In his will, Joseph Pulitzer bestowed an endowment on Columbia University of $2,000,000 for the establishment of a School of Journalism, one-fourth of which was to be “applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education.” The Pulitzer Prizes were first awarded in 1917. In addition to journalism, the Pulitzer Prize board also gives out awards in literature, drama, poetry, music, and photography.
This year, three women with current ties to the academic world received Pulitzer Prizes.
Edda Fields-Black, professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2024).
COMBEE tells the story of the Combahee River Raid, an attack on the major rice plantations in South Carolina. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew led a group of Black and White soldiers up coastal South Carolina’s Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people. Dr. Fields-Black is a descendant of one of the raid’s participants.
A Carnegie Mellon faculty member since 2001, Dr. Fields-Black currently serves as director of the university’s Deitrich College of Humanities Center. In addition to her latest award-winning book, she has authored numerous other scholarly publications, including Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2008). She is also the executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a contemporary classical and multimedia symphonic work and the first symphonic work about slavery on rice plantations.
Dr. Fields-Black received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kathleen DuVal, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024).
Native Nations explores the 1,000-year history of the continent from the rise of ancient cities to present day. The book discusses how Indigenous peoples adapted to climate change and instability with innovation, forming smaller communities and egalitarian government structures with complex economies which spread across North America.
Dr. DuVal began her career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. She currently holds faculty appointments with the American Indian and Indigenous studies program, the American studies program, the Latina/o studies program, and the Research Laboratories of Archaeology. In addition to her latest installment, she is the author of several books, including Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2015).
An honors graduate of Stanford University in California, Dr. DuVal holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of California, Davis.
Marie Howe, a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection, New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).
Alongside new ideas and observations, Howe’s latest award-winning volume draws from each of her four previous collections: The Good Thief (Persea, 1988), What the Living Do: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), and Magdalene: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award.
A former poet laureate of New York, Howe has held teaching appointments at Columbia University and New York University. At Sarah Lawrence College, she teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in poetry. She also currently serves as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as the poet-in-residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
Howe received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Windsor in Canada and her master of fine arts degree from Columbia University.