Dannu  J. Hütwohl was this year's Iles Award for the Graduate Study of myth recipient. This award is furnished annually by an endowment in honor Robert L. and Phyllis Iles. Below, you can read how Dannu benefitted from the assistance that this award provided:

"Thanks to the generous support of the Iles Award for the Study of Myth and the Center for the Study of Religion for my dissertation project “The Birth of Sacrifice: Ritualized Deities in Eastern Mediterranean Mythology,” I was able to use my award funds to pay for the program and material costs of the ANAMED Summer Intensive Program for Anatolian Languages. In the month-long program, I gained language and philological training in Hittite, Akkadian, Sumerian, and Luwian from experts in the field. The program was truly one of the most rigorous and fulfilling experiences of my academic career. Each day involved several hours of intensive study of grammar and reading of texts in the original script (cuneiform or hieroglyphics). By completing the program, I now have the necessary research tools and skills to incorporate these languages into my future research on the study of myth, religion, and the dynamics of cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean. Additionally, I have gained important contacts with experts in the field, who have already helped me immensely with new ideas for research. My dissertation project already analyzed the Akkadian myth Atrahasis, but my new training allowed me to gain further confidence in my reading of the myth. I was also able to add an appendix to my project comparing a Sumerian myth with the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, as well as propose some parallels between the practices depicted in the hymn and Anatolian practices of sacrifice. Moreover, I now have the philological tools necessary for exploring some of the historical antecedents of Greek practices that seem to have originated in the Near East. Thus, I will now be able to broaden my corpus of texts from the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to the Anatolian world. With future research, I would like to investigate the possibility of representations of “divine sacrifice” in Hittite myths, as well as compare Hittite ritual texts with the literary descriptions of sacrifice. Ultimately, I would like to expand the appendix of my dissertation into a full chapter for my post-doctoral monograph. Finally, I was able to use additional funds to build up my library of books on Phoenician studies for my research into cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean, which will further augment my research capabilities. Thank you, CSR and Iles family!"