Dianne Sachko Macleod, Professor Emerita of 19th-Century, Modern & Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis, in recognition of her book Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 published by University of California Press. The book 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.
Barzun Prize Recipients
2007 award presented in November 2008
Thomas E. Burman, Lindsay Young Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, in recognition of his book Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 published by University of Pennsylvania Press. A learned and revisionist study of the knowledge of the Qur’an in the West in the later Middle Ages, Professor Burman’s book presents a hands-on picture of how Europeans read the sacred text of Islam. Through examinations of the Latin translations in early printed books, Burman finds that scholars of the period were immersed in a wide range of grammatical, lexical and interpretive problems presented by the text. He considers these subjects in the historical and comparative context of Christian-Muslim relations and cultures and modern Qur’anic scholarship. In so doing, he has broadened the way that medieval and Renaissance history of Muslim-Christian relations is understood.
2006 award presented in April 2007
Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, in recognition of his book Five Germanys I Have Known, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “We all seek traces of a tangible past,” Fritz Stern writes in Five Germanys I Have Known, “and we try to fill them with life.” This sentence describes the aspirations both of personal memory and of professional history, and in this incomparable book Stern brings them magisterially together. Because he is such a gifted and disciplined historian, his very memories acquire the quality of evidence, carefully weighed and sifted, never over-interpreted. And because the central thread of memories in the book is his own – from the destruction of the world of European Jewry to the reunification of Germany – history here takes on a discreetly compelling personal accent. When Stern tells us that “the German roads to perdition...were neither accidental nor inevitable,” and that he finally feels, returning as an honored son to his German birthplace now become a part of Poland, that he has been given back a part of his past, we know we are reading not only an elegant memoir and not only a distinguished work of history, but a unique evocation of a haunted and haunting culture, an intimate analysis of that enduring Germany that has so altered our world.
2005 award presented in April 2007
Jacob Soll, associate professor of history at Rutgers University, in recognition of his book Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism, University of Michigan Press. Jacob Soll follows the typographical fortunes and receptions of the French translation of Machiavelli's Prince and its various and changing meanings into the Enlightenment. In the course of his researches, especially on erudite textual criticism, he makes valuable contributions both to the history of reading as a social and political practice and as a modern medium of subversive as well as absolutist political thought.
2004 award presented in 2005
Bart Schultz, Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, in recognition of his book Henry Sidgwick - The Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press.
This book is a comprehensive study of the great Victorian moral philosopher, author of Methods of Ethics, and influential writer on many subjects (including religion, politics, education, psychology, and parapsychology), placed in his social circle and in the culture of pre-Bloomsbury England.
2003 award presented in 2004
Stéphane Gerson, assistant professor of French at the Institute of French Studies, New York University, in recognition of his book The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, Cornell University Press.
Working below the level of national "unity," Stéphane Gerson explores regional and village space and time in terms of local culture, employing historiography, archeology, cults, archives, monuments, museums, monographs, learned societies, popular celebrations, pageants, commemorations, committees, and other vehicles of social memory to open another and decentralized dimension of French identity and to recall multiple local pasts into modern national consciousness.
2002 award presented in 2003
Robert E. Norton, professor and chair of German and Russian Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, in recognition of his book Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle, Cornell University Press.
This book is a comprehensive and original study of the most influential, perhaps greatest, and in recent times most unappreciated poet of twentieth-century Germany. George was an ambivalent prophet and symbol of the true, "secret," and "sacred" Germany underlying modern bourgeois corruption. He "loved art as power," and he aspired indeed to turn poetry into reality in his imagined domain. He was a major presence as an author but even more as an arachnoid "master" and Führer of many poets, philosophers, artists, and historians of the Weimar Republic and, though his hubris kept him from participating in fascist politics before his death in 1933, as a cultural harbinger of the Third Reich.
2001 award, presented in 2002
Jonathan Rose, Professor of History, Drew University, and founder and past president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), for The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press
This work, which goes beyond old-fashioned intellectual history, offers a rich and innovative study of the "history of audiences," based on an impressive array of neglected sources (memoirs, oral history, social surveys, school records, and newspapers). Showing the reading choices and practices of workers from the pre-industrial age to the twentieth century, Rose concludes that, between the rise and the decline of the "autodidact tradition," working-class knowledge of politics, science, history, philosophy, literature, and sexuality was much higher and more sophisticated than previously assumed and that this unsuspected level of cultural literacy forces revision of the traditional view of English social and cultural history.
2000 award, shared; presented in 2001
Peter N. Miller, Professor of Cultural History, Bard Graduate Center, for
Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century, Yale University Press
The author explores the correspondence of the renowned French scholar, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, illuminating the learning and cultural values of the seventeenth-century world of letters.
and to
Ronald D. Witt, Professor of History, Professor of History, Duke University, for In the Footsteps of the Ancients: the Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Brill Press
The author revisits the problem of the origins of Italian humanism, greatly expanding the range of interpretations and giving attention to the later significance of Renaissance humanism.
1999 award, presented in 2000
J.G.A. Pocock, Professor of History Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, for Barbarism and Religion, 2 vols., Cambridge University Press
In the first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, the author distinguishes between the British, Swiss and French Enlightenments, and traces their influence on Gibbon's interpretation of the Christian millennium. In the second volume, Narratives of Civil Government, he compares Gibbon to other historians of his age, and follows Gibbon's narrative of the Roman empire, shaped by the forces of barbarism and religion.
