Two Women Historians Honored With Book Awards

Laura Ackerman Smoller, professor of history at the University of Rochester in New York, was awarded the La Coronica International Book Award at the International Congress of Medieval Studies’ annual convention. The Congress is based at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Professor Smoller was honored for her book The Saint and the Chopped Up Baby: The Cult of Vincent Ferrer in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2014). Dr. Smoller is a graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Christine Leigh Heyrman, the Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History at the University of Delaware, is the winner of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. She was honored for her book American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam (Hill and Wang, 2015). The book relates the story of American Protestant missionaries who traveled to the Middle East in the nineteenth century in an attempt to convert Muslims to Christianity.

Professor Heyrman has taught at the University of Delaware since 1990. She is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.