In addition to being a huge, unexpected honor, receiving the Jordan Schnitzer book award has helped attract non-specialist attention to my book, broadening its impact beyond the usual narrow academic readership. The monetary award has supported new research as well as some exciting collaborative projects. My second monograph, Victory’s Shadow: Conquest and Governance in Medieval Catalonia (Cornell University Press), which will appear in June, contextualizes and enriches the history examined in Contested Treasure by studying the origins, execution, and political implications of the Crown of Aragon’s capture of vast Muslim-ruled territories to the south of Barcelona. I co-organized a large, well-received conference at UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) this past fall (“Iberia, the Mediterranean, and the Wider World in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods) that welcomed scholars from throughout the US and Europe and addressed a range of topics including exciting new research on ethno-religious relations. My co-organizers and I are now working to edit these papers as a two-volume release to be published within the CMRS’s Cursor Mundi series put out by Brepols. I suspect that the generous prize and recognition associated with the Jordan Schnitzer award also helped me obtain a full-year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that I will use to complete my third monograph: From the Hands of the Infidels: The Christianization of Islamic Lands in Europe. I also intend to spend a portion of that time away from teaching and service responsibilities researching a fourth book project, which has developed out of the interests I explored in Contested Treasure. Communities of Purity: Religion, Genealogy, and Identity in the Iberian World will assess the pacing and localization of shifts in popular attitudes and official policies regarding Jews and Christian converts from Judaism during the fifteenth century within Iberia. I would like to express my gratitude once again to Jordan Schnitzer, the AJS, and the award committee for recognizing my work and supporting my continuing research endeavors.
