Dan David Prize
Annual history awards
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dan David Prize, founded in 2000 by Dan David, is an international group of awards that recognize and support outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past.[1] Nine prizes of $300,000 are awarded each year to outstanding early- and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines.[2] The Prize has an annual purse of $3 million, making it the largest history award in the world,[3][4] including $300,000 funding an international postdoctoral fellowship program at Tel Aviv University, where the Prize is headquartered. The Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation.[5]
| Dan David Prize | |
|---|---|
| Awarded for | Outstanding work in the study of the human past |
| Country | Israel |
| Presented by | Dan David Foundation |
| Rewards | US$3,000,000 (Nine US$300,000 prizes and one US$300,000 fellowship) |
| First award | 2002 |
| Website | dandavidprize |
Until 2021 the prize consisted of three annual prizes of $1 million[6] for innovative and interdisciplinary research in three time dimensions: Past, Present and Future. Prize laureates donated 10 percent of their prize money to doctoral scholarships for outstanding Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholarships in their own field from around the world.
In September 2021, the Dan David Prize announced that it would shift its focus to support the work of "historians, art historians, archaeologists, digital humanists, curators, documentary filmmakers and all those who deepen our knowledge and understanding of the past".[2]
History
The Dan David Foundation was founded in 2000 with a $100 million endowment by Romanian-born Israeli businessman and philanthropist Dan David.[7] The Dan David Prize was founded with the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms.[8][non-primary source needed] Each year, three prizes of $1 million were awarded in rotating fields to those who made outstanding contributions to humanity. Its founding director from 1999 until 2002 was Gad Barzilai.[9] Its chairman since 2007 is Itamar Rabinovich.[10]
In anticipation of the prize's 20th anniversary in 2021, the Dan David Prize refocused in a new direction, citing the decline of global investment in the humanities and the relative scarcity of major prizes in the humanities. The redesigned prize focuses on supporting outstanding research in the historical disciplines and celebrating scholars and practitioners whose work illuminates the human past and enriches public debate with a deeper understanding of history.[2]
The Prize announced that starting in 2022 it would award up to nine prizes of $300,000 each year to early- and mid-career scholars and practitioners around the world[11] to recognize significant achievements in the study of the past and support the winners' future endeavours. From 2022, there will no longer be a distinction between three prize categories.
Laureates include cellist Yo-Yo Ma (2006), Israeli author Amos Oz (2008), U.S. Vice President Al Gore (2008), Canadian author Margaret Atwood (2010), French economist Esther Duflo, and immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci (2021).[12]
The prize has occasionally faced political controversy. In 2016, Catherine Hall of University College London rejected the Dan David Prize based on considerations related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Her prize money was donated to fund scholarships at Tel Aviv University.[13] In 2026, an open letter signed by more than 100 academics urged Australian historian Matthew Champion of Melbourne University to reject the award over the war in Gaza and Israel's regional policies.[14] The intervention drew pushback from university leadership and other scholars who criticized attempts to politicize international academic recognition.[15]
From 2022 recipients of the prize were called winners rather than laureates. The first cohort of prize winners was announced on March 1, 2022.[16]
Laureates (2002–2021)
Winners (2022–present)
| Year | Winner | Field |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Mirjam Brusius | Visual and material culture in global and colonial contexts |
| Bartow Elmore | Environmental history of global capitalism | |
| Tyrone McKinley Freeman | History of African American philanthropy | |
| Verena Krebs | Medieval Ethiopia and cross-cultural encounters | |
| Efthymia Nikita | Bioarchaeology of the Mediterranean | |
| Nana Oforiatta Ayim | Curator, writer, artist and art historian centering African heritage | |
| Kristina Richardson | Medieval Islamic world and the Roma | |
| Natalia Romik | Architect and public historian who works to preserve the memory of Jewish life in Eastern Europe | |
| Kimberly Welch | Legal history of the antebellum South | |
| 2023 | Saheed Aderinto | Social and cultural historian of modern Africa, deploying unusual lenses and categories like sexuality, childhood, guns, animals and music for understanding the Nigerian past |
| Ana Antic | Historian of psychiatry and twentieth-century Europe, exploring issues of politics, violence and mental health | |
| Karma Ben Johanan | Intellectual historian of inter-religious encounters, focusing on Catholic–Jewish interactions | |
| Elise K. Burton | Historian of science, race and nationalism in the modern Middle East, focusing on genetics, physical anthropology, and evolutionary biology | |
| Adam Clulow | Global historian of Europe and East Asia, deploying video games and virtual reality for popularising history | |
| Krista Goff | Historian using oral history and everyday sources in understanding experiences of understudied ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. | |
| Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers | Historian exploring women's social, economic and legal relationships to enslaved people and to the slave trade in the trans-Atlantic world. | |
| Anita Radini | “Archaeologist of dirt” analyzing the tiny remains of dust that collect in dental plaque, for learning about the work lives and environments of people in the past | |
| Chao Tayiana Maina | Public historian using digital technologies to capture and preserve previously hidden or suppressed historical narratives in Kenya. | |
| 2024 | Keisha N. Blain | Black internationalism and Black women's activism in the 20th century |
| Benjamin Brose | Cultural histories of Buddhism and Asian religion | |
| Cécile Fromont | Visual and material cultures of Early modern Africa, Latin America and Europe | |
| Cat Jarman | Archaeology of the Viking Age and public archaeology | |
| Daniel Jütte | Cultural histories of material objects and everyday technologies in Europe | |
| Stuart M. McManus | Global histories of the Renaissance and of slavery | |
| Kathryn Olivarius | Disease, citizenship and economics in the antebellum South of the United States | |
| Katarzyna Person | Holocaust archives and the recovery of marginalized voices | |
| Tripurdaman Singh | Colonialism, decolonisation and the birth of democracy in South Asia | |
| 2025 | Abidemi Babatunde Babalola | Anthropological archaeology of science and technology in West Africa |
| Mackenzie Cooley | Nature and medicine in the early modern world | |
| Bar Kribus | Ethiopian archaeology and the history and material culture of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) | |
| Fred Kuwornu | Documentary filmmaker exploring identity, race and historical representation | |
| Dmitri Levitin | Early modern intellectual history and the history of knowledge | |
| Beth Lew-Williams | Race and migration in the modern US | |
| Hannah Marcus | Science and scientific culture in early modern Europe | |
| Alina Șerban | Roma history, culture and identity through film and theater | |
| Caroline Sturdy Colls | Archaeology of the Holocaust and sites of genocide | |
| 2026 | R. Isabela Morales | Public history of slavery and emancipation in the US |
| Verena Meier | Persecution of Roma and Sinti in modern Europe; University of Heidelberg / Technical University of Berlin | |
| Giancarlo Marcone Flores | Archaeology of pre-Hispanic Peru and participative heritage; Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología – UTEC, Peru | |
| Andrew Lipman | History of early modern North America Barnard College; Columbia University | |
| Dagomar Degroot | History of environmental change on Earth and across the solar system; Georgetown University | |
| Howard Chiang | Modern East Asian medicine, gender and sexuality; University of California, Santa Barbara | |
| Matthew Champion | History of premodern temporalities; University of Melbourne | |
| Roland Betancourt | Byzantine art history and contemporary popular culture; University of California, Irvine | |
| Max Bergholz | Intercommunal violence, nationalism and memory in modern Europe; Concordia University, Montreal, Canada |
