Jonathan Wyrtzen awarded 2016 Social Science History Association Presidential Book Prize

The Social Science History Association has awarded the 2016 President’s Book Award to Jonathan Wyrtzen, associate professor of sociology, history, and international affairs.

Wyrtzen’s book, “Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity,” was unanimously selected for the award and cited by the judging panel as an “extraordinary work of social science history.”

The book addresses the question: How did four-and-a-half decades of European colonial intervention transform Moroccan identity? As elsewhere in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912-1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, the analysis in “Making Morocco” focuses on interactions between state and society.

The Social Science History Association is an interdisciplinary group of scholars that shares interests in social life and theory; historiography; and historical and social-scientific methodologies.

The association annually awards the $1,000 prize for a meritorious first work by an early-career scholar. Entrants are judged on scholarly significance, interdisciplinary reach, and methodological innovativeness within monographs analyzing past structures and events and change over time.