MESA Graduate Student Paper Prize
Du Fei
Cornell University, Department of History
2023 Winner
The Graduate Student Paper Prize committee is pleased to announce “Thinking with Kulthūm Nana: ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ and Women’s Knowledge in Islam,” as the winner of the 2023 award. In this impressive intertextual work, the author traces multiple versions of the Persian text from the Safavid era, Aqāʾid al-nisāʾ (The Beliefs/Dogmatics of Women), also known as Kulthūm Nana, across centuries, examining the “tension embedded in the text between the idea of a feminine form of knowledge-making and its male representation.” The author skillfully guides the reader through the intricate details pertaining to the life of a manuscript, the intellectual tradition around it, and the historical change reshaping the implications with a carefully crafted historical narrative.