Warm congratulations on both counts! 

Derek R. Peterson, professor of history and African studies at the University of Michigan, has been selected as the winner of the 2013 Martin A. Klein Prize in African History for his book Ethnic Patriotism and the East Africa Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935-1972 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012). The Klein Prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association (AHA) in recognition of the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous calendar year. 

“This book explores the cultural and intellectual worlds of East Africa from the mid-1930s through the first decade of independence, identifying the communities of belonging created both by ethnic patriots who valorized loyalty to chiefs and elders and by upstart, cosmopolitan networks of Christian revivalists,” noted Toyin O. Falola, the 2013 Klein Prize committee chair, professor of history and the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the humanities at the University of Texas-Austin. He continued, “By analyzing these divergent communities in multiple settings, Peterson demonstrates the contested nature of identity and belonging, the prevalence of dissent, and the problematic nature of nationalism.”

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A. Azfar Moin, assistant professor of history at Southern Methodist University, has been selected as the winner of the 2013 John F. Richards Prize for his book The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Columbia Univ. Press, 2012). The John F. Richards Prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association (AHA) and honors the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asian history published in English. 

“Like the Safavids in Iran, Mughal emperors from Babur to Aurangzeb embedded their sovereign authority in cosmic, messianic imaginings, linked to sufism, astrology, genealogy, and millennialism,” noted Durba Ghosh, the 2013 Richards Prize committee chair and associate professor of history at Cornell University. She continued, “Using mainly Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu texts—and Mughal miniature painting—Moin shows how claims to authority were cast in a universalism transcending any single form of religion. His work will recast how we imagine the dynamics of sovereignty during the Mughal era.”