Monsoon Book Prizes
Sponsored by the German University of Technology in Oman – Gutech, and hosted by Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, the purpose of the Monsoon Book Prizes is to support advanced scholarship on the Indian Ocean world by awarding three awards a year to outstanding, peer-reviewed texts in the following categories:
- The Monsoon Book Prize in History - $4,000
- The Monsoon Book Prize in Archaeology and Anthropology - $4,000
- The Monsoon Book Prize in Political Economy - $4,000
The three proposed prizes encourage and celebrate the research, production, and publication of accessible, high-quality, and original scholarship on the dynamic and fluid cultural zone of the Indian Ocean. They propel dialogue about the region making a core part of the conversation in academia. While the number and quality of books on the Indian Ocean as an intercultural zone has increased since the turn of the twenty-first century, there are still wide vistas of research and room for exciting new books on the history of the region’s many cultures and peoples. These prizes encourage a reorientation towards the humanities and the social sciences. They celebrate scholarship focused on importance of culture and history, the broader connections between coast, hinterland and overseas that are the foundation of the prosperity of the diverse cultures and economies of the Indian Ocean. The intellectual aim of the prizes, therefore, is the broadening of the horizon of current studies and encourage works that focus on interconnectivity of places, peoples, and polities. The prizes encourage a deeper engagement in two ways: in time, by encouraging books that explore pre-modern history, and in space, by encouraging studies that examine the cultures of the Gulf today and the continuing “living heritage” of the Indian Ocean.
Authors and publishers may contact Dr. Allen Fromherz at [email protected] to nominate books by August 19, 2024.
Download the promotion flyer.
- Prize nominations should be sent to Dr. Allen Fromherz at [email protected] by August 19, 2024.
- Nominations should include at least 1 pdf of the book (preferably watermarked and copyrighted) that will be sent as multiple copies with the prize committee.
- Peer reviewed and published books in English on the Indian Ocean published from 2015 to June 2024 are eligible.
- Drafts and copy proofs are not eligible and will not be considered.
- Nominations should indicate to what prize category they wish to submit (archaeology/anthropology, political economy, or history). If category is not provided, the committee will choose the category.
- Either authors or publishers are welcome to submit books.
- Books may also be nominated by the members of the selection committee.
- Both single authored and edited books will be welcome, although both must show a unity of theme, argument, and purpose.
- Proofs or non-published manuscripts will not be accepted, only complete and published books.
- New editions will be treated as new books on the date of their latest edition's publication. However, any book can only receive one prize and may not receive a new prize as a new edition.
- Peer reviewed books by University Presses or established scholarly trade presses are welcome. Books not peer-reviewed will not be considered except at the committee's discretion.
- All submissions should be in English, or should be complete, published English translations of academic books in Arabic. (In the case of a translation from Arabic to English, the date of the published translation will be used as the date of eligibility for the prize).
- An author may submit for only one of the prizes in any given year but may resubmit for consideration in future years.
- An academic book publisher, working for a press, may submit an unlimited number of books in any given year with the consent of the authors. Authors should inform their press of their intent to submit for the prize and it will be up to authors to coordinate with their presses and editors the submission of books in time to the committee.
- In addition to a full PDF of their book, authors and/or publishers (although this is not required for publishers) should submit a brief letter, no more than 500 words, stating their name, best contact information (email and cell phone required) affiliation and background. They may also provide a shortened synopsis of the main argument of the book or chapter. An optional author CV (no longer than 2 pages will be accepted) can also be appended to the letter.
- Late submissions will be accepted except at the committee's discretion in extraordinary circumstances.
- Prize winners should commit to April 10-11, 2025, the projected date of our prize ceremony. If there are co-authors, only one author will be funded to come to the prize ceremony. Co-authors will agree to split the monetary prize.
- Receiving the prize is contingent on availability of the author to attend the ceremony and give a 30-minute original paper (approximately 15-20 pages) on April 10-11, 2025 that will be exclusively used by the Monsoon Book Prizes and considered for publication as a book chapter in a future, edited volume of prize winners.
First, these prizes will benefit scholars through direct support of their research. Indian Ocean studies are not recognized by many prizes. While book prizes as monetary awards are important for scholars, the recognition provided by a book prize can go far beyond funding. They can recognize an outstanding senior scholar or establish a burgeoning writer’s career. They can ensure tenure or promotion to higher ranks within academia. This makes these proposed prizes especially valuable to scholars, especially since such prizes are lacking. Currently scholars of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Peninsula compete with an overly broad pool of scholars. As an opportunity to publicly celebrate the awarding of prizes in the press, the prizes will increase international understanding of the Indian Ocean. The prizes will benefit future generations of readers and will help to further establish, over time, the deeper understanding and interpretation of that history in a way that also makes it accessible to Habermas’ idea of the “public sphere.” The “public sphere” that these prizes benefit will include not only other academics but also journalists, politicians, diplomats, businesspeople, and the wider public’s understanding of Indian Ocean cultures.
Finally, the prize ceremony will be an event that encourages conversations between prize recipients, the scholarly community and graduate student attendees, inspiring fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue.
Dr. Abdulrahman al-Salimi GU Tech: Co-Chair
Abdulrahman al-Salimi- Sultanate of Oman is a scholar of early Islamic and contemporary Islamic thought. Currently, he is focusing on editing eighth and ninth-century Ibadi texts as well as Mutazilte texts, assessing their authenticity and analyzing their contents. These sources will deepen our understanding of early Islamic political thought and theology. He is also working on Portuguese documents found in the Indian Ocean. See his publication.
Dr. Allen Fromherz, Georgia State University: Co-Chair
Dr. Allen Fromherz is Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University. He is the author of several books on the Gulf and the Indian Ocean world including The Center of The World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present, University of California Press, 2024; Qatar, A Modern History (Georgetown), The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads (Edinburgh) and From Muscat to Zanzibar: Sayyid Said bin Sultan's Cosmopolitan Empire (SQCC).
He edited Sultan Qaboos and Modern Oman, 1970-2020 with Dr. Abdulrahman al-Salimi and hosted the Sultan Qaboos and Modern Oman conference at GSU in 2022. Dr. Fromherz was senior humanities fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2016 and received a Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center grant and a Senior Scholar Fulbright Scholarship. He has been an active member of the Ibadi Studies Seminar. In addition to scholarship on the Gulf, he is also the author of several books on North Africa Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times and The Near West (Edinburgh) and is the President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS).
Dr. Nile Green, UCLA
Nile Green holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History. A former Guggenheim Fellow, his ten monographs include Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (which won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award and the Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Book Award); The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (a New York Times editors’ choice); and Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction.
His recent book, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale, 2022), won the Bentley Book Prize from the World History Association and was selected as a Foreign Affairs best book of 2023. He has also edited seven books and is host of the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam. Green has travelled and researched in various regions around the Indian Ocean, from Yemen, Oman, and Saudi Arabia to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, along with Zanzibar and Durban.
Dr. Roxani Margariti, Emory University
Roxani Eleni Margariti is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University’s Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies of the Islamic Civilizations Studies Ph.D. Program. She has also taught at the University of Crete, Greece, and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and the American Academy in Berlin. Her research focuses on medieval maritime history, economic and social networks, and the material culture of maritime societies of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.
She has co-edited two volumes on the social and economic history of the Middle East and is the author of Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), a study of urban topography and commercial institutions at the Yemeni port from the 11th to the 13th century, based primarily on Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic sources and archaeological and environmental data. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Insular Crossroads: the Dahlak Archipelago, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean History, in which she examines the biography of a maritime polity located at the margins of larger states of the medieval and early modern Middle East and East Africa.
Dr. Sugata Bose, Harvard University
Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in History at Harvard and as the Founding Director of Harvard’s South Asia Institute. Prior to taking up the Gardiner Chair at Harvard in 2001, Bose was a Fellow of St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, and Professor of History and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Bose was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Cambridge where he obtained his Ph.D. His many books include Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (with Ayesha Jalal, 5th edition 2022), A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006), His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire (2011, 10th anniversary edition 2022), The Nation as Mother and other visions of nationhood (2017) and, most recently, Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century (2024). He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997.
Sugata Bose served as a Member of Parliament in India elected to the 16th Lok Sabha (2014-2019) representing the Jadavpur constituency in Bengal and throughout that period as a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs.
Ahu Kostak-Bulat, Georgia State University: Coordinator
Ahu Kostak-Bulat is the Head of Special Programs for Global Engagement. Ahu has strategic and operational responsibility for leading and managing Office of International Initiatives' Special Programs for incoming international students and faculty, including the Summer Programs and the Faculty Mentoring Program. She also develops and implements special cohort-based professional and academic training programs for participants from abroad in collaboration with academic and support units.
Grants funded include the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by IREX, 2024; the Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program (Fulbright TEA) sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and administered by IREX, 2022, 2023, 2024; the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program for Iraq (IVSP), sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by AMIDEAST, 2022. Programs that her unit supported include The Sultan Qaboos and Modern Oman-50 Years of the Omani Renaissance 1970-2020 Conference, 2022; English Language Training for Ukrainian government professionals, civil servants hosted by GSU’s Intensive English Program, 2024; Monsoon Book Prize sponsored by the German University of Technology in Oman and hosted by Georgia State University, 2024-25. Ahu is highly committed to working with local and international institutions and University constituents to implement enriching educational programs and to provide opportunities for students and faculty to gain global competency skills.
Ahu has a B.S. degree in International Relations, Ankara University, Faculty of Political Science (Ankara, Turkey) and an M.A. degree in European Studies from Marmara University (Istanbul, Turkey). Ahu has traveled to Canada, China and many countries in Europe - including a study abroad in France, and hopes to travel to Australia, Africa, and Latin America in the near future.
WINNERS
On behalf of the German University of Technology in Muscat, Oman, and the Monsoon Book Prizes Selection Committee, we are pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Monsoon Book Prizes. A public awards ceremony, which will include lectures by each of the prize winners, will be held at Georgia State University in Atlanta on April 10 at the Office of International Initiatives. Final awards are contingent on the ability of awardees to attend the event. Details of the awards celebration, including how to register, will be posted here in the next weeks.
The Monsoon Book Prize in Political Economy is awarded to Dr. Seema Alavi for her book, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Harvard University Press).
Seema Alavi is a historian who specializes in early modern and modern South Asia, with an interest in the transformation of the region’s legacy from Indo-Persian to one heavily affected by British colonial rule. She started her teaching career at the Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi; and has been a Professor at Delhi University, Delhi before moving to Ashoka University in 2022.
Alavi earned her PhD from Cambridge University, England. She has twice been a Fulbright Scholar and a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge and was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard. In 2010 she was at the Radcliffe institute at Harvard as the William Bentinck-Smith Fellow.
She has written books on the military, medical and religious histories of India. Her most recent book is Sovereigns of the Sea. Omani Ambition in the age of Empire, Penguin India, 2023.
She wrote Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India, 1770–1830 (Oxford University Press, 1995) and co-authored with Muzzafar Alam, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I‘jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (Oxford University Press, 2001). Her book Eighteenth Century in Indian History in the Oxford Debates series is a popular reader in India and abroad. In 2009 she wrote Islam and Healing : Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition,
1600–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2009). She serves on the editorial board of several national and international journals, including Modern Asian Studies UK, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, UK, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, UK and Biblio, New Delhi.
(Honorable Mention in Political Economy – Dr. Jatin Dua, Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (University of California Press)
Jatin Dua is an associate professor of Anthropology and Director of the Oceans Lab at
the University of Michigan, a research and teaching initiative dedicated to collaborative and
multimodal ways of engaging oceans. His research explores maritime mobility, and its perils and
possibilities, focusing on processes and projects of governance, law, and economy. His book,
Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, published with the University of
California Press (December 2019) and winner of the 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award, is a
multi-sited ethnographic and archival engagement with Somali piracy and contestations over
legitimate and illegitimate commerce in the Western Indian Ocean. In addition, he has published
a number of articles on maritime anthropology, captivity, political economy, and sovereignty in
Africa and beyond. He is the chief editor of the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History.
The Monsoon Book Prize in History is awarded to Dr. Nathaniel Mathews for his book, Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship between East Africa and the Gulf (University of California Press)
Nathaniel Mathews is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at SUNY-Binghamton. He has a B.A. in History from Howard University and an M.A. in Global, International, and Comparative History from Georgetown University. In 2016, he completed a dissertation in Northwestern University's history department on the Zanzibari community in Oman, and in 2024 published Zanzibar Was a Country, his first book. He has also published on the topic of slavery and abolition in Islam. He is currently working on a second project about transregional migration to Zanzibar in the colonial period, using naturalization records from The Zanzibar Archives.
(Honorable Mention in History – Dr. Michael Laffan, Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1885-1945 (Columbia University Press
Michael Laffan obtained his B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) from the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney (2001). He has been at Princeton’s history department since 2005. His first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (Routledge, 2003), argued that Islam played an important role in the Indonesian nationalist movement. He followed this with The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton, 2011), which looks at the results of an engagement between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars. His newest book, Under Empire (Columbia, 2022), looks at two centuries of interactions between Muslim subjects of empires and nation states across the Indian Ocean. He is currently working on a broad history of the Cocos Islands, now part of Australia.
The Monsoon Book Prize in Anthropology is awarded to Drs. Jim Sykes and Julia Byl for their edited volume Sounding the Indian Ocean: Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Seascape (University of California Press)
Jim Sykes is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A drummer and anthropologist, he holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and has also taught at Yale and King’s College London. His first book, The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka, won the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2019. With Gavin Steingo, he co-edited Remapping Sound Studies (Duke, 2019). Sykes is currently at work on two book projects. The first is a study of music, religion, media, and urban development in Singapore, focusing on Tamil Hindu drummers. The second is a comparative anthropology of musical labor that explores the historical emergence of the idea that music is ‘not a real job’. This second project centers fieldwork conducted with climate protest drummers in Berlin, Germany, in 2022-2023. The volume that won the Monsoon Prize, Sounding the Indian Ocean, was based on a symposium held at UPenn in spring 2019. Sykes would like to thank Penn’s University Research Fund for making the project possible.
Julia Byl is Associate Professor in ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta. As part of her work on North Sumatran musical cultures, she has listened to four-part harmony in palm liquor stands, and examined manuscripts on Shaivite cosmology and Sufi metaphysics. She has been involved in the European Research Council projects, "Musical Transitions to Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean," P.I. Katherine Butler Schofield, and "Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in South Asia," P.I. Carola Lorea. Her monograph, Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present was published in 2014 (Wesleyan University Press), and Fall 2023 saw the publication of Sounding the Indian Ocean, co-edited with Jim Sykes (University of California Press). She is the director and editor of Canadian Mehfil, a documentary film on South Asian music and poetry in Edmonton, incorporating audio-visual footage filmed in the 1960s. Julia's newest project, "Civic Modulations," explores public music, the individual, and the transnational institution in East Timor, and involves archival and ethnographic research in Dili, Portugal, Jakarta and The Hague.
(Honorable Mention in Anthropology – Dr. Michael Lambek, Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte (University of Toronto Press)
Michael Lambek (BA McGill, MA, PhD Michigan) is professor & Canada Research Chair emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto where he taught since 1978, with intervals at the London School of Economics. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2000. Lambek has carried out extensive ethnographic research in the western Indian Ocean (Mayotte and northwest Madagascar) and in Switzerland. He has published eight books plus one co-authored, eight edited books, and over 125 book chapters and refereed journal articles, primarily on topics of religion, historicity, personhood, and ethical life. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte was shortlisted for the Herskovits and Innis book awards; The Weight of the Past received honorable mention for the Victor Turner Prize; and Island in the Stream won the Elliott P. Skinner Award. His latest book (2025) is Cohabiting with Spirits: The Biography of a Marriage in Mayotte. Lambek edits book series at the University of Toronto Press and at Cambridge University Press. He has supervised 21 doctoral students to completion.
