The Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) holds an annual graduate student paper prize competition, which is aimed towards encouraging emerging scholars to write compelling ethnographies on religion. This prize is intended to foster theoretically significant, ethnographically rich work by students at an early stage of their career.
The prize includes a cash award of $250 for the winning paper, which might be recommended for publication in Religion and Society. There will also be a $100 cash award for the runner up. Starting in 2018, SAR launched a mentorship program that pairs select graduate student finalists with faculty mentors. Finalists have an opportunity to meet with their mentor at the AAA meetings to gain valuable feedback on revising their papers for publication.
Click here to view the call for the 2025 Student Paper Prize
Winner and Honorable Mention for the 2025 Student Paper Prize
At the Society for the Anthropology (SAR) Business meeting held at the American Anthropological Association Meeting in New Orleans on November 21, 2025, this year’s Student Paper Prize winners were announced.
This year’s winner was Dylan Renca, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Boston University, for his paper “The Trouble of Nonhuman Beings: Virtue, Relationality and Power on Java in a Time of Islamic Revival.” Renca’s essay examines the challenges of living a Sufi form of virtue ethics that prioritizes relations with the spirits of ancestors, at a time when monotheism is politically valorized in Javanese public life. It considers the uneasy position navigated by Sufis amid two ethical models that place varying degrees of emphasis on autonomy and relationality.
The honorable mention went to Thomas Long, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at University of Manchester, for his paper “Black Churches, White Divisions: Race, Theology and the Debate over Critical Race Theory Amongst Baptists in Texas.” Long’s paper examines how debates over Critical Race Theory intersect with racial fractures in the American Baptist Church, unsettling broadly recognizable, historically shaped distinctions of conservative, moderate, and liberal Baptists. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Texas, the paper traces how White Baptists predominantly understand racism as individual sin, a position that takes CRT and structural approaches to race as unbiblical. Long finds among Black Baptists, however, a complex navigation of theological conservatism that variously embraces and rejects gendered and raced strands of conservative positions.
Congratulations to the awardees, and many thanks to the committee members, Britt Halvorson and Cymene Howe.
Recent Student Paper Prize Winners
- 2024. ‘The Liturgical Life of Parish Kitchens: Charity and Theological Selving in Greek Orthodox Aid Spaces’ by Hannah Grace Howard (Boston University).
- 2023. ‘(Un)Holy Gold: Arabi Ponnu and a Transregional Politics of Caste Among Kerala Christians’ by Irene Promodh (University of Michigan).
- 2022. ‘The Massacre and Martyr(dom)s of Oak Creek: The Scale of Violence, Articulation of Agonisms, and Problem of Diaspora’ by Randeep Hothi (University of Michigan).
- 2021. Co-winner: ‘“Dressing up like Mother to be called Father”: Anglo-Catholic priests as camp prophets’ by Carolyn Dreyer (University of Cambridge).
- 2021. Co-winner: ‘Of agency, Allah, and authority: The making of a divine trial among Muslims with same-sex attraction in Indonesia’ by Febi Ramadhan (Northwestern University).
- 2020. ‘“Finding Vessels for Our Lights”: Buddhist-Derived Meditation as an Ethical Means for Jewish Encounters with the Divine’ by Ori Mautner (University of Cambridge).
- 2019. ‘Divine Monarchy, Spirited Sovereignties, and the Timely Malagasy MSM Medium-Activist Subject’ by Seth Palmer (University of Toronto).
- 2018. Jane Saffitz (University of California, Davis).
Recent Student Paper Prize Runners-Up
- 2024. ‘”What Is a Druze”: Colonial Truths and Cultural Pathologies’ by Aamer Ibraheem (Columbia University).
- 2023. ‘How spirits hope? Embodied suffering, complex temporality, and an expanded spectrum of hope in North China’ by Ray Qu (University of Virginia).
- 2022. ‘History Written in Advance: Christian Prophecy, Chinese-Zambian Relations, and Diffracted Modernity’ by Justin Haruyama (UC Davis).
- 2021. ‘To circumcise or not to circumcise? Ritual choice, agency, and agony’ by Lindsey Jackson (Concordia University).
- 2020. ‘Toward a Non-person-centered Anthropology of Hope: Incense Seeing and Nonhuman Agency in North China’ by Ray Qu (University of Virginia).
- 2019. ‘The Aesthetics of Piety: Affect and/in Prayers among Indonesian Transgender Sex Workers’ by Bahram Naderil (Northwestern University).
- 2018. ‘U T’aan Nukuch Máak (Advice of the Elders): An Entrance into Maya Women’s Symbolic World’ by Crystal Sheedy (SUNY Albany).
Click here for more on the inaugural 2018 student prize meeting