Banu Subramaniam, a professor in the department of women, gender, sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has won the 2020 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts.
The Kendrick Prize was established in the fall of 2006 in memory of Michelle Kendrick of Washington State University-Vancouver, an energetic, well-loved scholar of literature and science and long-time member of SLSA. The Kendrick Prize is open to any book of original scholarship on literature, science, and the arts.
Professor Subramaniam was honored for her book Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019). The SLSA prize committee stated that the book “is a profound and important demonstration of what feminist science studies can bring to contemporary cultural criticism, one that is particularly timely in exploring the role of science in the rise of Hindu Nationalism. Holy Science is imaginative in conception and remarkably nuanced and precise in its articulations and offers both bold claims and a responsible basis for hope as we challenge ourselves to create a more just future.”
Professor Subramaniam received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Madras in India. She earned a Ph.D. in zoology and genetics from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.