[1] Originally trained in economics and statistics at Yale, Akenson's mentor in the study of Irish history was John V. Kelleher, the founder of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literature at Harvard.
[9] In 1990 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada named The Irish in Ontario (1984) "one of the most important publications in social science in the past 50 years in Canada,"[1] and in 1994 Akenson was named the winner of the Trillium Book Award for his biography of Irish writer and politician, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Conor: The Biography of Conor Cruise O'Brien (1994).
[1] Of his latest contribution to the history of Irish Migration, Ireland, Sweden and the Great European Migration, 1815–1914 (2013), fellow Irish Diaspora historian Donald MacRaild wrote: "This monumental study clearly will have a huge impact in the field.
Typically of Akenson, an original thinker of the first order, it debunks many myths, half-truths, and lazy assumptions on the part of historians.
His book God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster was named the winner of the 1992 Grawemeyer Award for "ideas improving world order".
Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself (2007) was a finalist for the British Columbia Achievement Prize for Best Canadian Non-fiction Book; Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (2000) was short-listed for the Canadian Writers' Trust Prize; and Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (1998) was shortlisted for the Governor General's Awards for Non-fiction.