Nine Historians and Archaeologists Receive $300,000 (USD) Each as the Dan David Prize Marks Five Years of Honoring Innovative Research on the Human Past
Scholarship spans from intercommunal violence in the Balkans to ancient road networks in Peru, from music in medieval cathedrals to the origins of modern theme parks
TEL AVIV, Israel, June 17, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Dan David Prize, the largest history prize in the world, today announced its 2026 winners. The nine winners, whose work explores the human past through outstanding research, will each receive $300,000 (USD) in recognition of their achievements and to support their future endeavors. The winners, all in early and mid stages of their careers, are historians and archaeologists whose research spans the Americas, East Asia, Europe and even how events in outer space have impacted human history.
This year marks five years since the Prize was relaunched to focus on historical research and practice. With the addition of the 2026 cohort, the Dan David Prize has recognized 45 scholars and practitioners across six continents, awarding more than $13.5 million (USD) to support groundbreaking historical work.
Following an open nomination process, the winners were selected by an international committee of experts. This year’s selection committee members work at leading academic institutions including Oxford University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Sciences Po in Paris.
“Five years ago, we relaunched this Prize with a conviction that supporting historians at pivotal moments in their careers could make a lasting difference,” said Ariel David, board member of the Prize and son of Dan David, the founder of the Prize. “The results have exceeded our expectations. Our past winners are using their awards to acquire critical research tools, produce films, and build community programs that bring history to life for new audiences. This year’s winners continue that tradition. Their work spans from the Balkans to Peru, from medieval cathedrals to modern theme parks. They challenge us to see the past, and our present, in a new light.”
The 2026 Dan David Prize winners are:
- Max Bergholz, Concordia University, Montreal – A historian of modern Europe who studies the dynamics of intercommunal violence, nationalism, and historical memory, primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. His first book, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016) is a microhistory that explains how the once peaceful multiethnic community in Kulen Vakuf descended in 1941 into horrific violence that led to the deaths of more than 2000 people. He is currently writing a book entitled Our Truths: Violence and the Challenge of a Common Humanity, which investigates how three distinct governments and their local supporters in the Croatian town of Glina have attempted, between 1945 and the present day, to grapple with aspects of that town’s violent past during 1941.
- Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine – An art historian whose research spans from the art and culture of the Byzantine empire to modern popular culture. His earlier work on Byzantium explored the premodern history of race, queerness, and trans identities. In his most recent book, Disneyland and the Rise of Automation (Princeton University Press, 2026), Betancourt looks at how the modern amusement park aestheticized the automation of industry in the second half of the 20th century, acclimating people to its systems and practices.
- Matthew Champion, University of Melbourne – A historian of medieval and early modern societies, whose work focuses on how people experienced, perceived, and structured time. His work stresses the need for nuanced local, global, comparative, emotional, material, and sensory histories of temporalities, with a particular emphasis on how images, objects, sounds, and music can enrich our understanding of past societies. His book The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries (University of Chicago Press, 2017), asks how the passage of time in the 15th-century Low Countries was ordered by the rhythms of human action, from the musical life of a cathedral to the measurement of time by clocks and calendars, from the work habits of a guildsman to the devotional practices of the laity and religious orders.
- Howard Chiang, University of California, Santa Barbara – A historian of modern East Asian thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the critical study of science, medicine, race, gender, and sexuality. Chiang is among the pioneers of the field of Sinophone studies, which reconceives regions such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Asian America, where the category of “Chinese” fails to capture the complexity and diversity of cultural expression. Chiang’s first book, After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018), analyzes the history of sex change in China, while his second book, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021), proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance.
- Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown University – An environmental historian who combines the methods and evidence of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences in his work. His scholarship is focused on understanding how environmental change, on Earth and beyond, has shaped human history, and on translating those insights into forms that matter for scholarship, policy, and public life. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age (Cambridge University Press, 2018), detailed how the Dutch Republic adapted to climate change during the “Little Ice Age” allowing it to enter a “golden age” at a time when other societies were suffering. His new book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System (Harvard University Press, 2025), argues that real and perceived changes in these environments shaped human history in previously untold ways.
- Andrew Lipman, Barnard College, Columbia University – A historian of early modern North America and the British Atlantic, whose work explores how Native peoples participated in the creation of a connected oceanic world, with a focus on the American Northeast. His first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale, 2015), argued that the Puritan project in New England was always intertwined with the power politics of their Indigenous neighbors and those of their Dutch competitors, and that coastal Native peoples’ maritime culture was key to their survival after the invasion of their homelands. His second book, Squanto: A Native Odyssey (Yale, 2024), is the first book-length study of Squanto or Tisquantum, a Native interpreter who aided early settlers and whose actions are part of the popular mythology behind American Thanksgiving.
- Giancarlo Marcone, Universidad de Ingenieria y Tecnologia – UTEC– An archaeologist whose research focuses on human settlements and long-term occupation patterns along the central coast of Peru. He explores late pre-Hispanic interactions between political and domestic economies, examining how multiethnic intermediate groups navigated diversity and climate change during the Inca expansion. He has also researched the continuity and transformation of infrastructure, particularly how the Inca road system has influenced modern roads as a result of historical and ongoing negotiations with local communities. In addition to his scholarly work, Marcone is engaged in heritage work, promoting participatory heritage management among non-Indigenous but marginalized communities in the region.
- Verena Meier, University of Heidelberg and the Technical University of Berlin – A historian of modern Germany and Europe whose research focuses on the genocide of Sinti and Roma during Nazism, investigating the long history of antigypsyism in 19th-20th century Germany as well as its postwar legacy. Her work explores how institutions of power – ranging from the police and the church to transnational networks of intellectuals – translate visions of social order into practice, and how these processes shape inclusion, exclusion, and the boundaries of belonging in modern societies. In 2017, she was commissioned by the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma to author a report on “Protestantism and Antigypsyism,” which provided a foundation for academic and civic discussions on churches’ historical responsibilities and their role in the discrimination and persecution of Sinti and Roma from the period of Martin Luther’s reformation until today.
- R. Isabela Morales – A public historian and scholar of slavery and emancipation in the United States, whose work centers individual, local, and family stories as a window into the larger landscape of race and slavery in 19th-century America. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2022), reconstructs the history of the Townsend family, the descendants of white planter Samuel Townsend who, upon his death, left almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves. The book was awarded the 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. In addition to her academic work, Morales has produced special exhibitions, oral history projects, and award-winning public programs for museums and universities in New York, New Jersey, and beyond, most recently at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum.
Since the Prize’s relaunch in 2021, the $300,000 awards have enabled winners to pursue ambitious new projects and bring historical scholarship to wider audiences. As the Prize marks its fifth year, past winners illustrate the transformative impact of the award. Anita Radini, an assistant professor of archaeology at University College Dublin, used her award to acquire a specialized microscope to enable new research into past environments and develop an outreach kit to help children better understand the natural world. Kim Welch, a professor at Vanderbilt University whose research reconstructs the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent, said the Prize gave her “the space, time, and resources necessary to be ambitious” and track historical lives across time and space. Saheed Aderinto, a professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at Florida International University, used his award to pursue documentary filmmaking, funding extensive research in Nigeria and Europe, as well as enabling other African scholars to develop their own filmmaking skills. “Winning the prize enabled me to produce the films I want and tell stories on my own terms,” he said.
“At a time when research in the humanities is threatened by political intervention as well as ongoing funding cuts, the prize allows winners the freedom to engage in unencumbered research and continue to provide sophisticated and nuanced insights into the human past,” said Professor Tim Cole, historian and Academic Advisor to the Dan David Prize. “This year’s nine winners join a growing community of scholars whose collective work enriches the tapestry of historical scholarship with new threads of research and creative reimaginings of familiar historical landscapes.”
The 2026 winners recently received the Prize at a gathering in Italy. Nominations for the 2027 Dan David Prize are now being accepted at www.dandavidprize.org/nominate.
The Dan David Prize was first established in 2001 by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Dan David, to reward innovative and interdisciplinary work that contributed to humanity. In 2021, the Prize was relaunched with a focus on historical research, honoring the founder’s passion for history and archaeology. It now recognizes early and mid-career scholars to help them fulfill their potential at a time when historical knowledge and scholarship are under attack, many university departments are threatened with closure, and budgets for research, archives, libraries, and museums are being slashed or withdrawn.
The late Dan David lived through persecution in Nazi-allied and then Communist Romania, becoming an accomplished photographer and later an entrepreneur and philanthropist. Dan was fascinated by automatic instant photography, and he built a company that introduced countries around the globe to the automatic photo booth. Dan had a keen interest in history and archaeology, which feature in many of the projects of the Dan David Foundation. His full bio is available here.
About the Dan David Prize
The Dan David Prize, endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University, is the largest history prize in the world. Dan David, the founder of the Prize, believed that knowledge of the past enriches us and helps us grapple with the challenges of the present, and is crucial for reimagining our collective future. At a time of diminishing support for the humanities, the Prize celebrates the next generation of outstanding historians, archaeologists, curators, filmmakers and digital humanists. Each year, up to nine researchers are awarded $300,000 each in recognition of their achievements and to support their future endeavors.
To learn more about Dan David, the Prize, and the 2026 winners, visit www.dandavidprize.org.
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