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, three are women with affiliations at colleges and universities in the United States. All three hold a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University
Mackenzie Cooley is an associate professor of history and director of Latin American and Latine studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. A historian of science and medicine in the early modern Hispanic world, Dr. Cooley’s work explores how humans have shaped, classified and extracted knowledge from nature – and, in so doing, redefined their own bodies, societies and empires. Her first book, The Perfection of Nature(University of Chicago Press 2022), reveals how Renaissance breeding practices shaped ideas of race, human potential and dominion over animals. Her current research explores “bioprospecting” – the quest to harness nature for human health and medicine.
Dr. Cooley joined the faculty at Hamilton College in 2018. She is a graduate of Cornell University, where she majored in history and comparative literature. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University
Beth Lew-Williams is a professor of history and director of Asian American studies at Princeton University in New Jersey. A historian of race and migration in the United States, her work demonstrates how restrictions on Chinese immigration to the United States was pivotal in the construction of American concepts of citizenship and “alienage.” She is the author of the forthcoming book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press, 2025), which uncovers thousands of laws that regulated the everyday lives of Chinese immigrants and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life. She is also the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Professor Lew-Williams joined the Princeton faculty in 2014. She is a graduate of Brown University, where she majored in history. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University.
Hannah Marcus is a professor in the department of the history of science and the faculty director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1400 and 1700. She is the author of Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020). She is currently completing a book on the history of old age in early modern Italy.
Dr. Marcus joined the Harvard faculty in 2017. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and earned a Ph.D. at Stanford University.