Congratulations to Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria has been awarded the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.” Ghodsee’s book explores gender roles and reconfigurations in a post-Communist Bulgarian community.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe also won the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

Congratulations to Professor John M. Owen IV, whose book The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 has been awarded the 2011 Lepgold Prize from the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University.

The Lepgold Prize honors “exceptional contributions to the study of international relations” in memory of Professor Joseph S. Lepgold, a Georgetown University Government and School of Foreign Service professor who passed away in 2001. The award announcement praises The Clash of Ideas in World Politics for its wide scope in addressing the ideological struggles related to forcible regime promotion:

John Owen examines more than two hundred cases of forcible regime promotion over the past five centuries, offering the first systematic study of this common state practice. He looks at conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism between 1520 and the 1680s; republicanism and monarchy between 1770 and 1850; and communism, fascism, and liberal democracy from 1917 until the late 1980s. He shows how regime promotion can follow regime unrest in the eventual target state or a war involving a great power, and how this can provoke elites across states to polarize according to ideology. Owen traces how conflicts arise and ultimately fade as one ideology wins favor with more elites in more countries, and he demonstrates how the struggle between secularism and Islamism in Muslim countries today reflects broader transnational trends in world history.

Congratulations to PUP author Mark Valeri, whose book “Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America” has been awarded the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. The prize recognizes “the best book published in the two previous calendar years, originating in the North American scholarly community, which presents original research on [...]

PUP author Thomas J. Sargent, along with Princeton economist Christopher A. Sims, has been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Sargent, a professor at New York University, is a visiting professor at Princeton University this fall and has co-authored two books with PUP: “The Big Problem of Small Change” with François R. Velde (2003), and “Robustness” with Lars Peter Hansen (2007).