FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Winners of the Fifteenth Annual Hamilton Book Awards
Sponsored by the University Co-operative Society

AUSTIN, October 19, 2011 - The winners of this year's University Co-op Robert W. Hamilton Book Awards were announced on Wednesday, October 19,  2011 at the Four Seasons Hotel. The Hamilton Award is one of the highest honors of literary achievement given to published authors at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Hamilton Awards are named in honor of Professor Robert W. Hamilton, the Minerva House Drysdale Regent Chair-Emeritus in Law. Professor Hamilton was chair of the Co-op Board for 12 years, from 1989 to 2001, and was in large measure responsible for the Co-op's uncommon growth and profitability during that period. 

The $10,000 Grand Prize winner of the Hamilton Book Award was

In Scripting Jesus, Michael White, famed scholar of early Christian history, reveals how the gospel stories of Jesus were never meant to be straightforward historical accounts, but rather were scripted and honed as performance pieces for four different audiences with four different theological agendas. As he did as a featured presenter in two award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries (From Jesus to Christ and Apocalypse!), White engagingly explains the significance of some lesser-known aspects of The New Testament; in this case, the development of the stories of Jesus including how the gospel writers differed from one another on facts, points of view, and goals. Readers of Elaine Pagels, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Bart Ehrman will find much to ponder in Scripting Jesus. http://www.harpercollins.com/

 L. Michael White also won the Hamilton Book Awards Grand Prize in 2006 for From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries & Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith published by Harper Collins

There were also 4 winners who took home $3,000 runner-up prizes:

Richard Graham, Ph.D., - Department of History
Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780-1860,
Published the University of Texas Press

David M. Hillis, Ph.D., - Department of Integrative Biology
Principles of Life, Sinauer Associates and W. H. Freeman

Inga Markovits, LLM, - School of Law
Justice in Lritz: Experiencing Socialist Law in East Germany, Princeton University Press

Karl H. Miller, Ph.D., - Department of History
Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim, Published by Duke University Press

Another highly regarded award presented at this event was University Co-operative Societys
Career Research Excellence Award.

J. Patrick Olivelle, Ph.D. Department of Asian Studies, College of Liberal Arts, was awarded the $10,000 Career Research Excellence Award for maintaining a superior research program over many years at the university.

Patrick Olivelle served as the Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin from 1994 to 2007, where he is Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions. Prior to coming to Texas, Olivelle taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, from 1974 to 1991, where he was the Department Chair 1984-90.
Olivelle's current research focuses on the ancient Indian legal tradition of Dharmastra. He has edited and translated the four early Dharmastras. . He has also prepared a critical edition of the Law Code of Manu (Manava Dharmasastra). . A new translation based on the critically edited text was published in Spring 2004 in the Oxford World's Classics series and the critical edition was published in 2005. Olivelle has won several prestigious fellowships, including Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS. He was elected Vice President of the American Oriental Society in 2004 and President in 2005.

Barbara E. McArthur, Research Scientist McDonald Observatory, College of Natural Sciences, and George Fritz Benedict, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist McDonald Observatory, College of Natural Sciences, were awarded the $5,000 Best Research Paper Award for "New Observational Constraints on the Upsilon Andromedae System with Data from the Hubble Space Telescope and Hobby-Eberly Telescope" (The Astrophysical Journal, June 1, 2010).

Steven Dietz, Professor Department of Theatre and Dance, College of Fine Arts, won the $5,000 Creative Research Award for outstanding achievement by a faculty member at The University of Texas at Austin. The newly established University Co-op Creative Research Award replaces the Fine Arts award to recognize outstanding creative achievement throughout the University. Faculty in the colleges of Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, Communication and the School of Architecture are eligible for consideration.

About University Co-operative Society:
The University Co-op is a not-for-profit corporation owned by the students, faculty and staff of the University of Texas at Austin.  Since the year 2000, the University Co-op has given over 32 million dollars to UT in the form of gifts, grants and rebates.

Contact:
Hulan Swain, hswain@universitycoop.com