Two American Women Are Among the Nine Winners of the Dan David Prize

The Dan David Prize is awarded by the Dan David Foundation at Tel Aviv University in Israel to up to nine early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The honor comes with a $300,000 prize. The prize was established in 2001 by Dan David, who lived through Nazi and Communist persecution in his native Romania before becoming a global business leader and philanthropist. The prize has the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. The prize is given in recognition of the winners’ contribution to the study of the past and to support their future endeavors.

OF this year’s nine winners of the Dan David Prize, two are American women with university affiliations.

Krista Goff is an associate professor of history at the University of Miami. Using oral histories as well as archival and everyday sources, Goff’s work critically examines asymmetries of power and layered processes of belonging and exclusion in the Soviet Union. Her current research focuses on the afterlives of German occupation and national deportations in the Soviet Union. Professor Goff is the author of the award-winning book Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Dr. Goff is also 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 in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Goff is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She earned a master’s degree at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian who explores women’s social, economic, and legal relationships to enslaved people and to the slave trade in the trans-Atlantic world. Dr. Jones-Rogers’ research has been primarily concerned with women and slavery, but her work also explores the evolution and development of early systems of law, especially as they pertain to women, bondage, and the slave trade.

Dr. Jones-Rogers is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019), which draws on the testimonies of enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals, legal, financial, and military records as well as an array of other narrative sources to show how White married women – a group historically seen as legally disempowered and economically dispossessed – exercised extraordinary power in and over enslaved African-Americans’ lives.

Dr. Jones-Rogers earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s degree in American history, and a Ph.D. in history all from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.