ANN ARBOR—University of Michigan classical studies and history Prof. Sabine MacCormack has received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation‘s new Distinguished Achievements Award for scholars in the humanities. MacCormack, who holds the U-M’s Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen Jr. Professorship for the Study of Human Understanding, was selected for her comparative studies of social and religious history.

As one of five award recipients, MacCormack will receive as much as $1.5 million to pursue her work and to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life. The award is for three years and is structured to meet recipients’ particular scholarly needs.

MacCormack, a comparative historian of religious and social institutions and attitudes, earned a B.A. degree in 1964 and a D.Phil. degree in 1974, both from Oxford University. Her research interests include late antiquity; history of the classical tradition and of Christianity; and Spanish and Andean historiography and culture. A member of the American Philosophical Society, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999.

The Distinguished Achievement Awards are for those “who have made major contributions to their own disciplines, whose influence may well have extended more broadly to other fields, and whose current work promises to make significant new advances through both teaching and research. The awards will provide the recipients and their institutions with enlarged opportunities to deepen and extend humanistic research. As such, they should benefit not only the individual scholar, but also their institutions and scholarship more broadly.”

With funds being granted to, and overseen by, the institutions with which the recipients are affiliated, the awards will underwrite salaries, research assistance and expenses, and support for colleagues engaged in collaboration with the awardees. The awardees will be expected to spend at least two of the three years on their home campuses. Distinguished Achievement Awards may not be held concurrently with other similar awards.

The recipients of the Awards were selected through an intensive process of nomination and review. Final selection was made by a panel of distinguished scholars led by the Foundation’s chairman, Hanna H. Gray, president emeritus and the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Chicago.

In each of the next two years, the Foundation plans to make another four to six awards, with recipients chosen from such fields as classics, history, history of art, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and all areas of literary studies.

Profs. Peter Brown (Princeton University), Stephen Greenblatt (Harvard University), Alexander Nehamas (Princeton University), and Robert Pippin (University of Chicago) are the other 2001 Mellon award recipients.

EDITORS: More information about the Mellon Distinguished Achievements Award is available at http://www.mellon.org/DAA%20announcement.html.