News

Prof. Rosegarten presents Ranana Dine, PhD'25 with the J. Coert Rylaarsdam Prize. Photo by Charissa Johnson

The Divinity of School awards and prizes are presented on an annual, cyclical, and ad hoc basis, depending on the nature of the honor.  Below is a list of prizes and awards presented in the 2024-2025 academic year, inclusive of University-wide awards and national and international fellowships.

• The 2025 Rhind Award was presented to Marissa Ilnitzki during convocation on June 6

The Rhind Award was established by University Trustee and Divinity School Visiting Committee member James Rhind in honor of his father, who was a Presbyterian pastor and teacher. Each year, the Joseph Gray Rhind Award is presented to a graduating Master of Divinity student whose excellence in academic and professional training gives notable promise of a significant contribution.

Marissa Ilnitzki’s cohort knows her as a deep listener, a capable interlocutor, and a committed friend: one who pays close attention to others and in whose presence they feel seen, heard, and respected. 

At Northwestern Hospital, where Marissa completed a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education and continues to work shifts as a hospital chaplain, the staff recognize her abundant gifts for spiritual care. Patients appreciate her warmth and authenticity, as well as the sense of dignity, understanding, and empowerment they experience during her visits. 

Ilnitzki is also a gifted ritual leader, working with people in times of celebration and in times of loss to curate practices that invite both joy and grief.  Ilnitski's care for persons and communities is matched and sustained by her lively intellectual curiosity, courage, and love for the arts, all of which are powerfully articulated in her MDiv thesis, “A Postcolonial Image: What Hospital Chaplaincy Can Learn from the Art, Theory, and Practice of Improvisation.” 

A long-time student of Second City’s improv courses, Ilnitzki describes her felt sense of the improvisational in all manner of human relations, including the practice of theology. She advocates for chaplains and other caregivers to use such exercises to “ground themselves in humility, remind themselves of the limits of their knowledge, take in new information, and trust that each person has something unique and beautiful to contribute to our mutual understanding.”

• The 2025 Susan Colver-Rosenberger Educational Prize was presented to Matthew Vega on June 6

The Susan Colver-Rosenberger Educational Prize is a dissertation prize awarded in rotation to a Ph.D. student in the Social Sciences or Theology. The purpose of the prize is to stimulate constructive study and original research, and to develop practical ideas for the improvement of educational objectives and methods for the promotion of human welfare.

Matthew Vega is a pioneering theologian and thinker whose research has practical implications for enhancing understanding among many groups of people. He is the first to develop what he calls a Blaxican Theology. Consequently, he provides a paradigm for uniting the Mexican and black American heritages, traditions, and commonalities. As the first to make this discovery, 

Vega shows us how increased interaction and cooperation across boundaries give hope that a better world is possible. It is this new vision and way of being in the world, led by younger generations, that affirms the future is bright.

• The 2025 J. Coert Rylaarsdam Prize was presented to Ranana Dine on June 6

The J. Coert Rylaarsdam Prize is awarded to a deserving student of the University of Chicago Divinity School who has made special efforts to promote interfaith relations, with particular reference to the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. These efforts may consist of curricular or extracurricular achievements.  

Ranana Dine’s critical engagement with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions of ethics in coursework and Buddhist aesthetics in her dissertation has been exemplary. Dine's excellence in scholarship enables a thoughtful, generous, and beautifully informed perspective on Jewish tradition, art, and practice to be widely understood and appreciated by members of every faith. This same generosity of spirit is evident in her open and respectful teaching. 

• 2025 Excellence in Teaching Award: Zachary Taylor

This award recognizes PhD students who demonstrate excellence in teaching and learning. 

Zachary Taylor received the award in recognition of his excellence in academic, pedagogical, and professional training, and reflects the great promise he holds as an educator in the academic study of religion.

• 2025 Tikva Frymer Kensky Memorial Prize: Tommaso Bacci

Tikva Frymer-Kensky (1943-2006) was Professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Judaism. An expert on Assyriology, Sumerology, Biblical studies, and Jewish studies, she was perhaps best known for her work on women and religion. Read more here. This award is presented to students who have written the most accomplished essay integrating the materials and insights of at least two of the fields to which Professor Frymer-Kensky’s scholarship contributed: Hebrew Bible, Biblical law, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and ritual and/or feminist theology.

Tommason Bacci received in the honor in recognition of his outstanding paper entitled, "The Mighty Punishments of YHWH and His Judgements: A Diachronic Reading of שְׁפָטִים† in the Priestly Exodus.”

• 2025 Milo P. Jewett Prize: Lilia Ellis

The Milo P. Jewett Prize was established by the Baptist Theological Union to encourage and foster excellence in the effective expression of the meaning and spirit of the Holy Scriptures. 

The 2025 award was given to Lilia Ellis in recognition of “Putting on the New Human”: Scriptural Metaphors, Hildegard, and the Transgender Image of God."

• 2025 Ibrahim Rashed Qur’anic Studies Prize: Mehmet Emin Gulecyuz

This prize is awarded in recognition of the best-written paper in Qur’anic Studies. Papers may be submitted by a graduate student who is enrolled in any department at the University of Chicago. The papers must fall into the broadly defined category of Qur’anic Studies and exhibit a demonstrable engagement with Qur’anic Arabic. This Fund has been established with a gift in memory of Ibrahim Rashed, journalist and devoted student of the Qur'an, to recognize, encourage, and foster outstanding contributions to the field of Qur'anic Studies by promising young scholars at the University of Chicago.

Mehmet Emin Gulecyuz's outstanding and detailed biographical study of the Qur'an exegete, Sufi metaphysician, and legal theorist Molla Fenari represents a significant contribution to the fields of Islamic intellectual history, Ottoman Studies, and Qur’anic Studies.

• 2025 Anthony C. Yu: Saman Fazeli

Anthony C. Yu (1938-2015), was the Carl Darling Buck Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and the Divinity School. He introduced a comparative approach to the study of religion and literature that drew on both Eastern and Western traditions. Read more.

The Fellowship offers doctoral students support in completing their dissertation research.

• Alma Wilson Teaching Fellows 2025-26: Pieter Hoekstra, Lauren Beversluis, Michaela Podolny

The Alma Wilson Fellowship Teaching Prize offers doctoral students and candidates in the Divinity School, with an outstanding teaching record, the opportunity to design and teach a course of their own design in the University’s Undergraduate Program in Religious Studies.

• International Ministry Grants: Ocean Li, Katarina Stanisavljevic

• Rachel Abdoler, a PhD candidate in the History of Christianity, Awarded a Fulbright-Hays fellowship

Rachel Abdoler was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship to support her research, “Between Defense and Devotion: Butrus al-Sadamanti's Tafsir on the Passion of Christ in its Thirteenth Century Copto-Islamic Milieu.” The award, announced in November 2024, will underwrite six months of work in the collections of the Vatican Library in Rome and a library in Cairo, Egypt, on Christian texts written in Arabic.

• Francesco Rahe named 2025 Rhodes Scholar

Francesco P. Rahe, a recent graduate of the College at the University of Chicago, was selected as a 2025 Rhodes Scholar. He majored in both Religious Studies and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts. 

While at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Rahe founded Critical Understandings of Liturgies and Traditions (C.U.L.T.), the university's first student organization devoted to fostering interfaith discourse and overcoming religious intolerance. He will pursue a master’s degree in classical Indian religions at Oxford University this fall and is particularly interested in translating Sanskrit texts. 

He is the 55th student from the University of Chicago to be named a Rhodes Scholar.

• Walton Yan wins Jonathan Z. Smith Award for Original Research in Religious Studies and National Guild of St. Margaret of Scotland Prize

Walton Yan won the 2025 Jonathan Z. Smith Award for Original Research in Religious Studies for his thesis on “The Byzantine Viewer and the Work of Memory: Rethinking Text-Image Relationship in the Leo Bible.” He also won the University of Chicago Medieval Studies Program's annual National Guild of St. Margaret of Scotland Prize for the best BA paper on a medieval topic.