Connor Martini wins the 2025 American Religion Dissertation Prize

Recent PhD graduate Connor Martini has won the 2025 American Religion Dissertation Prize for his thesis titled “The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in an Enchanted Universe.” This prize is awarded annually by a jury of editors of the journal to works demonstrating excellence in the study of religion in America.

Connor’s project examines how scientists searching for alien life create what he calls pre-enchantment—using radio telescope observations, signal processing algorithms, and narratives of imagined contact scenarios to prepare for encounters with unknowable others. Through ethnographic fieldwork at SETI research institutions and observational facilities, archival research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and textual analysis of scientific publications, he traces how researchers enact "pre-enchantment" through two primary modes: infrastructural practices that create material conditions for presences to become detectable, and promissory practices that orient this infrastructure toward possible imagined futures. He demonstrates how SETI practitioners engage in religious work—mediating presence and absence, cultivating openness to unknown figures, and managing uncertainty—through, not in opposition to, their scientific practices.

From the journal: "The prize jury found it to be scholarship of remarkable creativity and sophistication, marshaling a range of methods and critical approaches to consider in new—and entertaining—ways not just the what but the how and why of scholarly endeavor."