The Gordon J. Laing Award is conferred annually, by the University of Chicago's Board of University Publications, on the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the list of the University of Chicago Press. The first award was given in 1963 and the 53rd and most recent award was given on April 21, 2016 to Amir Sufi, the Bruce Lindsey Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
The award is named in honor of the scholar who, serving as general editor of the Press from 1909 until 1940, firmly established the character and reputation of the Press as the premier academic publisher in the United States.
The award is presented each April at a ceremony at the Quadrangle Club (University of Chicago).
Recipients of the Gordon J. Laing Award
House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again
I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Memory: Fragments of a Modern History
Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, The Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought
Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age
Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera
What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images
A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature
Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture
The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe
Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship
The Passing of an Illusion: The idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century
England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism
Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies
Modern American Religion (in three volumes)
How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example
Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States
Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought
The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?
On Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa
Modernity on Endless Trial
The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins
Truth and Beauty
Herodotus: The History (translation)
The Founders' Constitution (in five volumes)
A History of Religious Ideas (in three volumes)
Time and Narrative, Volume 1
Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725
The Journey to the West (in four volumes)
Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1: Theology and Ethics
Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism
The Last Half Century: Societal Change and Politics in America
Reason and Morality
Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 3: Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions
Culture and Practical Reason
Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics
Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes
Some Words of Jane Austen
The Intellectuals and the Powers
The Notebooks of Dostoevsky (in five volumes)
The Origins of Statecraft in China, Volume 1: The Western Chou Empire
The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City
Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Prediction in Twentieth-Century Culture
Education and Social Change in Ghana
Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume 1, Books 1 and 2
Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization
America’s Failure in China, 1941-1950
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance