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Dan David Prize
Dan David Prize
Awarded for	Outstanding work in the study of the human past.
Country	Israel
Presented by	The Dan David Foundation
Reward(s)	US$3,000,000 (Nine US$300,000 Prizes and one US$300,000 Fellowship)
First awarded	2002; 22 years ago
Website	www.dandavidprize.org

The Dan David Prize is an international group of awards that recognize and support outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past.^[1] Nine prizes of $300,000 are awarded each year to outstanding early- and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines.^[2] The Prize has an annual purse of $3 million, making it the largest history award in the world,^[3]^[4] including $300,000 funding an international postdoctoral fellowship program at Tel Aviv University, where the Prize is headquartered. The Prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation.^[5]

Until 2021 the Prize comprised 3 annual prizes of $1 million^[6] for innovative and interdisciplinary research in three time dimensions: Past, Present and Future. Prize laureates donated 10 percent of their prize money to doctoral scholarships for outstanding Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholarships in their own field from around the world.

In September 2021, the Dan David Prize announced that it would shift its focus to support the work of "historians, art historians, archaeologists, digital humanists, curators, documentary filmmakers and all those who deepen our knowledge and understanding of the past".^[2]

History

The Dan David Foundation was founded in 2000 with a $100 million endowment by Romanian-born Israeli businessman and philanthropist Dan David.^[7] The Dan David Prize was founded with the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms.^[8] Each year, three prizes of $1 million were awarded in rotating fields to those who made outstanding contributions to humanity.

In anticipation of the Prize’s 20th anniversary in 2021, the Dan David Prize refocused in a new direction, citing the decline of global investment in the humanities and the relative scarcity of major prizes in the humanities. The redesigned prize^[9] focuses on supporting outstanding research in the historical disciplines and celebrating scholars and practitioners whose work illuminates the human past and enriches public debate with a deeper understanding of history.

The Prize announced that starting in 2022 it would award up to nine prizes of $300,000 each year to early- and mid-career scholars and practitioners around the world^[10] to recognize significant achievements in the study of the past and support the winners’ future endeavours. From 2022, there will no longer be a distinction between three prize categories.

Laureates include cellist Yo-Yo Ma (2006), Israeli author Amos Oz (2008), U.S. Vice President Al Gore (2008), Canadian author Margaret Atwood (2010), French economist Esther Duflo, and immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci (2021).^[11] In 2016, Catherine Hall of University College London rejected the Dan David Prize. Her prize money was donated to fund scholarships at Tel Aviv University.^[12]

Winners (from 2022)

From 2022 recipients of the Prize were called winners rather than laureates. The first cohort of Prize winners was announced on March 1, 2022.^[13]

Year	Winner	Field
2022	Mirjam Brusius	Visual and material culture in global and colonial contexts
	Bartow Elmore	Environmental history of global capitalism
	Tyrone McKinley Freeman	History of African American philanthropy
	Verena Krebs	Medieval Ethiopia and cross-cultural encounters
	Efthymia Nikita	Bioarchaeology of the Mediterranean
	Nana Oforiatta Ayim	Curator, writer, artist and art historian centering African heritage
	Kristina Richardson	Medieval Islamic world and the Roma
	Natalia Romik	Architect and public historian who works to preserve the memory of Jewish life in Eastern Europe
	Kimberly Welch	Legal history of the antebellum South
2023	Saheed Aderinto	Social and cultural historian of modern Africa, deploying unusual lenses and categories like sexuality, childhood, guns, animals and music for understanding the Nigerian past
	Ana Antic	Historian of psychiatry and twentieth-century Europe, exploring issues of politics, violence and mental health
	Karma Ben Johanan	Intellectual historian of inter-religious encounters, focusing on Catholic–Jewish interactions
	Elise K. Burton	Historian of science, race and nationalism in the modern Middle East, focusing on genetics, physical anthropology, and evolutionary biology
	Adam Clulow	Global historian of Europe and East Asia, deploying video games and virtual reality for popularising history
	Krista Goff	Historian using oral history and everyday sources in understanding experiences of understudied ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union.
	Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers	Historian exploring women’s social, economic and legal relationships to enslaved people and to the slave trade in the trans-Atlantic world.
	Anita Radini	“Archaeologist of dirt” analyzing the tiny remains of dust that collect in dental plaque, for learning about the work lives and environments of people in the past
	Chao Tayiana Maina	Public historian using digital technologies to capture and preserve previously hidden or suppressed historical narratives in Kenya.
2024	Keisha N. Blain	Black internationalism and Black women’s activism in the 20th century
	Benjamin Brose	Cultural histories of Buddhism and Asian religion
	Cécile Fromont	Visual and material cultures of Early modern Africa, Latin America and Europe
	Cat Jarman	Archaeology of the Viking Age and public archaeology
	Daniel Jütte	Cultural histories of material objects and everyday technologies in Europe
	Stuart M. McManus	Global histories of the Renaissance and of slavery
	Kathryn Olivarius	Disease, citizenship and economics in the antebellum South of the United States
	Katarzyna Person	Holocaust archives and the recovery of marginalized voices
	Tripurdaman Singh	Colonialism, decolonisation and the birth of democracy in South Asia

Laureates (2002–2021)

Year	Theme	Laureate
2002	Past – History	Warburg Library
	Present – Technology, Information and Society	Daniel Hillis
	Future – Life sciences	Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, Robert Waterston
2003	Past – Paleoanthropology	Michel Brunet
	Present – Print & electronic media	James Nachtwey,^[14] Frederick Wiseman^[15]
	Future – cosmology & astronomy	John Bahcall
2004	Past – Cities: Historical legacy	Rome, Istanbul, Jerusalem
	Present – Leadership: Changing our World	Klaus Schwab
	Future – Brain sciences	Robert Wurtz, Amiram Grinvald, William Newsome
2005	Past- Archaeology	Graeme Barker, Israel Finkelstein
	Present – The Performing Arts: Film, Theater, Dance, Music	Peter Brook
	Future – Materials science	Robert Langer, George Whitesides, C.N.R. Rao
2006	Past – Music	Yo-Yo Ma
	Present – Journalism	Magdi Allam, Monica Gonzalez, Adam Michnik, Goenawan Mohamad
	Future – Treatment of cancer	John Mendelsohn, Joseph Schlessinger
2007	Past – Historians	Jacques Le Goff
	Present – Contemporary Music	Pascal Dusapin, Zubin Mehta
	Future – Quest for Energy	James E. Hansen, Jerry Olson, Sarah Kurtz
2008	Past – Creative Rendering of the Past	Amos Oz, Tom Stoppard, Atom Egoyan
	Present – Social Responsibility	Al Gore^[16]
	Future – Geosciences	Ellen Mosley-Thompson & Lonnie Thompson, Geoffrey Eglinton
2009	Past – Astrophysics – History of the Universe	Paolo de Bernardis, Andrew E. Lange, Paul Richards^[17]
	Present – Leadership	Tony Blair^[17]
	Future – Global Public Health	Robert Gallo^[17]
2010	Past – March Towards Democracy	Giorgio Napolitano
	Present – Literature: Rendition of the 20th Century	Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh
	Future – Computers and Telecommunications	Leonard Kleinrock, Gordon E. Moore, Michael O. Rabin
2011	Past – Evolution	Marcus Feldman
	Present – Cinema and Society	Coen Brothers^[18]
	Future – Ageing: Facing the Challenge	Cynthia Kenyon, Gary Ruvkun
2012	Past – History/Biography	Robert Conquest, Sir Martin Gilbert
	Present – Plastic Arts	William Kentridge
	Future – Genome Research	David Botstein, Eric Lander, J. Craig Venter
2013	Past – Classics, the Modern Legacy of the Ancient World	Sir Geoffrey Lloyd
	Present – Ideas, Public Intellectuals and Contemporary Philosophers	Michel Serres, Leon Wieseltier
	Future – Preventive Medicine	Esther Duflo, Alfred Sommer
2014	Past – History and Memory	Krzysztof Czyzewski, Pierre Nora, Saul Friedländer
	Present – Combating Memory Loss	John A. Hardy, Peter St. George-Hyslop, Brenda Milner
	Future – Artificial Intelligence, The Digital Mind	Marvin Minsky
2015	Past – Retrieving the Past: Historians and their Sources	Peter Brown, Alessandro Portelli
	Present – The Information Revolution	Jimmy Wales
	Future – Bioinformatics	Cyrus Chothia, David Haussler, Michael Waterman
2016	Past – Social History – New Directions	Inga Clendinnen, Arlette Farge
	Present – Combatting Poverty	Anthony B. Atkinson, Francois Bourguignon, James J. Heckman
	Future – Nanoscience	Paul Alivisatos, Chad Mirkin, John Pendry
2017	Past – Archeology and Natural Sciences	Svante Pääbo, David Reich
	Present – Literature	Jamaica Kincaid, A. B. Yehoshua
	Future – Astronomy	Neil Gehrels, Shrinivas Kulkarni, Andrzej Udalski
2018	Past – History of Science	Lorraine Daston, Evelyn Fox Keller, Simon Schaffer
	Present – Bioethics	Ezekiel Emanuel, Jonathan Glover, Mary Warnock
	Future – Personalized Medicine	Carlo M. Croce, Mary-Claire King, Bert Vogelstein
2019	Past – Macro History	Kenneth Pomeranz, Sanjay Subrahmanyam
	Present – Defending Democracy	Michael Ignatieff, Reporters Without Borders
	Future – Combatting Climate Change	Christiana Figueres
2020	Past – Cultural Preservation and Revival	Lonnie G. Bunch III, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
	Present – Gender Equality	Gita Sen, Debora Diniz
	Future – Artificial Intelligence	Demis Hassabis, Amnon Shashua
2021	Past – History of Health and Medicine	Alison Bashford, Katharine Park, Keith Wailoo
	Present – Public Health	Anthony Fauci
	Future – Molecular Medicine	Zelig Eshhar, Carl June, Steven Rosenberg