Religious studies professor Stephen Shoemaker was recently awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship.

Shoemaker was one of 36 awardees chosen from 433 applicants to represent humanistic scholarship with an individual research project.

Shoemaker teaches courses on the Christian traditions. His primary interests lie in the ancient and early medieval Christian traditions, and more specifically in early Byzantine and Near Eastern Christianity.

His research focuses on early devotion to the Virgin Mary, Christian apocryphal literature and the relations between Near Eastern Christianity and formative Islam. Shoemaker is the author of “The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad's Life and the Beginnings of Islam,” a study of the "historical Muhammad" that focuses on traditions about the end of his life.

Located in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, near Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, the humanities center provides an environment for individual research and the exchange of ideas.

The center offers fellowships for advanced studies in the humanities. While most of the center's fellowships are unrestricted, several are designated for particular areas of research, including a fellowship for a young woman in philosophy and fellowships for environmental studies, English literature, art history, Asian studies and theology.

Shoemaker also won fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and from the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest.

- by UO Office of Research, Innovation and Graduate Education