2026 Saller Prize Recipients Announced

Ibrahim Khan, PhD’25, from the Department of Political Science, and Xiaogao Zhou, PhD’25, from the Department of Sociology, have been selected as the 2026 Saller Prize recipients by a faculty review committee.

Khan’s dissertation, “The Problem of Peace: Anticolonial Thought and the Critique of International Order,” is a deft and wide-ranging historical inquiry into the development of the definition of aggression: in particular, it reveals the significant and neglected role of jurists, diplomats, and other political actors from the Global South in this process. Khan’s work is strongly interdisciplinary, bringing together his training in political theory, law, and Islamic studies to produce work that is theoretically rich, attentive to the nuances of legal doctrine, and meticulous as historical research.

In nominating Khan, the Department noted, “The dissertation makes striking original contributions, both theoretical and historiographical, to the interdisciplinary scholarship on international law and the international order, and the legacies and structures of empire that continue to pervade them, often unacknowledged in both the scholarship and public discourse.”

Khan is now a  Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University.

Zhou’s dissertation, “In Transition: Politics of Transgender Health Care in China,” is an ethnographic examination of the shifting transnational norms around medical care for transgender people are being taken up by medical professionals and activists in China.

Kristen Schilt, Associate Professor in Sociology, chaired Zhou’s dissertation committee. In her letter of nomination for the Saller Prize, she wrote that the work is “truly groundbreaking, as there is almost no scholarly research on this topic in China or in other countries. His research joins the field of social science-centered LGBTQ research about how gender and sexual minorities maneuver and create change in a restrictive state context, as well as transnational sociology, medical sociology, and the sociology of knowledge.”

Zhou is now  Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College.

The review committee for the 2026 Saller Dissertation Prize consisted of Associate Professor Darryl Li (Anthropology), Professor Lisa Wedeen (Political Science), Professor Greg Norman (Psychology), and Schilt.

The award is named for  Richard P. Saller , the tenth Provost of the University of Chicago (2002-2006) and former Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences (1994-2002). Professor Saller joined the University of Chicago as an Associate Professor of Anthropology in 1984. He was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1992 and was named the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor. He left UChicago in 2007 for Stanford University where he served as Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences until 2018. He is presently the Kleinheinz Family Professor of European Studies at Stanford.

A full list of all Saller Prize recipients is available at  https://socialsciences.uchicago.edu/about/divisional-awards/saller-prize .