News

The Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible recommends a novel set in a research lab and a murder mystery with roots in Swift Hall, in UChicago News's annual list from this year's teaching award winners.

UChicago News asked this year's recipients of the University's teaching awards for summer reading recommendations. Among them was Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a 2026 recipient of the PhD Teaching and Mentoring Award, who offered two recommendations.

The first is Allegra Goodman's novel Intuition, set in a cancer research lab where the pressure to succeed amid grant shortages turns a promising result into a source of both elation and suspicion. A reader of academic novels, Stackert pointed to Goodman's portrait of the people who work behind the scenes of scientific discovery.

His second pick carries a closer connection to home. Bruce Lincoln's Secrets, Lies, and Consequences reads, in Stackert's description, with the intrigue of an Agatha Christie novel and the weight of serious history. Lincoln, the Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, takes up the troubled past of the historian of religions Mircea Eliade and his ties to the 1991 assassination of Ioan Culianu in Swift Hall, the Divinity School's home. To write the book, Lincoln taught himself Romanian.

Read Stackert's recommendations, along with selections from other University of Chicago teaching award winners, at UChicago News: news.uchicago.edu/story/what-read-during-summer-2026