Humanities

Jessica Zu, assistant professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures, was appointed a 2023–2024 Faculty Fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study for her project “Karma, Science, and a Just Society: Buddhist Philosophical Toolboxes for Post-Racial and Post-Caste Worldmaking.” The residential fellowship includes a stipend, a research allowance and subsidized housing as well as weekly work-in-progress seminars and communication skills training designed to help fellows develop work that is accessible to broad audiences.

Adrian De Leon, assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity, has won the 2022–2023 Carleton C. Qualey Memorial Award for his article “Frank Mancao’s ‘Pinoy Image’: Photography, Masculinity, and Respectability in Depression-Era California” in the Journal of American Ethnic History. The award, established by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, recognizes and honors the best article published in the journal during the 2022 calendar year.

Percival Everett, Distinguished Professor of English, has won the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for his novel Dr. No (Graywolf Press, 2022). The prize recognizes a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit and impact. The award judges noted, “This is such a strange and brilliant book. Nothing like it has existed before.”

Robin Coste Lewis, writer in residence, has been awarded the 2023 Pen/Voelker Award for Poetry for her collection To The Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf, 2022). The annual award is presented to a poet whose collection of poetry represents a notable and accomplished literary presence. The award judges noted Lewis’ innovative use of various mediums and “collage-like weaving of texts and [literary] figures,” expanding “ways we might imagine what it means to ‘read’ and ‘see’ on the plane or stage of a book’s page.”

Benjamin Uchiyama, associate professor of history, has earned an Award for 20th Century Japan Research Award from the Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies and the University of Maryland Libraries. The annual award supports research in the libraries’ Gordon W. Prange Collection and East Asia Collection on topics related to the period of the Allied Occupation of Japan and its aftermath, from 1945 to 1960.

Sonya Lee, professor of art history, East Asian languages and cultures and religion, has earned a gold medal in the religion (Eastern/Western) category of the Independent Publisher Book (IPPY) Awards. The medal recognizes her book _Temples in the Cliffside_ (University of Washington Press, 2022). The IPPY Awards aim to reward those who exhibit the courage, innovation and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, University Professor, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English, American studies and ethnicity and comparative literature, has been chosen as the 2023–24 Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University. The Norton Professorship recognizes individuals “of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression.” Past honorees include T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges and Czeslaw Milosz. As a recipient of the honor, Nguyen will deliver six lectures over the course of the academic year.

Joseph Boone, Gender Studies Professor in Media and Gender and professor of English and comparative literature, has won the 2023 Next Generation Indie Awards for First Novel (Over 90,000 Words) for Furnace Creek (Black Spring Press, 2023). The Next Generation Indie Awards is the world’s largest nonprofit awards program for independent publishers. Boone and other winners will be honored at a June 23 ceremony at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Furnace Creek also received an Eric Hoffer Award honorable mention in the general fiction category and was a finalist in Foreward’s Indie Book of the Year competition for LGBT+ fiction.

Jessica Marglin, Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies and professor of religion, law and history, has been awarded the James Willard Hurst Book Prize by the Law and Society Association for The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship Across the Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2022). The prize recognizes “the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year.”

Marglin also received the The Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize for The Shamama Case. The prize recognizes the best scholarly and trade publications published from 2020 through 2022, focusing on books that broke new ground conceptually or methodologically, were comparative or interdisciplinary and that emphasized the intercultural, interregional and inter-religious contact of the Mediterranean.