The 2023 winners of the Dan David Prize, the world's largest history prize, have been announced.
The 2023 winners of the Dan David Prize, the largest history prize in the world, were announced on February 28. Among this year’s recipients are four scholars working at American universities. Each of the winners - nine early and mid-career scholars and practitioners working in Kenya, Ireland, Denmark, Israel, Canada and the United States - will receive $300,000 to recognize their achievements and support their future work.
"Our winners represent a new generation of historians," said Ariel David, board member of the Prize and the son of its founder. "They are changing our understanding of the past by asking new questions, targeting under-researched topics and using innovative methods. Many of the winners we are recognizing today are still in the early stages of their careers, but they have already challenged how we think about history. Understanding the past, in all its complexity, is critical to illuminating the present and confronting the challenges of the future."
The 2023 Dan David Prize winners working in America included:
Saheed Aderinto, Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. Aderinto is a historian who studies colonial identity and subjecthood in modern Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria.
He is the author of several books including When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order (Indiana University Press, January 2018), and Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio University Press, 2022).
Aderinto received his BA in History from the University of Ibadan and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
Adam Clulow, Professor of History, University of Texas, Austin. Clulow’s work has reassessed the early modern encounter between Europe and Asia. A pioneer in using historical video games, digital Public History magazines and VR to make history more accessible, he has received numerous teaching prizes for outstanding contributions to student learning.
Clulow is the creator of the Amboyna conspiracy trial, an interactive Digital Humanities project focused on a famous seventeenth century case that took place in what is now Indonesia. He was awarded the Jerry Bentley Book Prize for World History by the American Historical Association for his book The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia University Press, 2014). He is also the author of Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Clulow earned his BA from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban, South Africa, and his PhD from Columbia University in New York City.
Krista Goff, Associate Professor of History, University of Miami. Goff’s work has examined asymmetries of power and processes of belonging and exclusion in the Soviet Union. She is the co-editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and co-director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Think Tank, a national program based at Howard University.
Goff coedited the book Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands (Cornell University Press, 2019) and is the author of the award-winning book Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2021).
Goff received her BA from Macalester College, her MA from Brown University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Chancellor's Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley. Jones-Rogers specializes in African-American history, women’s and gender history, and the history of American slavery.
She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South,( Yale University Press, 2019), which has won a number of prizes, including the Harriet Tubman Prize from the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women’s Historians, the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Award, the Best Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
She is currently working on her second book, Women of the Trade, which explores the histories of English, African, and Afro-English women in the Atlantic slave trade.
Jones-Rogers earned her BA, MA and PhD from Rutgers University.
The other winners (with brief biographies) this year were:
Ana Antic, University of Copenhagen;
Karma Ben Johanan, Hebrew University;
Elise Burton, University of Toronto;
Anita Radini, University College, Dublin; and
Chao Tayiana Maina, a public historian based in Kenya.
The Dan David Prize
The Dan David Prize was established in 2001 through a foundation endowed by Dan David, a Romanian-born entrepreneur and philanthropist. Initially, the prize recognized “outstanding contributions to humanity" with a $1 million award each for three winners. In 2021, the award shifted its focus to recognizing an array of historical scholars in the developing stages of their careers who might otherwise lack the resources to expand their research.
