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Gordon J. Laing Award (Presented by UChicago Press)
The Gordon J. Laing Award is awarded annually by the University of Chicago Press to the faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction.
- Sarah Newman, 2026
Unmaking Waste: New Histories of Old Things - Jenny Trinitapoli, 2025
An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi - Margareta Ingrid Christian, 2024
Objects in the Air: Artworks and Their Outside Around 1900 - Elisabeth S. Clemens, 2023
Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State - Lisa Wedeen, 2022
Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria - Michael Rossi, 2021
The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America - Eve L. Ewing, 2020
Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side - Deborah Nelson, 2019
Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, and Weil - Forrest Stuart, 2018
Down, Out & Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row - David Nirenberg, 2017
Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today - Amir Sufi, 2016
House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again - Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, 2015
I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century - Alison Winter, 2014
Memory: Fragments of a Modern History - Andreas Glaeser, 2013
Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, The Opposition, and The End of East German Socialism - Adrian Johns, 2012
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Robert Richards, 2011
The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought - Martha Feldman, 2010
Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy - Bernard E. Harcourt, 2009
Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age - Philip Gossett, 2008
Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera - W. J. T. Mitchell, 2006
What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images - Bill Brown, 2005
A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature - Jonathan Hall, 2004
Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture - Robert J. Richards, 2003
The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe - Bruce Lincoln, 2002
Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship - François Furet, 2001
The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century - James Chandler, 2000
England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism - André LaCocque & Paul Ricoeur, 1999
Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies - Martin E. Marty, 1998
Modern American Religion: In Three Volumes - Marshall Sahlins, 1997
How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example - W. J. T. Mitchell, 1996
Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation - Edward Laumann, Robert Michael, and Stuart Michaels, 1995
The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States - David McNeill, 1994
Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought - Gerald N. Rosenberg, 1993
The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? - Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, 1992
Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa - Leszek Kolakowski, 1991
Modernity on Endless Trial - Richard G. Klein, 1990
The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins - S. Chandrasekhar, 1989
Truth and Beauty - David Grene, 1988
Herodotus: The History - Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, 1987
The Founders’ Constitution. In Five Volumes - Mircea Eliade, 1986
A History of Religious Ideas. In Three Volumes - Paul Ricoeur, 1985
Time and Narrative. Volume 1 - Richard Hellie, 1984
Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 - Anthony C. Yu, 1983
The Journey to the West. In Four Volumes - James M. Gustafson, 1982
Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1: Theology and Ethics - Wayne C. Booth, 1981
Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism - Morris Janowitz, 1980
The Last Half Century: Societal Change and Politics in America - Alan Gewirth, 1979
Reason and Morality - Sewall Wright, 1978
Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 3: Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions - Marshall Sahlins, 1977
Culture and Practical Reason - Keith Michael Baker, 1976
Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics - Eric W. Cochrane, 1975
Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes - Stuart M. Tave, 1974
Some Words of Jane Austen - Edward Shils, 1973
The Intellectuals and the Powers - Edward Wasiolek, 1972
The Notebooks of Dostoevsky. In Five Volumes - Herrlee G. Creel, 1971
The Origins of Statecraft in China, Volume 1: The Western Chou Empire - Gerald D. Suttles, 1970
The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City - Leonard B. Meyer, 1969
Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Prediction in Twentieth-Century Culture - Philip Foster, 1968
Education and Social Change in Ghana - Donald F. Lach, 1967
Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume 1, Books 1 and 2 - A. Leo Oppenheim, 1966
Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization - Tang Tsou, 1965
America’s Failure in China 1941-1950 - William H. McNeill, 1964
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community - Bernard Weinberg, 1963
A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance