2007 award presented in November 2008

Thomas E. Burman

The American Philosophical Society awarded the 2008 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History to Dr. Thomas E. Burman for his book, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Thomas E. Burman is Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1991. He received his Ph.D. in medieval studies from the University of Toronto in 1991. In 1995 he received a research grant from the Society.

Exceedingly original in its deployment of source material, its analyses and its conclusions, Thomas Burman’s Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 is a major contribution that is changing the way medieval and Renaissance history of Muslim-Christian relations is written. A learned and revisionist study of the knowledge of the Qur’an in the West in the later Middle Ages, it has its origins in the Latin translations found primarily in early printed books. Whereas past historians have leaned heavily on polemical treatises against Islam written by Christian scholars, Burman’s largely un-mined sources tell a different story: that the reading of the Qur’an in Western Europe was highly complex, with scholars of the period immersed in a wide range of grammatical, lexical and interpretive problems presented by the text. Burman considers these subjects in the historical and comparative context of Christian-Muslim relations and cultures and modern Qur’anic scholarship. The result is a hands-on picture of how Europeans read the sacred text of Islam.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of chairman Donald R. Kelley, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2008 award presented in November 2009

Dianne Sachko Macleod

The American Philosophical Society awarded the 2008 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History to Dianne Sachko Macleod for her book, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects - American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 (University of California Press, 2008).

The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Dianne Sachko Macleod earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkely in 1981. That same year she joined the faculty of Art History at the University of California, Davis, where she has recently become Professor Emerita.  Her other works include Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (1996) and (co-edited with Julie F. Codell) Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (1998).

Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects - American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 is a scholarly and beautifully illustrated study of 19th-century wealthy American women collectors and their role in shaping the cultural taste of their age and afterwards in painting and the fine arts, with full emphasis on their post-Bellum political involvements, the "gendering" of the modern museum, and the strategies of hiding and later exhibiting their acquisitions. The book is particularly original in its sympathetic and detailed expression of the range of collectors under consideration beyond the familiar and famous horizons.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2009 award presented in November 2010

Daniel Hobbins

The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2009 to Professor Daniel Hobbins in recognition of his book Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Daniel Hobbins earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University on Notre Dame. He researches and teaches the history of medieval Europe from 500-1500 at the Ohio State University, where he is an associate professor.  His specific interests include the cultural and intellectual history of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with special emphasis on universities, written culture, the Hundred Years' War, Joan of Arc, and, as evidenced by this latest work, Jean Gerson.

Dr. Hobbins' book takes a look at one of the most powerful theologians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Jean Gerson.  Gerson, who lived from 1363 to 1429, was an impressive player in Western Europe during a time of war, plague, and schism.  His life and work, as seen through a theological lens, have not harmonized with the modern understanding of this era, leaving a puzzle for historians.  Dr. Hobbins attempts to fill this gap in knowledge by arguing for a new understanding of Gerson as a scholar taking advantage of this period of rapid expansion in written culture.  More broadly, Dr. Hobbins casts Gerson as a mirror of the complex cultural and intellectual shifts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Gerson contrasts with earlier theologians due to his more humanist approach to reading and authorship; indeed, his attempts to reach a broader public with publications in both Latin and French garnered him an international audience.  However, the book avoids painting a triumphalist picture of this transitional period, not dissimilar to our own.  Instead, Dr. Hobbins portrays Gerson as the embodiment of a period of creative and dynamic growth which necessitated and eventually produced new technologies of the written word.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2010 award presented in April 2012

Peter E. Gordon

The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2010 to Professor Peter E. Gordon in recognition of his book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Peter Gordon received his Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Harvard College Professor, the Amabel B. James Professor of History, and co-founder and co-chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History at Harvard University. His first book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003), won several awards, including the Salo W. Baron Prize from the Academy for Jewish Research for Best First Book, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History. Specializing in modern European Intellectual History from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, he works chiefly on themes in Continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France in the modern period.

Dr. Gordon’s book is an in-depth study of the famous 1929 public debate between two major philosophers of the past century – Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger – that took place in Davos, Switzerland. Their confrontation over the mission of philosophy in the wake of Kant, neo-Kantianism, Husserl, and the crisis of European thought after World War I acquired an allegorical significance over the years, as if it marked an ultimate and irreparable rupture in 20th century Continental thought. Cassirer represented an anthropological turn to culture and "symbolic forms," while Heidegger argued for a post-metaphysical existential phenomenology – and this debate about what it means to be human has proceeded along these lines down to the present day. Peter Gordon has provided us with rich historical detail and skillful analysis of all that surrounded this debate.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2011 award presented in November 2012

Barbara Ann Naddeo

The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2011 to Professor Barbara Ann Naddeo in recognition of her book Vico and Naples – The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory. The award was presented by Keith Thomson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Barbara Ann Naddeo is currently an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Master’s Degree Program in History at the City College of New York and The Graduate Center. She specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, especially Italy. In particular, she is interested in the advent of the metropolis and its significance for the social sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Vico and Naples is an intellectual portrait of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) that reveals the politics and motivations of one of Europe’s first scientists of society. According to the commonplaces of the literature on the Neapolitan, Vico was a solitary figure who, at a remove from the political life of his larger community, steeped himself in the recondite debates of classical scholarship to produce his magnum opus, the New Science. Naddeo shows, however, that at the outset of his career Vico was deeply engaged in the often-tumultuous life of his great city and that his experiences of civic crises shaped his inquiry into the origins and development of human society.

Barbara Ann Naddeo’s fine study of Vico’s social ideas, unlike virtually all other works, concentrates not just on speculation about his formal ideas but on the cultural context, showing that his book, New Science, moves beyond his earliest work by establishing that his social theories “constitute a discrete field of knowledge” that expands the western intellectual tradition.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2012 award presented in November 2013

Peter Brown

The 2013 recipient of the American Philosophical Society’s Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is Peter Brown in recognition of his book Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD, published by Princeton University Press in 2012.

Peter Brown’s magnificent new book crucially revises several long-held assumptions about the ending Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity in the West. The story of renunciation of riches epitomized in Christ’s evocation of the rich man whose entry into the kingdom of God will be harder than a camel’s passage through the eye of a needle is so central to the period that Brown says he is tempted to call it the Age of the Camel. But many rich men managed another passage. Instead of renouncing their riches, they gave them to the church, and thereby ‘altered the texture of Christianity itself’. Brown concentrates on the neglected ‘middling classes’ of the late Roman West, and on the ‘minor nobility’ of Rome and the provinces, who all played a larger part in the time’s changes than has been imagined. Through the theme of wealth - debated, renounced and above all deployed - and through studies of a series of distinctive figures - from Symmachus and Ambrose to Augustine, Paulinus of Nola and Jerome - Brown recreates two hundred crowded years of what he calls ‘a world before our world’ - long before it, but still firmly present in ‘many of our own views on wealth and poverty’.

Peter Brown, the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is credited with having created the field of study referred to as late antiquity (250-800 AD), the period during which Rome fell, the three major monotheistic religions took shape, and Christianity spread across Europe. A native of Ireland, Professor Brown earned his B.A. in history from Oxford University (1956), where he taught until 1975 as a Fellow of All Souls College. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1986 after teaching at the University of London and the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Brown’s primary interests are the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the rise of Christianity, and he has pursued them through investigations into such diverse topics as Roman rhetoric, the cult of the saints, the body and sexuality, and wealth and poverty. He is the author of more than a dozen books. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Michael Wood (chair), Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University.

2013 award presented in April 2015

Adelheid Voskuhl

The American Philosophical Society is pleased to award the 2014 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History to Adelheid Voskuhl in recognition of her book Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2013). The presentation of the award will take place on April 24 at the Society's 2015 Spring Meeting.

At the heart of Adelheid Voskuhl’s remarkable book are two musical androids created in the 18th century. Both are young women seated at keyboard instruments, the first at a harpsichord, which she plays with her own articulated fingers, the second at a dulcimer, which she taps with long hammers held in her small hands. The first player was made by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Droz in Switzerland; the second by David Roentgen and Peter Kinzing near Cologne, and supposedly represents Marie-Antoinette. The music, the geography and the queen’s name begin to suggest that much of the century’s history might be reflected in these figures and Dr Voskuhl, through detailed accounts of the fabrication and display of the androids, the cultural programs they and their mechanical peers furthered, the reflections of such figures in literature, and the long legacy of their ‘travel’ through time to the present day, shows how machines have allowed humans think practically and theoretically through constructions of sentiment and subjectivity. Dr Voskuhl persuasively argues that we should seek to understand the androids in their own age before importing them into ours, or projecting our anxieties into theirs. This understanding holds all kinds of interesting surprises for us, and Dr Voskuhl is sharply critical of authors who rush to find the uncanny where it is not. However, the book ends on a discreetly subversive psychological and philosophical suggestion, and perhaps the uncanny, properly examined, will be allowed its return after all. The large question her book raises, Dr Voskuhl says, may be ‘not only whether we are becoming more and more like machines, but also whether we can assume that stable and reliable selfhood is possible even in the absence of machines’.

Adelheid Voskuhl is currently an associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and chair of the Science, Technology and Society Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her position at the University of Pennsylvania she was a Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study and an associate professor in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. Her research field comprises the history of technology from the early modern to the modern period. Her broader interests include the philosophy of technology, the history of the Enlightenment, and modern European intellectual and cultural history. She received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University in 2007, and holds graduate degrees in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University and in Physics from Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Michael Wood (chair), Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University.

2014 award presented in November 2015

Joel Kaye

The American Philosophical Society's 2015 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History has been awarded to Joel Kaye, professor of history at Barnard College, in recognition of his book A History of Balance 1250-1375 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). The award presentation took place at the Society's Autumn General Meeting on November 13, 2015.

Joel Kaye's A History of Balance explores a peculiarly challenging subject: a large idea that seems to be everywhere but is not quite an idea. His title itself is a paradox or a sort of wager. How does one write the history of 'an unworded feeling' for how objects and spaces are or ought to be arranged, of an 'unworded sense' beneath the words that point to it or conceal it? The answer is simple but his practice is complex and subtle. He tracks the manifestations of the sense of balance through the thinking of a century and a quarter in four distinct areas: economics, medicine, political theory and natural philosophy. The contrasts among these areas are important but so are the confluences. Dr. Kaye finds in all of them an extraordinary range of new premises and assumptions: relation replaces hierarchy; mathematics moves its basis from arithmetic to geometry; estimation, approximation and probability become acceptable within the realm of knowledge; difference and diversity acquire a positive value. 'Each supports each', he says of his 'models of balance', 'each comes back to each'. This is how something that was 'never an idea' can belong so completely to the history of ideas.

The richness and care of Joel Kaye's attention to the work of, among others, Galen, Marsilius of Padua and Nicole Oreme are exemplary. Even when the alertness to balance in his sense begins to fade, when at the end of the fourteenth century 'the new model of equilibrium was imagined and evoked less and less by thinkers to explore the workings of either nature or society', he offers persuasive, interlocking explanations but proposes no final, single cause. He does suggest, though, that the 'retreat' of the model is 'as deep and wide-ranging' in its effects as its 'emergence' had been, and he invites us to think of parallel occasions in other times and places.

Joel Kaye joined the Barnard faculty in 1992. In addition to his teaching duties in the department of history, he is affiliated with Barnard's medieval and Renaissance studies program. His scholarly interests center on medieval intellectual history, with special interests in the history of science and the history of economic and political thought. His book Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, earned the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America.

The Barzun Prize selection committee consisted of Michael Wood (chair), Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Jeffrey Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture, Harvard University.