Douglas L. Winiarski, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond, has been awarded the John M. Murrin Prize for the best article published in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal during 2024.
His article “Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet: Revitalization Movements, Religious Studies, and the Ontological Turn,” appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Early American Studies.
Published by the McNeil Center, EAS provides a forum for original research into the histories and cultures of North America in the Atlantic world before 1850. The prize is named for the late John Murrin, Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. Recipients of the Murrin Prize are chosen by a sub-committee of the editorial board.
The committee wrote:
Douglas Winiarski’s “Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet: Revitalization Movements, Religious Studies, and the Ontological Turn,” importantly rethinks the interpretation that scholars have offered about the early life and ministry of Laloeshiga, more commonly known as Tenskwatawa.
The article is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. Winiarski leverages the latest methodological tools from Indigenous, religious, and visual studies to historicize and reappraise historical interpretations of the Shawnee Prophet. Using a careful yet incisive approach to confront the significant interpretive challenges of centering a dismissed Native person, Winiarski reconciles issues of conflicting evidence and philosophies of historical comprehension.
The essay is particularly timely in thinking through issues of settler colonialism in the archival record and in its presentation of how various historical and dialectical complications framed and mirrored the encounters between Indigenous people and colonizers.
In sum, Winiarski both reframes the life and impact of this important and misunderstood figure and offers readers a useful approach to thinking about how religion contributed to individuals’ lives and to history. Scholars working through “the tangle of myth and misinformation” that obscure other well-known figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will find inspiration in his masterful approach.
This year’s prize sub-committee included Kyle Roberts (chair), Tara Bynum, Tamara Harvey, Andrea Mosterman, Chernoh Sesay, and Ashli White. Be sure to visit the EAS Miscellany website for a list of past Murrin Prize winners.
The McNeil Center and the EAS editorial board would like to thank the sub-committee as well as everyone who has submitted articles for publication in EAS.
To learn more about Winiarski’s work, be sure to visit the Interview with Douglas Winiarski on the EAS Miscellany website.