Brittany E. Wilson, assistant professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, has received a 2016 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. 

Wilson is one of 10 recipients of the Lautenschlaeger Award for her first book, Unmanly Men: Refigurations of Masculinity in Luke-Acts, published in 2015 by Oxford University Press.

The book challenges widely held assumptions that men in the Gospel of Luke and Book of Acts embody variations of “muscular Christianity.” Instead, Wilson argues that Luke reconfigures—or refigures—men’s claims to power in order to highlight God’s alternative construal of power in Jesus. In Luke-Acts, Wilson maintains that “real” men in fact look manifestly unmanly.

The Lautenschlaeger Award is given annually to 10 scholars from around the world and across academic disciplines. Twenty-three committee members, currently from 19 different countries, select the winners. Previous winners have included Duke Divinity School Professors Jennie Grillo, Anathea Portier-Young, and Kavin Rowe.

Wilson will join the other recipients for an award ceremony and colloquium this May at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. While there, she will receive the Lautenschlaeger Award’s 3,000 Euros prize money and present her current research project, which is on the importance of embodiment in Acts and the early church.

“I am thrilled to be going to Heidelberg this coming May,” Wilson said, “and I am looking forward to presenting my current research among such esteemed colleagues. In my first book, I underscore the connection between masculinity, power, and theological witness. My current book presses these connections even further by exploring how corporeality in the early church connects to core tenets of the Christian faith. Discussing my research in such a forum is a great opportunity that will inevitably enrich the project itself.”