The Singleton Center is delighted to announce the joint winners of the 2025–26 Singleton Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research Paper: Ariela Algaze, Department of History of Art, and Jackson Hartigan, Department of History.

In The Metalinguistic Image: Mediating Language in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Ariela Algaze considers the function of the inscriptions in Latin, Greek, and Arabic that accompany the spectacular mosaics and painted muqarnas vaults of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, Sicily (1132–ca. 1170). She argues that, in the context of Norman Sicily—where multilingualism was promoted as royal policy under Roger II, despite the fact that few were literate in all three official languages—the symbolic and performative function of these inscriptions relied less on their legibility than on their iconicity. That is, their recognizability as representing different languages overshadowed their content. The “metalinguistic image” serves as a theoretical framework to explore the royal chapel’s fundamental concern with linguistic mediation, a concern manifested visually by the depiction in the nave of the genesis of linguistic diversity associated with the Tower of Babel, by the representation in the transept vault of the apostles’ instrumentalization of language after the Pentecost to convert the gentiles (portrayed as Sicily’s Muslims and Jews), and by the presence of the Pantokrator in the apse holding a bilingual Gospel book. The multilingual inscriptions and metalinguistic images of the Cappella Palatina articulate a theory of language as an ambivalent but ultimately useful tool for the political legitimation of Norman rule in Sicily and, more broadly, and for the fulfillment of the evangelical mission of Christianity.

In The European Reception of Jean Bodin’s Arguments against Slavery, Jackson Hartigan analyses a 16^th century text against slavery by the French jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin, in his De republica libri sex (1576–86), and three case studies of its reception. Bodin asserted that slavery was unethical and politically disadvantageous, and he inveighed against the Mediterranean and Atlantic slaving practices of Europeans, particularly the Spanish and Portuguese. Yet scholars have been slow to recognize the importance of Bodin’s writings for broader early modern debates about slavery. Hartigan uses the reception of Bodin to trace how his arguments shaped subsequent European ideas about slavery, including attempts to criticize or defend specific early modern slaving practices. He focuses on three readers of Bodin: Daniel Heinsius, Henning Arnisaeus, and Juan Márquez. Bodin set the agenda for their writings by challenging the intellectual foundations of slavery in two ways. First, he rejected Aristotle’s definition of natural slavery; second, he advanced practical and moral arguments to show that the maintenance of slavery as it was defined by Roman law was not a prudent political policy. He hence drew on the pragmatic mode of political reasoning known as “reason of state” to make a claim about slavery’s ruinous social and political consequences. Importantly, Bodin’s readers focused on this latter line of argument, evaluating whether legally sanctioned slaveholding was characteristic of ethical or prudent political conduct. Reconstructing the debate about slavery that Bodin’s work instigated helps us understand the nature of anti-slavery thought in the centuries before the rise of modern abolitionism.