"Studies in Late Antiquity" Announces Winner of the Elizabeth DePalma Digeser Article Prize
Studies in Late Antiquity is pleased to award this year's annual Elizabeth DePalma Digeser Article Prize for SLA Volume 9 to Reyhan Durmaz for her article "Place, Practice, Patron: Making Religious Communities in the Early Medieval Jazīra" (SLA 9.1).
Durmaz presents a fresh model for approaching the religious landscape of the late antique Middle East that moves us away from longstanding scholarly preoccupation with doctrine and sectarian differences. Anchored in contextually-sensitive readings of three eighth-century Syriac texts from northern Mesopotamia (the Jazīra), she shows how Christian communities living within an early Islamic empire defined themselves through three interlocking dynamics: place, practice, and patron. As Durmaz demonstrates, what defines a “religious community” in this particular historical milieu is less a group's doctrinal profile or affiliations than its particular location, its distinctive practices, and its legendary founders and highly localized leadership.
The article prize committee selected this article first because of its careful and productive reading of understudied texts and second due to the clear, engaging, and creative model of community formation that it proposes. The article successfully brings the richness of late antique scholarship on religious communities into early medieval middle eastern conversations.
We invite you to read Reyhan Durmaz's award-winning article, "Place, Practice, Patron: Making Religious Communities in the Early Medieval Jazīra," for free for a limited time.
Print copies of SLA issue 9.1, in which the article appears, as well as other individual issues of SLA, can be purchased on the journal’s site.
For ongoing access to Studies in Late Antiquity, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.