Each year, the American Catholic Historical Association honors lifetime achievement in Catholic Studies with three awards: the Lifetime of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Service to Catholic Studies Award. Today, the ACHA is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2026 awards. The recipients will be honored at the Association’s annual meeting this week in Chicago.
ACHA Lifetime of Distinguished Scholarship Award
Dr. Carlos Eire
2026 Honoree
The Lifetime of Distinguished Scholarship Award recognizes lifelong contributions to the field of Catholic studies.
The ACHA is delighted to bestow the 2026 Distinguished Scholar Award on Dr. Carlos Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.
The author of War Against the Idols (1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (1995), Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), Learning to Die in Miami (2010), A Very Brief History of Eternity (2009), Reformations (2016), The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: a Biography (2019), and most recently, The Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023), Eire has contributed significantly to the field of Catholic history. His prolific and prize-winning publications offer perspicacious analyses of the theology that underwrote Protestant campaigns against idolatry; Catholic piety and ritual practice at the end of life in sixteenth-century Spain; ideas about eternity from ancient times to the present; the composition, reception, and long afterlife of the sixteenth-century Life of Teresa of Avila; and the complexities of the many religious reformations that convulsed Europe in the early modern period and continue to exert powerful pressures on the modern Western world.
Eire has been hailed, with reason, as “America’s leading historian of the Reformation.” Dr. Eire’s latest book, They Flew, which takes up the “wild facts” of levitating saints and bilocating nuns, makes a powerful argument in defense of Catholic history as a window onto the contemporary present. “Every age and culture has its own unquestionable beliefs,” Eire writes, “and our own tends to prize the rationality and superiority of unbelief as one of its core beliefs, especially in regard to denying the existence of a supernatural dimension” (362). With They Flew Eire has charted new territory in the field of Catholic history and has opened fresh possibilities for engaging with the Catholic past that, I expect, will bear much fruit in generations to come.
Congratulations, Dr. Eire.
ACHA Excellence in Teaching Award
Dr. Kevin Madigan
2026 Honoree
The Distinguished Teaching Award is presented to a college or university professor who has demonstrated a high commitment to teaching beyond the expected requirements of their position and through their influence and skill have promoted Catholic studies from one generation of scholars to another.
The ACHA is delighted to bestow the 2026 Distinguished Teaching Award on Dr. Kevin Madigan, the Winn Research Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University. Dr. Madigan’s twenty-five career at Harvard was punctuated by a number of teaching awards, which is enough to justify his receipt of the ACHA’s distinguished teaching award.
A few personal testimonies in his students’ own words, however, will go a bit farther to bring texture to his impact as a teacher and mentor. One student recalls Kevin’s “steady kindness through all the stages of my time at Harvard,” how he lifted her confidence as a writer, making her feel she was “saying something that mattered.” Another student writes that “working under Kevin Madigan, I never felt as though I was being trained. Instead I felt like I was allowed to grow into an academic…Especially in those treacherous years before tenure, when my future was entirely in my own hands, I realized just how valuable a gift he gave me.”
Kevin Madigan was the kind of professor who wouldn’t just explain where in the library you could find the reference dictionary but personally walk you over to the library and show you that reference dictionary. He was (and still is) generous—with his time, with his praise, with his expertise. I can’t begin to describe just how much his support meant to me—not just in grad school, but in the many years since. But Dr. Madigan gave his students more than encouragement and confidence. He also gave us a model of character.
Despite his tremendous professional accomplishments—Kevin Madigan is the author and editor of numerous field-defining books, an award-winning scholar of stunning versatility whose expertise ranges from 12th c. Italy to 20th c. Germany—Kevin embodies the virtues of both humor and humility, and in so doing has set a standard for his students worth striving for. It is my pleasure to confer upon Kevin Madigan the American Catholic Historical Association’s 2026 Distinguished Teaching Award.
ACHA Service to Catholic Studies Award
National Catholic Partnership on Disability
2026 Honoree
The ACHA Service to Catholic Studies Award recognizes outstanding service to the field of Catholic studies.
The ACHA is delighted to bestow the 2026 Distinguished Service Award on the National Catholic Partnership on Disability. The NCPD was founded in 1982 to work toward the implementation of the 1978 Pastoral Statement of the US Catholic Bishops on people with disabilities. The NCPD’s mission is to advance the meaningful participation of persons with disabilities in the Church and society.
To that end, the NCPD provides resources and training to assist parishes, schools, and other Catholic institutions become more accessible to people with disabilities; engages in advocacy and policy work to raise awareness of the full spectrum of disabilities and remove barriers to access; and supports families, individuals, ministers, and caregivers to ensure that people with disabilities aren’t just included in the Church but welcomed as full and important members of faith communities. Rooted in gospel values that affirm the dignity of every person, the NCPD works tirelessly to develop tools and materials that assist in the work of integration and acts as the connective tissue that unites parishioners, teachers, caregivers, catechists, and others together around the common goal of creating a Church that has room for everyone.
As teachers and caregivers and people with disabilities know all too well, the extra labor that goes into creating the conditions for full inclusion and meaningful participation in settings both large and small often goes overlooked—but it makes an enormous, indeed life-changing, difference in the lives of everyone involved. I am so pleased to recognize the NCPD for its commitment to this important work with the ACHA Award for Distinguished Service. Thank you for all that you do.