Travis Zadeh, Professor of Religious Studies, has won three awards for his 2023 book, Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (Harvard University Press).
Zadeh was awarded the 2024 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies by the Modern Language Association of America, which is awarded annually to “outstanding” scholarly works in Middle Eastern or Middle Eastern diaspora literary or linguistic studies.
Zadeh’s book follows the many travels of a natural history on the wonders of creation produced in thirteenth-century Iraq by the Persian judge and naturalist Zakariyya Qazwini.
The selection committee wrote that Zadeh’s book “reexamines Qazwini’s legacy, revealing how wonder shaped Islamic philosophy, science, and literature and how colonial modernity distorted this intellectual tradition.”
Zadeh’s Wonders and Rarities was also named the winner of the 2024 PROSE Award in World History by the Association of American Publishers. The AAP’s annual PROSE awards recognize “excellence in professional and scholarly publishing.”
The book also took home the 2024 Parviz Shahriari Book Award for History of Mathematics, Science and Technology from the Association for Iranian Studies. The biennial award recognizes and promotes “scholarship in the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology in Iran and the Persianate world.” It was created to honor the writings and translations of Parviz Shahriari, who helped popularize mathematics in Iran.
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