Columbia University in New York City recently announced the recipients of the 2026 Bancroft Prize. The award, worth $10,000, is presented annually to two authors of distinguished works in the fields of American history and diplomacy.
Both of this year’s Bancroft Prize recipients are women.
Emilie Connolly, assistant professor of history at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, was honored for her debut book, Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States (Princeton University Press, 2025). The award-winning monograph examines how the federal government became both dispossessor of and trustee to the continent’s first peoples.
At Brandeis, Dr. Connolly teaches courses on early America, Indigenous history, and the history of American capitalism. She is currently working on her second book, which will examine the implications of Indigenous nations’ longstanding immunity to colonial taxation.
Dr. Connolly holds a bachelor’s degree from McGill University in Montreal, a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and a Ph.D. from New York University.
Beth Lew-Williams, professor of history at Princeton University in New Jersey, was honored for her latest book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law (Belknap Press, 2025), which traces the history of legal discrimination against Chinese immigrants in the United States.
A Princeton faculty member since 2014, Dr. Lee-Williams currently serves as director of the Asian American studies program. Earlier in her tenure, she was director of graduate studies for the history department. In addition to John Doe Chinaman, Dr. Lew-Williams is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018).
Dr. Lew-Williams received her bachelor’s degree from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in California.