University of Richmond Professor Douglas Winiarski Receives Award for Scholarship on Native American Religious History
Winiarski awarded Murrin Prize for research on the Shawnee Prophet.
UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND — Douglas Winiarski, professor of religious studies at the University of Richmond, has been awarded the John M. Murrin Essay Prize from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies for his article “Revisioning the Shawnee Prophet: Revitalization Movements, Religious Studies, and the Ontological Turn.”
The Murrin Prize is awarded annually for the best article in the journal Early American Studies, celebrating excellence in historical scholarship.
Winiarski’s article reframes the origin story of Laloeshiga, more commonly known as Tenskwatawa or the Shawnee Prophet, an important and misunderstood religious leader of the Shawnee tribe in the early 19th century.
Winiarski, an expert on early American religion, was intrigued by the idea that Laloeshiga/Tenskwatawa started receiving prophetic visions several years earlier than historians had previously thought.
“Frankly, I was stunned by what I found in the standard 19th-century sources,” Winiarski said. “None of the supposed facts of Laloeshiga’s early life seemed to hold up to scrutiny, especially the famous incident in which he allegedly experienced his first vision while in a drunken stupor during the winter of 1805. I wrote this article, in part, to set the record straight. But I also wanted to think about how we might reconceptualize the field of Native American religious history in the future.”
The prize committee praised Winiarski’s work, saying, “The article is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship … Scholars working through 'the tangle of myth and misinformation' that obscure other well-known figures from the 18th and 19th centuries will find inspiration in his masterful approach.”
Winiarski, who has taught at UR since 2000, is also the author of Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, which won a Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy.
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