ΦBK Book Award Winners
The Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards are given each year in December for outstanding scholarly works published in the United States. The winning books, drawn from the fields of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics, must be of broad interest and accessible to the general reader.
These awards support the general mission of the Society to advocate for excellence in the liberal arts and sciences and to promote dialogue about important issues and ideas of our time in an environment of intellectual fellowship.
This year’s award recipients are Leor Halevi of Vanderbilt University, Peter Brooks of Yale University and Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago. The Society presented the awards on December 5 at the Williamsburg Lodge in Colonial Williamsburg at a formal dinner held in their honor.
Donald Lamm, former chairman of the board of W. W. Norton, was the keynote speaker at the 2008 awards dinner.
Members of the Fellows of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Secretary's Circle joined the Phi Beta Kappa Senate at this event.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON AWARD — $10,000 Prize
Leor Halevi received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia University Press, 2007). This award was established in 1960 for significant contributions to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. Leor Halevi is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University. His work has won numerous distinctions, including fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
CHRISTIAN GAUSS AWARD — $10,000 Prize
Peter Brooks received the Christian Gauss Award for Henry James Goes to Paris (Princeton University Press, 2007). This award, given for books in the field of literary scholarship and criticism, was created in 1950 to honor a former Phi Beta Kappa president and distinguished scholar at Princeton University. Peter Brooks recently joined the Princeton faculty after many decades of teaching at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature.
SCIENCE BOOK AWARD — $10,000 Prize
Neil Shubin received the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science for Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon Books, 2008). This award is offered for outstanding contributions by scientists to the literature of science. Its purpose is to encourage literate and scholarly interpretations of the physical and biological sciences and mathematics. Neil Shubin is provost of The Field Museum as well as a professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as an associate dean.
Previous ΦBK book award winners have included Marjorie Garber, Harold Bloom, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Robert Coles, Richard Hofstadter, Jared Diamond, Edward O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould and Linus Pauling, among others.
For more about the awards, please contact the Society at (202) 745-3235 or write to awards@pbk.org.