Prestigious prizes for recent monographs

Posted on 20 January 2011

The Department is pleased to congratulate Ziad Elmarsafy and Kevin Killeen who have won prestigious prizes for their recent monographs.

Ziad Elmarsafy has been awarded the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize which is administered by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. From a short-list of ten monographs Ziad's book received the following commendation:

The Enlightenment Qur'an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam by Ziad Elmarsafy (Oneworld, 2009). The reviewer calls this "a really clever book - it takes the translations of the Quran made into Western European languages and examines how they mesh into the notions of Western hegemony current at the time". The author demonstrates how Islamophobia in its modern guise on the one hand and the medieval polemic against Islam on the other had between them a period of relatively little anti-Islamic polemic among Western scholars: the translators were not necessarily apologists for Islam, but they did seriously engage with the text. Elmarsafy's reflections on the "politics of translation" make for a fascinating read. "All in all, a very impressive piece of work".

Kevin Killeen has been awarded the CCUE (Council for College and University English) Book Prize 2010 for his book Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (Ashgate, 2009). The prize is awarded annually for the best scholarly book in the field of English studies by an early-career academic.

A reviewer from 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Vol. 17 (2010) notes "Killeen brilliantly handles the major challenge presented by the huge and disparate mass of Browne's subject matter ... exhibits an excellent ability to make carefully drawn and necessary distinctions among the various religious interests of Browne's age ... The sophistication and wealth of detail in this well-argued book preclude a fair summary in a brief review ... This excellent book, then, will be of interest to scholars across disciplines (much as Browne's work was), especially those engaged in the history of science, the history of ideas, and literary criticism."