Thomas Sizgorich, newly appointed assistant professor of history at UNM, is the recipient of a Council of Graduate Schools/University Microfilms International Prestigious Dissertation Award for 2004-05 for his dissertation, “Monks, Martyrs and Mujahidun: Militant Piety in Late Antiquity and Early Islam.”
Sizgorich completed this work at the University of California at Santa Barbara. An award ceremony will be held on Wednesday, Dec. 8 in Palm Springs, Calif.
He began graduate school with an interest in the causes of inter-communal violence in the later Roman world. Then developed interest on the theory and practice of jihad in early Islam.
“Gradually I began to suspect that the role of militant piety in processes of self-fashioning among later Roman communities and the early Islamic community were somehow connected,” Sizgorich said.
“I began to understand this connection as the product of a shared vocabulary of signs, symbols and narratives with which late antique communities, including the very early Muslim community, imagined and talked about encounters with the divine and the consequences of revelation in the affairs of the world,” he said.
He said he looks forward to turning the dissertation into a book at UNM.
The Council of Graduate Schools is an organization of institutions of higher education in the United States, Canada, and across the globe engaged in graduate education, research scholarship, and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees. For over four decades, the Council of Graduate Schools has been the only national association dedicated solely to representing the interests of graduate education. Its mission is to improve and advance graduate education. CGS accomplishes this mission through advocacy in the federal policy arena, innovative research, and the development and dissemination of best practices.
The CGS/UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award is sponsored jointly by CGS and UMI Dissertations Publishing, a Division of ProQuest Information and Learning, and was first presented in 1981. The awards are made annually to individuals who have completed dissertations representing original work that makes an unusually significant contribution to the discipline. Two awards are given annually in two different broad areas biological sciences, social sciences, mathematical and physical sciences; and humanities and fine arts. Individuals must be nominated for these awards by a member institution.