Jenna Reinbold, an associate professor of religion at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, has received the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion for her book, Seeing the Myth in Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). According to the academy, the award is given to significant works of scholarship that affect “how religion is examined, understood, and interpreted.”
Dr. Reinbold’s work analyzes the underlying religious logic of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was interested in this topic because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights purposefully lacks overt references to the divine. While the document does not reference one specific religion, Dr. Reinbold argues that it has a religious quality to it.
“The people who were working on the document understood themselves to be doing something very momentous and thought about the language [of the text],” Dr. Reinbold said. “That provided me a way to focus more conceptually on human rights.”
Dr. Reinbold holds a bachelor’s degree from Portland State University in Oregon and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.