Triennial Awards Recipients

The Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities

2021 2018	Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University Lonnie Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
2015	David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize winning author
2012	Patricia Meyer Spacks, author and President Emeritus of the AAC&U
2009	Douglas Greenberg, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University
2006	Gerald Early, Merle Kling Professor of Letters and Director of the Center for Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis
2003	Robert Pinsky, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Boston University and former Poet Laureate of the United States
2000	Richard Franke, Founder of the Chicago Humanities Festival and CEO Emeritus of The John Nuveen Company
1997	Joseph Epstein, Renowned Essayist and former Editor of The American Scholar
1990	John E. Sawyer, President Emeritus of Williams College and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
1988	Daniel J. Boorstin, retired Librarian of Congress
1985	Robert M. Lumiansky, President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies and The Phi Beta Kappa Society
1982	Dumas Malone, the distinguished Jefferson scholar and Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia
1979	Charles Frankel (awarded posthumously), teacher, philosopher and President Emeritus of The National Humanities Center
1976	Louis B. Wright, Director Emeritus of the Folger Shakespeare Library
1973	Howard Mumford Jones, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor for the Humanities at Harvard University
1970	Barnaby C. Keeney, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and President Emeritus of Brown University

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The Sidney Hook Memorial Award

2021 2018	Viet Thanh Nguyen, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California Nancy Weiss Malkiel, professor of history emerita at Princeton University
2015	Jill Lepore, Author and David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University
2012	Martha Craven Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago
2009	John Seery, George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and Professor of Politics at Pomona College
2006	Charles Tilly, Joseph Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University
2003	Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University
2000	Natalie Zemon Davis, professor of history emerita at Princeton University
1997	Carolyn G. Heilbrun, professor of English literature emerita at Columbia University
1994	John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor of History emeritus and professor of legal history in the Law School at Duke University
1991	Leon Lederman, former president of the AAAS and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago

Read more about the Sidney Hook Memorial Award.