Jimmy Wales Accepting the Dan David Price

The Dan David Prize is a major international award that recognizes and supports outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past. It awards nine prizes of $300,000 each year to outstanding early- and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The Prize has an annual purse of $3 million, making it the largest history award in the world, with the remaining $300,000 funding an international postdoctoral fellowship program at Tel Aviv University, where the Prize is headquartered. The Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation. Until 2021 the Prize awarded 3 annual prizes of $1 million for innovative and interdisciplinary research in three time dimensions: Past, Present and Future. Prize laureates donated 10 percent of their prize money to doctoral scholarships for outstanding Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholarships in their own field from around the world. In September 2021, the Dan David Prize announced that it would shift its focus to support the work of historians, art historians, archaeologists, digital humanists, curators, documentary filmmakers and all those who deepen our knowledge and understanding of the past.

History

The Dan David Foundation was founded in 2000 with a $100 million endowment by

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...

n-born Israeli businessman and philanthropist Dan David. Laureates include cellist

Yo-Yo Ma Yo-Yo Ma ('' Chinese'': 馬友友 ''Ma Yo Yo''; born October 7, 1955) is an American cellist. Born in Paris to Chinese parents and educated in New York City, he was a child prodigy, performing from the age of four and a half. He graduated from ...

(2006), Israeli author

Amos Oz Amos Oz ( he, עמוס עוז; born Amos Klausner; 4 May 1939 – 28 December 2018) was an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, and intellectual. He was also a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. From 1967 onw ...

(2008), U.S. Vice President

Al Gore Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician, businessman, and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was the Democratic ...

(2008), Canadian author

Margaret Atwood Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, ...

(2010), French economist

Esther Duflo Esther Duflo, FBA (; born 25 October 1972) is a French–American economist who is a professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abd ...

, and immunologist Dr.

Anthony Fauci Anthony Stephen Fauci (; born December 24, 1940) is an American physician-scientist and immunologist serving as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to the preside ...

(2021). In 2016,

Catherine Hall Catherine Hall (born 1946) is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of Briti ...

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

rejected the Dan David Prize. Her prize money was donated to fund scholarships at Tel Aviv University.

Transition to the new prize

The Dan David Prize was founded with the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. Each year, three prizes of $1 million were awarded in rotating fields to those who made outstanding contributions to humanity. In anticipation of the Prize’s 20th anniversary in 2021, the Dan David Prize set out in a new direction, citing the decline of global investment in the humanities and the relative scarcity of major prizes in the humanities. The redesigned prize focuses on supporting outstanding research in the historical disciplines and celebrating scholars and practitioners whose work illuminates the human past and enriches public debate with a deeper understanding of history. The Prize announced that starting in 2022 it would award up to nine prizes of $300,000 each year to early- and mid-career scholars and practitioners around the world to recognize significant achievements in the study of the past and support the winners’ future endeavours. From 2022, there will no longer be a distinction between three prize categories.

Winners (from 2022)

From 2022 recipients of the Prize were called winners rather than laureates. The first cohort of Prize winners was announced on March 1st, 2022.

Laureates (2002-2021)

References

External links