Three NYU Faculty Books Win Association of American Publishers Awards

    Three NYU faculty books received awards from the Association of American Publishers, the organization announced in early February.

      Joan Breton Connelly’s Portrait of a Priestess (Princeton University Press) won in the “Classics and Ancient History” category. Connelly, a professor of classics and art history, offers the first comprehensive cultural history of priestesses in the ancient Greek world. She explores how priestesses lived and worked and challenges long-held beliefs to show that priestesses played far more significant public roles in ancient Greece than previously acknowledged.

      Frank Peters’ The Voice, The Word, The Books (Princeton University Press) captured the “Theology and Religious Studies” award. Peters, an expert on the world’s three major religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—offers readers a tour of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran, sacred texts that have had a profound influence on human culture. A professor in the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department, Peters offers the latest Biblical and Quranic scholarship, explaining how they evolved through time from oral to written texts.

      Jerome Wakefield’s The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press) won in the “Psychology” category. Co-authored with Rutgers University Professor Allan Horwitz, the book contends that while depressive disorder certainly exists and can be a devastating condition warranting medical attention, the apparent epidemic actually reflects the way the psychiatric profession has reclassified normal human sadness—largely as an abnormal experience. Wakefield, a University Professor and a professor in the Silver School of Social Work, and Horwitz stress the importance of distinguishing between abnormal reactions due to internal dysfunction and normal sadness brought about by external circumstances, such as the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, or the diagnosis of a serious physical illness.

— James Devitt