Professor Alan Strathern wins WHA Bentley Prize

Congratulations to Professor Alan Strathern, Associate College Lecturer in Early Modern History, whose book Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History has been awarded this year’s World History Association Bentley Book Prize. 

Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical literature from all regions and periods of world history, Alan Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about transformations in the fundamental nature of religion and its interaction with political authority. His analysis distinguishes between two quite different forms of religiosity – immanentism, which focused on worldly assistance, and transcendentalism, which centred on salvation from the human condition – and shows how their interaction shaped the course of history. Taking examples drawn from Ancient Rome to the Incas or nineteenth-century Tahiti, a host of phenomena, including sacred kingship, millenarianism, state-church struggles, reformations, iconoclasm, and, above all, conversion are revealed in a new light.

Professor Strathern teaches primarily early modern European and World History. Initially specialising in the history of Sri Lanka c.1500-1650, his work has increasingly adopted a more comparative or interdisciplinary approach, addressing themes such as origin myths, ethnic consciousness, sacred kingship, and first encounters.