The Foundation would like to congratulate Dr Katie Johnston, 2018-2019 Wiener-Anspach Alumna, and Dr Julien Decharneux, currently a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, on the prizes they were recently awarded for their doctoral dissertation.
Katie Johnston received the Oxford Nicolas Berggruen Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation in Philosophy, Law & Politics 2023. The prize, funded by Nicolas Berggruen of the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, is awarded to a dissertation “that is both excellent and transformative in either theory or practice” presented in one of Oxford’s three faculties (Philosophy, Law and Political Science).
Katie Johnston completed her DPhil from the University of Oxford in February 2022 with a thesis titled “The impact of the coexistence of multiple norms from different sources of international law on change to the jus ad bellum” (available here). During her DPhil, she was granted a Wiener-Anspach doctoral fellowship to undertake a year of research at the Université libre de Bruxelles, under the supervision of Prof. Olivier Corten (Centre de Droit international). Following this stay she published an article titled “The Nature and Context of Rules and the Identification of Customary International Law” in the European Journal of International Law. Today, Katie Johnston is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool.
Julien Decharneux, PhD in Theology and Religion (ULB), has been awarded the 2022-2023 Kreglinger Prize for his thesis titled “Creation and Contemplation : The Cosmology of the Qur’ān and Its Late Antique Background” (partly completed at the University of Oxford thanks to a grant from the Wiener-Anspach Foundation).
Awarded every two years by the ULB’s Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, this prize rewards a young historian of religion for the quality of his or her research and provides support for the publication of a doctoral thesis. In 2017-2018, the prize was awarded to another Wiener-Anspach Alumnus, Dr Jérôme Verdoot.
Dr Decharneux is currently a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he has undertaken a research project on “The Qur’an and Christian asceticism in late antiquity: analysing the practices and beliefs of the early Qur’anic community in the light of Syro-Eastern spirituality”, under the supervision of Prof. David Taylor (Faculty of Oriental Studies).
On 6 June his book Creation and Contemplation: The Cosmology of the Qur’ān and Its Late Antique Background was published by De Gruyter.