FACULTY

RECENT FACULTY AWARDS

2020

• Mae Ngai was awarded the Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship for 2020-2021.
• Madeleine Zelin received a 2019-2020 Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.
• Adam Kosto was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
• Rhiannon Stephens was a recipient of a Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

2019

• Zeynep Çelik received the Tamayouz Excellence Award and the Giorgio Levi Della Vida Award for Excellence in Islamic Studies. 
• Ira Katznelson and Mark Mazower were elected Corresponding Fellows at The British Academy. Professor Katznelson was also elected to an Honorary Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
• Natasha Lightfoot was awarded a 2019-20 Endangered Archives Programme Grant by the British Library, for planned work to digitize papers at the Antigua & Barbuda National Archives. The grant helps preserve records in underfunded archives that are in danger of being lost to natural elements, building disrepair and other threats.
• Alice Kessler-Harris was elected president of the Society of American Historians.
• Mark Mazower received an honorary doctorate from Catholic University Leuven.
• Charly Coleman was awarded a 2019 Lenfest Junior Faculty Development grant.
• Stephanie McCurry was awarded a Humanities War and Peace Initiative Grant. The grant was sponsored by Columbia’s Humanities War and Peace Initiative (through the Division of Humanities in the Arts and Sciences).
• David Rothman was awarded an article prize from the ABIM Foundation for “Bringing Transparency to Medicine: Exploring Physicians’ Views and Experiences of the Sunshine Act.”
• Andrew Delbanco and Frank Guridy won the Lionel Trilling Book Award and Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching, respectively. For details from the Academic Awards Committee of Columbia College, please see this link.
• Richard R. John was awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in U.S. History.
• Andrew Delbanco received the 2019 Mark Lynton History Prize and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The War Before The War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War.
• Adam Tooze received the 29th annual Lionel Gelber Prize for Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed The World.
• Simon Schama was awarded a knighthood for “services to History” at Buckingham Palace.
• Adam Tooze was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2019.
• Pablo Piccato’s A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth and Justice in Mexico received the María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History for “the book or article judged to be the most significant work on the history of Mexico published during the previous year.” The prize is given by The Conference on Latin American History. The book also received an honorable mention for the Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize from the New England Council of Latin American Studies.
• Rashid Khalidi received the Arab Jewish Partnership for Peace and Justice in the Middle East award.

2018

• Malgorzata Mazurek was awarded a fall 2018 Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant for her project “Structuring the World: the Science of Interconnectedness from Natural History to Social Statistics, 1780s – 1930s.”
• A. Tunç Şen was awarded the Middle East Medievalists’ (MEM) inaugural prize for Best PhD Dissertation on the Medieval Middle East. For more information, please visit this link. He was also awarded an article prize for “Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court: Bāyezīd II (r. 886/1481-918/1512) and His Celestial Interests” by Comité International des Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes.
• Rashid Khalidi received the WOCMES Seville 2018 Award for “Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies.”
• Merlin Chowkwanyun and David Rosner received a National Science Foundation grant to support their research infrastructure project, ToxicDocs.
• Pamela Smith was given the 2017-2018 Columbia University Faculty Mentoring Award by the Graduate Student Advisory Council. This award is a student initiative instituted in 2004 to commemorate excellence in the mentoring of Ph.D. and Masters (MA) students. Selections were made entirely by graduate student representatives from GSAS and affiliated schools based on student nomination letters spanning all disciplines.
• Neslihan Şenocak and Marc Van De Mieroop received 2018 Lenfest Awards.
• David Rosner was given the 2018 Rachel Carson Award.
• Stephanie McCurry was awarded a Senior Faculty Heyman Fellowship for 2019-20.
• Hannah Farber was awarded a 2018 Lenfest Junior Faculty Development grant.
• Charly Coleman and Hannah Farber were awarded Junior Faculty Heyman Fellowships for 2019-2020.
• Karl Jacoby was elected to the Society of American Historians. He also became a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
• Marwa Elshakry was awarded a Stavros Niarchos Foundation grant for her Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory at Sea project.
  

  2017

• Susan Pedersen and Charly Coleman were awarded President’s Global Innovation Fund Faculty Grants for “Enhancing the Research Component of the Columbia/Barnard/GS History Major.”
• Karl Jacoby’s book The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire won the 2017 Wheatley Book Award for Nonfiction.
• Malgorzata Maurek was awarded a Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant.
• Mae Ngai was awarded a fellowship from the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for Spring 2018.
• Caterina Pizzigoni was awarded the 56th annual Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching.
• David Rosner won the award “For Outstanding Scholarship on the History of Work and Health” from the International Commission of Occupational Health.
• Eugenia Lean was awarded an Institute for Advanced Study fellowship.
• Manan Ahmed, Alexandre Roberts, and Rhiannon Stephens were awarded the Fall 2016 Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Grant.
• Matthew Jones was awarded a 2017-18 Data & Society Fellowship from the Data & Society Research Institute.
• Mae Ngai was appointed Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of North America at the Library of Congress for Fall 2017.
• Karl Jacoby’s book, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Millionaire was awarded the Organization of American Historian’s Billington Prize in Frontier and Borderlines History.
• Joel Kaye was awarded the 2017 Haskins Medal for his book A History of Balance, 1250-1375. The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and its Impact on Thought. The Haskins Medal is awarded by the Medieval Academyof America for distinguished publication in the field of medieval studies.
• Manan Ahmed‘s book, A Book of Conquest, was reviewed in the Wire and nominated for the Karachi Literature Festival Non-Fiction Book Prize.
• Manan Ahmed was awared an ISERP Start-Up Center Award in “Data Ethics.”
• David Rosner has been named Mentor of the Year by the Mailman School of Public Health for his work with junior faculty at the School.
• Susan Pedersen‘s book The Guardians received an honorable mention by the Nanovic Institute Awards.

2016

• The Making and Knowing Project, directed by Pamela Smith, was awarded a two-year fellowship by the Gerda Henkel Foundation for postdoctoral research in French archives.
• Gergely Baics‘s book Feeding Gotham was selected as one of the “Best Books of 2016” by The Financial Times.
• Eric Foner and Kenneth Jackson were awarded the 2016 Alexander Hamilton Medal.
• Alice Kessler-Harris will be awarded the AHA’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.
• Rebecca Kobrin received the Ella Darivoff Fellowship from the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Pamela Smith and her collaborator Marc Smith, Professeur de paléographie médiévale et moderne, École nationale des chartes, have been awarded a three-year NEH grant for “Craft Techniques and Knowledge Systems in a 16th-Century Artist’s Manuscript: An Open-Access Critical Edition and Translation.”  Part of The Making and Knowing Project directed by Pamela Smith, the NEH funds will support the design and development of the digital environment for the open-access critical edition and translation of a 16th-century manuscript of an artist’s recipe compilation for painting and metalworking techniques and observations on scientific processes.
• Martha Howell has been invited as a distinguished fellow in residence at the Huntington Library, California, for the academic year 2017-18.
• Columbia University’s Center for Korean Research has been awarded a 5-year Academy of Korean Studies “Core University for Korean Studies” Grant. Charles Armstrong will serve as Project Director.
• Charly Coleman‘s book, The Virtues of Abandon,has been awarded the 2014-15 Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies.
• Eric Foner was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa from Princeton University.
• Susan Pedersen was newly elected to the Academy of Arts & Sciences.
• Alice Kessler-Harris was awarded the 2016 Sol Stetin Award for Labor History by the Sydney Hillman Foundation.
• Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History, became President of the Renaissance Society of America (www.rsa.org), the largest international learned society devoted to the study of the era 1300-1700 with over 5000 members from a wide variety of disciplines.
• Christopher Brown was awarded a 2015-16 Columbia University Faculty Mentoring Award. The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC) instituted this award in 2004 to commemorate excellence in the mentoring of Ph.D. students. This award is a student initiative; selections were made entirely by graduate student representatives from GSAS and affiliated schools based on student nomination letters spanning across all disciplines.
• Susan Pedersen was awarded the 41st annual Lionel Trilling Book Award for her recent book, The Guardians.
• Marc Van De Mieroop was awarded a grant from the ACLS Fellowship Program 2016.
• Hilary Hallett was awarded a fellowship at the NYPL‘s Cullman Center.
• Madeleine Zelin was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Society for Chinese Law and History.
• Carl Wennerlind was awarded a fellowship from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University, 2016-17.
• Gregory Mann, Susan Pedersen, and Seth Schwartz were awarded Choice‘s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2015. 

2015

• Natasha Lightfoot and Manan Ahmed were selected as awardees for the Lenfest Junior Faculty Development Awards, Spring 2016.
• Eric Foner was honored with the Everyday Freedom Hero award by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. 
• Pamela Smith and Frédéric Brechenmacher received an Alliance Joint Project Grant for their project “Objects and Archives in Science, Technology, and Society Studies: Promoting Research and Innovative Teaching Co-initiatives.”
• Karen Barkey was awarded Alliance Joint Project Grant for “Negotiating Pluralism in Shared Religious Sites.”
• Mae Ngai was named a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar for the 2015-2016 academic year.
• CBC News and Maclean’s covered Susan Pedersen‘s 2015 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature win for her book The Guardians.
• The American Philosophical Society awarded Joel Kaye the 2015 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for his book A History of Balance, 1250-1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought. The annual Barzun Prize is open to books centered in all time periods and all disciplines that touch on the history of culture, broadly conceived.
• Susan Pedersen was awarded the Cundill Prize for her book The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire.
• Congratulations to the following social science faculty, inagural recipients of the Heyman Center Fellowships: Manan Ahmed, Tarik Amar, Hilary Hallett, Natasha Lightfoot, and Rhiannon Stephens.
• Abosede George‘s book, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos, was awarded the 2015 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize by the African Studies Association.
• Martha Howell has been elected as foreign member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (RFABSA).
• Adam Tooze‘s The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, is a Kirkus Prize Finalist.
• Susan Pedersen‘s book, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, was shortlisted for the 2015 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature.
• Professor Emeritus Herbert S. Klein is the 2015 recipient of the Conference on Latin American History’s Distinguished Service Award.
• Mark Mazower received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Athens.
• Rebecca Kobrin received a Provost’s Grant for Junior Faculty Who Contribute to the Diversity Goals of the University. Her project is on the “Voices of the New Russian-Jewish Diaspora.”
• Karl Jacoby‘s French translation of his book Shadows at Dawn was awarded the Grand Prix des Rendez-Vous De L’Histoire in France. Shadows at Dawn is the first book in translation to win this award.
• Mae Ngai was awarded the President’s Global Innovation Fund grant for a project on “Colonization and Decolonialization in the Making of the Modern World: An Intensive Summer Course Taught in Rio de Janeiro and New Delhi.”
• Matthew Connelly was awarded a grant from the Provost Hybrid Learning Course Redesign and Delivery Request for Proposals for a course on “International and Global History Since World War II.”
• Mae Ngai was selected as a Visiting Scholar for 2015-2016 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
• Susan Pedersen and Pamela Smith received the President’s Global Innovation Fund grant for the Enhancing the Research Component of the History Major.
• Ira Katznelson was awarded the 2015 John Jay Award.
• Marwa Elshakry was awarded the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950.The prize is awarded annually by the Journal of the History of Ideas for the best first book in intellectual history.
• Rebecca Kobrin is a recipient of the 2015 Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. The award was created in 2005 by Columbia Trustee Emeritus, Gerry Lenfest, (LAW’58, HON’09), to honor exceptional faculty in the Arts and Sciences. The awards are given annually to recognize unusual merit across a range of activities including scholarship, University citizenship, and professional involvement, with primary emphasis on teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.
• Neslihan Senocak was named a Fellow of the National Humanities Center for 2015-16.