Richard M. Eaton, a well-known and respected social-cultural historian of Islam and premodern India (1000—1800), has been awarded the 25th Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award in Islamic Studies by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, or CNES.
Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886–1967) was a Jewish Italian expert in the history and culture of the Near East. The CNES award named in his honor, created by historian and founding director of CNES Gustave E. von Grunebaum, has been continuously awarded — mostly on a biennial basis — since 1967.
CNES will host a scholarly conference, “Sufis in Premodern Persianate Society and Politics,” on November 5, 2026, as which Eaton will deliver a formal lecture. The proceedings will be published as a new volume in the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Series in Islamic Studies.
This page is dedicated to congratulatory messages to Professor Eaton from his colleagues, conference participants and many former students and mentees.
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It gives me enormous pleasure to wish Dr. Eaton a warm congratulations on
receiving the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award. As a historical and political
geographer of Pakistan, my thinking has been powerfully shaped, nurtured
and challenged by Dr. Eaton's mentorship and supervision of my Ph.D. research.
This encompasses topics as diverse as conversion, state-formation, frontiers,
archives, political space, and comparison.
I jumped to enroll in every class Dr. Eaton offered while I was a Ph.D.
student at the University of Arizona. Through these he modelled excellence
in teaching, lecturing and historical discussion. He remains my model of a serious
scholar: rigorous, committed, generous, curious and open to challenge and change. Congratulations!
Majed Akhter
Senior Lecture in Environment and Culture
Department of Geography, Kings College London
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Congratulations and all best wishes!
Saïd Amir Arjomand
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Sociology
State University of New York, Stonybrook
Editor, Journal of Persianate Studies
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Dick Eaton (2nd from left) with Roshan Institute colleagues in Tucson, June 2025.
Congratulations, Dick, on this fantastic award!! I have admired and learned from your work
since graduate school, and it is such an honor, and rather surreal in the best of ways
to now be your colleague. Thank you for the brilliant scholarship you have contributed
to our fields, as well as your kindness and generosity in welcoming me to Tucson.
Belle Cheves
Roshan Institute Assistant Professor in Persian and Iranian Studies
History Department, University of Arizona
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Congratulations on winning the Giorgio Levi della Vida Award and joining the
long line of superb scholars recognized by UCLA as outstanding leaders in our field.
Your prolific production of works of original scholarship, your innovative construction
of historical overviews, and your penetrating analyses of controversial questions
make you ultimately worthy of this recognition.
Further, your teaching has galvanized numerous students to look at
international and global issues with a critical but creative eye. You have
constantly said that you will never retire, and nor should you. I wish you many
more years of sterling scholarship and inspiring teaching.
Linda T. Darling
Professor Emerita of History, University of Arizona
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Our gathering in early November to honor Professor Richard Eaton is not, I understand, primarily for his contribution to Central Asian studies, but, with apologies
to those here who think of him above all in connection with scholarship on South Asia,
it could be. I can’t speak for my colleagues on the ‘Central Asian panel,’ but
when I was starting out, there was really no one in the academic firmament who
could offer a model of how to study the social history of Sufi communities in
Central Asia; there was, however, a relatively large cluster of scholars who took
Sufis seriously as social actors, and who took regional contexts—or even what
then might have been called ‘marginal’ contexts, outside the imagined ‘centers’ of
Islam—seriously, and although their region was not Central Asia, the sheer force and
quality of what they produced about South Asia made their work essential to anyone
hoping to look beyond the politics and ideology that clogged the academic circles
focused on Central Asian Islam.
I was quite starstruck when I eventually had the chance to meet Dick and
Bruce and Carl, the people who went with those names whose work I had
been reading, and I feel honored to be in their presence again for this gathering;
I would come to depend on each of them, or rather their works, for different
things, from ways to interrogate Sufi literature, or understand Sufi doctrine,
or think about religious boundaries between Muslims and others in a regional
environment, but when I made my first trip to India—in 1988, seeking
Central Asian manuscripts—the book I took with me was The Sufis of Bijapur,
maybe because it had “Social Roles” in the subtitle. Dick and I have met
only sporadically at conferences over the years, and we have corresponded
not all that much more, but to a large degree I have felt myself in a sort
of dialogue with that book ever since that time.
All this is by way of saying thanks to Dick Eaton for his sustained example
of fine scholarship, and congratulations on this well-deserved award!
Devin DeWeese
Professor Emeritus of Central Eurasian Studies
Indiana University, Bloomingon
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Heartfelt congratulations to you, Dick, for your well-deserved Giorgio Levi Della
Vida Medal for Excellence in Islamic Studies. Back in the late 1970s, when I was
developing my dissertation on Khwaja ʿUbayd Allah Ahrar — at a time when the
field of Sufism in Central Asia was largely undeveloped — "Sufis of Bijapur" became the touchstone that opened new possibilities for me to understand the diverse roles
of Sufis in society, and it demonstrated to me the immense value of combining
hagiographical sources with traditional chronicles to bring the history
of those roles to light.
Your subsequent studies have continued to deeply influence my perspective on
historical interpretation and the Persianate in Islamic studies. Thank you for your
extraordinary scholarship and for the enormous contribution your work has made to me
and so many others!
Jo-Ann Gross
Professor Emerita, Middle Eastern and Central Eurasian History
The College of New Jersey
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Professor Eaton taking the podium at the AAS Annual Conference, Boston,
March 2023, when he was awarded the Distinguished Contributions to
Asian Studies Award.
Professor Eaton receiving the Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies Award from
AAS President Professor Kamran Asdar Ali at the Association of Asian Studies Annual
Conference, Boston, March 2023.
Professor Eaton with Ayesha Irani, Sweta Dutta, Pronoy Chakraborty, and
Rebecca Manring at the Annual Conference for South Asia, Madison, WI, 2024.
Ayesha A. Irani
Associate Professor of Asian Studies
University of Massachusetts-Boston
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Warmest congratulations, with profound gratitude for your great contributions
to our knowledge of the Mughal empire, and for your work in supporting
the field of South Asian history.
Abhishek Kaicker
Associate Professor of History
University of California, Berkeley
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Congratulations on this singular honor, Dick!
Ahmet T. Karamustafa
Professor and Chair, Department of History, University of Maryland
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The Eaton house. Racoon on the light pole.
Sadie and the racoon. Sadie focused on the racoon.
Congratulations on receiving the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award! It is lovely to
see your work honored in this way.
The news brought back fond memories of you, Beth and Cam at the farm and
your story of Sadie faithfully tracking the raccoon that spent three days
atop the pole.
Hope you are keeping well.
Choon Min Koh
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While proud of many books that Dick Eaton has written, I also prize some of his
salient articles, not least the essay he did for a conference convened by John Richards,
and then a book based on that conference where Dick had a major essay on temple
destruction. William Dalrymple caught the gist of what Dick said in this-two
paragraph note to his review titled; "India: The War Over History,"
New York Review of Books 52:6
(April 7, 2005):
In India, and amongst the Indian diaspora, something approaching a full-scale war has been declared over the ownership of the past: a passionately contested battle over both Sanskrit scholarship and the interpretation of Indian history.
[1] An excellent collection of essays — "Beyond Turk and Hindu," edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence [University Press of Florida, 2000] — has recently updated the idea of the ‘composite culture’. The book shows the degree to which the richness of medieval Indian culture was the direct result of the inspired cross-fertilisation of Indian and Islamic civilisations. The historians take the view that “there have never been clearly fixed groups, one labelled ‘Hindu’ – and the other, both its opposite and rival- labelled ‘Muslim.” Indeed, as one author points out, there is not a single mediaeval Sanskrit inscription that identifies “Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims,” but instead they refer more generally in terms of “linguistic affiliation, most typically as Turk.” The groupings we today identify as ‘Muslim’ were then “construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many.”
An important essay in "Beyond Turk and Hindu" has attempted to quantify the number of temples that were destroyed. It is a central nostrum of the RSS that fanatical Indo-Muslim states desecrated as many as 60,000 Hindu temples. This claim is examined by Professor Richard Eaton in his essay “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim states” [pp 246–281]. Eaton concludes that “such a picture cannot be sustained by evidence from original sources”. Rather than 60,000 looted temples, Eaton writes that he can find evidence for around eighty desecrations, and that these demolitions tended to take place in the specific context of military defeats of Hindu rulers or when “Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim domains, viewed as protected state property, were left unmolested.” Eaton’s findings are hotly contested by the Hindu far right, but have been broadly accepted by professional historians.
This is but one of many salient contributions Dick has made, but it certainly is
one that continues to warrant citation in, and application to, future histories
of pre-modern India.
Bruce B. Lawrence
Marcus Family Humanities Professor of Religion Emeritus, Duke University
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Congratulations, Dick, on winning the Della Vida Award! I’m delighted to
see you receive this well-deserved recognition of your extraordinary
contributions to Islamic Studies. You’ve led such an incredibly impactful
career and have genuinely transformed the ways that we understand Islamic history
in India and across the Persianate world. I’m excited to see what comes next!
Scott Levi
Professor t of History
Ohio State University
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Dr. Eaton, Many congratulations on the Della Vita Award! Richly deserved! Over the
past ten years or so that I've been your colleague, I've been continually amazed at
your dedication and intellectual output, which shines such a wonderfully bright light on
our department and colleagues. I bask in the borrowed light! Congrats again!
David Pietz
Regents Professor of Modern Chinese History and UNESCO Chair in Environmental History
University of Arizona
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Sudev Sheth with Professor Richard M. Eaton over coffee in South Philadelphia during Eaton’s
semester at Penn, 2024.
Professor Eaton, I have long admired your scholarship, and I am equally
grateful for the generosity and encouragement you have shown me over the
years. Your support of my work, including your generous words about my first book,
Bankrolling Empire, has meant a great deal. I especially treasure our
conversations over tacos and coffee around South Philly during your semester
at Penn in 2024, along with the hand-drawn Christmas cards that
still arrive each year. Thank you for the example you have set, in
scholarship and in kindness. Sending my best wishes from yet another
city you know and navigate with such ease!
Sudev Sheth
Senior Lecturer of International Studies, The Lauder Institute; and
Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
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Congratulations, Richard! Well deserved!
Laura Tabili
Professor Emerita of History, University of Arizona
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Dick Eaton (2nd from left) with friends in Tucson, AZ, 2013.
Personally, and on behalf of the Roshan Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in
Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Arizona, I extend our warmest
congratulations to you on receiving the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award.
Like the other programs at the University of Arizona with which you are affiliated,
Roshan GIDP feels fortunate and proud to have you as a colleague and friend.
This well-deserved recognition honors your outstanding scholarship and
enduring contributions to multiple fields. We are delighted to celebrate this
achievement with you.
Kamran Talattof
Founding Director
Roshan Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Persian and Iranian Studies
University of Arizona
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Congratulations, Dick, on an honor that is so well deserved! Your impact on South
Asian studies has been remarkably wide-ranging, and it is wonderful to see
that recognized and honored!
Audrey Truschke
Professor of History, Rutgers University-Newark
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May 2022, Delhi, India. Professor Eaton stopped by my home late at night on his way out to the airport. We offered him a drink, and he said, "No chance you'd have Bourbon?" As it happened, we did — Kentucky Bourbon, a gift from a writer friend who had visited earlier from New York. So here's Dick Eaton, at my desk, raising the bottle!
Ananya Vajpeyi
Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
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