Congratulations to Darren Grem, the 2011 recipient of the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize from The Southern Historical Association. Grem recieved his Ph.D at the University of Georgia in 2010 and is currently doing a post-doc at Emory University.
Paul Harvey of “Religion in American History” fame (and one of our finest historians of southern religion) will be in Baltimore to present Grem the award. Here is a snippet of the remarks that Harvey will deliver on Friday:
Dr. Grem’s dissertation “follows the money” of American evangelicalism through the twentieth century, focusing on the relationship between corporate capitalism, southern entrepreneurs, and the rise of evangelical institutions. Individual chapters trace the innovations in funding and Christian entrepreneurship from figures as diverse as Billy Graham, R. G. LeTourneau, the founder of Chic-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby, and evangelists such as Billy Graham and the Wycliffe Bible Translators. The result is a rich and complex analysis which places corporate capitalism squarely within the world of southern evangelicals through the twentieth century, much like C. Vann Woodward himself did with the world of the “Redeemers” and the New South movement. It’s one of the finest and most important works in American religious, intellectual, and economic history that I’ve read in a considerable time, and the fact that it combines all three of those fields I’m sure is one of the things that made it so attractive to Oxford University Press.
Congratulations!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.