Image by Nicole Marie Photography, via gloryliu.com
The American Philosophical Society has named Glory M. Liu the 2025 recipient of the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities. The prize recognizes Liu’s paper “Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism,” first presented at the APS April 2023 Meeting and published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 165.
The Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities, established in 1982 by a gift from the widow of Henry Allen Moe, honors a distinguished essay or paper read at a Meeting of the Society that makes a notable contribution to humanistic scholarship or jurisprudence. The award recognizes intellectual rigor, originality, and the capacity of scholarship to illuminate enduring questions about culture, ideas, and society. The APS awards the Moe Prize annually to an author whose work demonstrates exceptional scholarship and whose findings advance public understanding of the humanities.
Glory M. Liu is a Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Liu’s paper is based on her first book, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism, published by Princeton University Press in 2022. In both the article and the book, Liu traces the transatlantic afterlife of Adam Smith, showing how Smith’s ideas were adapted, reframed, and popularized in the United States to support distinct visions of economic life and civic identity. Her work combines careful archival research with theoretical sensitivity to intellectual transmission and reception, offering a richly documented account of how a European thinker came to occupy a central place in American economic thought and national self-understanding.
Liu will accept the 2025 Henry Allen Moe Prize in Philadelphia at the Society’s April Members Meeting on April 23.