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.

Continental Divide is a study of the 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.

For more on the Jacques Barzun prize, visit the American Philosophical Society’s website.

*Photo credit: American Philosophical Society.

Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History, Michael McCormick as well as Dean of Radcliffe Institute and Howard Mumford Jones Professor American Studies, Lizabeth Cohen, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the American Academy is a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and education.

Recently, Professor McCormick has been continuing his quest to bring climate science into the realm of historical research by studying climate data and historical accounts after the fall of the Roman Empire for a forthcoming article.

Professor Cohen has been appointed Dean of Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study after serving as Interim Dean for the academic year 2011-2012.

For more on the Academy and a list of the 14 Harvard scholars elected this year, visit the Harvard Gazette.

James Hankins, professor of history and general editor for I Tatti Renaissance Library at Harvard, has been awarded the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America. He is the the youngest recipient of the award, which has previously gone to two other Harvard professors, James S. Ackerman in 1998 and Lewis Lockwood in 2008.  Harvard PhDs who have won the award are F. Edward Cranz and John W. O’Malley.

For more information on the award and past winners, please visit the Renaissance Society of America’s website.

Lizabeth Cohen, Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study since last July, has recently been named dean by Harvard President Drew Faust.

“Liz Cohen is a distinguished and imaginative scholar with a deep knowledge of Radcliffe and Harvard and a strong dedication to Radcliffe’s pursuit of new ideas and collaborations across the academic disciplines, the professions, and the creative arts,” said Faust in announcing the appointment. “She is an experienced academic leader with a talent for nurturing creativity and spurring cooperative effort, and as interim dean she has already strengthened Radcliffe’s ties to people and programs across Harvard and beyond. Her wide span of intellectual interests, her spirited curiosity, and her incisive intelligence promise to serve the institute well.”

“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to lead the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to further success in its mission to create and disseminate bold new thinking in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts,” said Cohen. “In my eight months as interim dean, I have learned how much the institute has to offer — advancing the research of Harvard faculty and students, providing intellectual invigoration to our interdisciplinary fellows, sustaining the world’s preeminent research library on the history of women, and pursuing programs to share this wealth of new knowledge with wider audiences close to home and increasingly around the world.”

Read the full story in the Harvard Gazette.

*Photo credit: Tony Rinaldo, Harvard Gazette

Professor Maya Jasanoff has won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction for her work “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World”. The National Book Critics Circle awards honor the best literature published in English in six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Read the Harvard Gazette story.

Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library, has been awarded a National Humanities Medial. This award honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.

For the full list of winners and more information about the award, visit the National Endowment for the Humanities website.

Joshua Hill has won the Harold K. Gross Dissertation Prize for Best History Department Dissertation for his project “Voting as a Rite: Changing Ideas of Elections in Early Twentieth Century China”. He is currently a lecturer at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University where he has taught a graduate-level survey of Modern Chinese history in addition to coordinating “Topics in Chinese Foreign Policy,” a credit-bearing series of guest lectures for graduate students.

Niall Ferguson is a little concerned these days.

The feeling started years ago, during one of his stints leading a course in Western civilization. “Each time I taught it, I felt I was getting closer to an original answer to the question, ‘Why did the West dominate the rest?’ plus the subordinate question, ‘Is it over?’ ”

Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, believes we are witnessing the end of the predominance of the West — “Europe and North America, broadly,” he says — relative to countries like China, India, and Brazil. Much of the rest of the world has not only caught up with Western achievements; according to Ferguson, the West also has lost faith in its own civilization because of the widespread perception that its success was almost exclusively the result of violence and imperialism.

So his latest book, “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” was mostly produced amid a mood of uneasiness, he admits. “I was worried that the West was losing sight of what made it so successful, and perhaps losing those advantages that had previously been so important.”

In “Civilization,” Ferguson dubs these Western advantages his six “killer apps,” which are competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic. “The prescription must be to reinstall and update these apps, to take these six things and make sure we’re doing them as well as we can,” he argues.

“I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how healthy these things are in the West, and the answer is not very. While I was writing the book I also realized that what other fallen civilizations had in common was the speed with which their downfall happened. Things don’t always happen gradually in history; sometimes they fall apart quite fast. So there’s a certain urgency in my argument. If you don’t watch out, things can go wrong very rapidly. By the way, I think that’s what’s happened in Europe. The financial crisis has gone from bad to worse in the span of a year.”

Read the full Harvard Gazette article.

*Photo credit: Jon Chase, Harvard Staff Photographer

Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History and Director of the Harvard Center for History and Economics, has been awarded the Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year Award for her book The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History.

The Saltire Society was founded in 1936 to encourage everything that might improve the quality of life in Scotland and restore the country to its proper place as a creative force in Europe.  It seeks to preserve all that is best in Scottish tradition and to encourage new developments which can strengthen and enrich the country’s cultural life.  It has wide ranging interests including architecture, arts and crafts, civil engineering, history, literature, music and science - and promotes excellence in many fields through a series of national awards.

For more on the Society, visit their website.

Organization and award information retrieved from the Saltire Society on 5 December, 2011. www.saltiresociety.org.uk

The 2012 Rhodes Scholars from Harvard include Brett Rosenberg (from left), Sam Galler, Victor Yang, and Spencer Lenfield. The Harvard seniors will attend Oxford University next fall.

BRETT ROSENBERG

“The opportunity study at Oxford is just incredible, and really overwhelming right now,” said Rosenberg. “One reason I came to Harvard is because there are unparalleled opportunities here, not only in academics, but in everything you do here.

“I spend a lot of my time now singing with a choir dedicated to black creativity and spirituality,” she continued. “We’ve sung for Ted Kennedy. We sang with Bobby McFerrin. There are things that happen at Harvard that just wouldn’t happen anywhere else.”

In her time at Harvard, Rosenberg has served as a research assistant to noted Professor Niall Ferguson at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, written for Harvard Magazine and the New York Times, and launched her own satirical blog, “Notes from a Mockracker.”

The Cabot House resident and history concentrator is hoping to pursue international relations while at Oxford, a continuation of her current work examining the Cold War. As part of her thesis, Rosenberg is examining a 1956 study commissioned by political leader and philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller that gathered 108 intellectual luminaries in an effort to diagnose the big problems facing the country over the following 10 to 15 years, and the broad national goals that should be adopted to remedy them.

Rosenberg also offered thanks to the staff of Cabot House, who supported her throughout the months-long Rhodes process.

“Cabot House has been incredible,” she said. “They assigned me a fellowships tutor, Tarun, who is my new hero. They have been behind me every step of the way, helping read over drafts of my proposal, calming me down when I got really anxious about it. They even organized a mock interview for me. I can’t say enough nice things about Cabot and the people there.”

Read the about the other three winners in the Harvard Gazette.

*Photos by Jon Chase, Rose Lincoln, Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographers