Centennial Professor of History Joel Harrington has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with a 2020 award in literature.

Harrington, a historian of Europe who has written extensively on the Reformation and early modern Germany, is among 19 writers being recognized this year by the academy with the prestigious literature prize.

The specific award for Harrington, who also has faculty appointments in the Program in German Studies and Graduate Department of Religion, honors exceptional accomplishment in any genre and recognizes his body of work.

His most recent book is Dangerous Mystic: Meister Eckhart’s Path to the God Within (Penguin Press, 2018; forthcoming in German from Siedler Verlag in 2020), which examines the life and controversial spiritual teachings of a 14th-century theologian and their potentially radical implications for Christianity then and now.