First book by Miami professor receives national prize

Scott Kenworthy, an associate professor of comparative religion at Miami University, has been awarded the 2010 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History (ASCH) for his book, The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism and Society after 1825 (2010).

Award committee members praised Kenworthy’s first book as “prodigiously researched and written with clarity and grace,” and they noted that it is a “sweeping history ... (that) in (his) able hands ... becomes a lens for viewing the history of Russian religion.”

The prize will be awarded officially during the ASCH’s winter meeting on Jan. 7, 2012, in Chicago.

Kenworthy, who joined the faculty of Miami in 2004, also is a faculty associate with Miami’s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies and a faculty affiliate with Miami’s department of history.

His research interests focus on Eastern Orthodoxy in modern Russia. He received his doctorate in history from Brandeis University in 2002, serving as a post-doctoral fellow from 2001 to 2003 at Miami in the Havighurst Center.