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.