Rishad Choudhury wins Association for Asian Studies’ 2026 Bernard S. Cohn Prize

Rishad Choudhury, a historian and Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College, has been awarded the 2026 Bernard S. Cohn Prize by the Association for Asian Studies for his book Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Cultures After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge, University Press, 2004).

The Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize recognises outstanding first single-authored works in English on South Asia published during the preceding year. Two books—one in humanities and one in social sciences—are recognised each year from and on a broad range of topics across various disciplines centring South Asia “in the spirit of Barney Cohn’s broad and critical scholarship on culture and history in South Asia”. Past winners have included such volumes as Cabeiri deBergh Robinson’s Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists (University of California Press, 2013), Lotte Hoek’s Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2013), Vaibhav Saria’s Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (Fordham University Press, 2021), and more.

In an interview for the Library of Congress Blogs, Choudhury described the book as being “set in an age that was defined by a twin set of tensions” of the declining Muslim empires of the Mughals in South Asia and the Ottomans in West Asia and North Africa, a major portion of which were Hajj pilgrims.

He noted that he “seeks to understand how Muslims responded to the breakdown of traditional imperial societies by building connections with the wider world”. In a short piece written for the Cambridge University Press blog, he details “...South Asian hajj pilgrims who travelled to the Arabian Hijaz and the Ottoman Middle East hence also came to understand that the gathering crises in the Mughal world were of a piece with changes then surging across the Indian Ocean. For them, inqilab or revolution was thus unrestricted to South Asia.”

Choudhury hopes his book might offer a fresh perspective on a crucial period of imperial change in world history for specialists interested in South Asia, the Islamic world, and the Indian Ocean, as well as students of global and transnational history.

The official award ceremony is being held on March 13 during the AAS 2026 Annual Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The 2026 Cohn Prize Committee includes scholars from leading academic institutions from around the US and UK, and is chaired by 2024 Cohn Prize winner Kriti Kapila from King’s College London. Rishad Choudhury shares the award with Sandipto Dasgupta and honourable mention recipients Anna Lise Seastrand and Tyler Williams.