Gordon J. Laing Award

The Gordon J. Laing Award is conferred annually, by the University of Chicago's Board of University Publications, on the faculty author, editor, or translator whose book has brought the greatest distinction to the list of the University of Chicago Press. The first award was given in 1963 and the most recent award was given on April 23, 2024, to Margareta Ingrid Christian, Asst. Professor, Department of Germanic Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.

The award is named in honor of Gordon Jennings Laing, the scholar who, serving as general editor of the Press from 1909 until 1940, firmly established the character and reputation of the Press as the premier academic publisher in the United States.

The award is presented each spring at a ceremony at the David Rubinstein Forum at the University of Chicago.

Recipients of the Gordon J. Laing Award

2024 Margareta Ingrid Christian - Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900
2023 Elisabeth S. Clemens - Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State
2022 Lisa Wedeen - Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria
2021 Michael Rossi - The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America
2020 Eve Ewing - Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
2019 Deborah L. Nelson - Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil
2018 Forrest Stuart - Down, Out, & Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row
2017 David Nirenberg - Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today
2016 Amir Sufi and Atif Mian - House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again
2015 Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo - I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
2014 Alison Winter - Memory: Fragments of a Modern History
2013 Andreas Glaeser - Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, The Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism
2012 Adrian Johns - Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
2011 Robert J. Richards - The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought
2010 Martha Feldman - Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy
2009 Bernard Harcourt[1] - Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age
2008 Philip Gossett[2] - Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera
2006 W.J.T. Mitchell - What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images
2005 Bill Brown (critical theory) - A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature
2004 Jonathan Hall - Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture
2003 Robert J. Richards - The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe
2002 Bruce Lincoln - Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship
2001 François Furet - The Passing of an Illusion: The idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century
2000 James Chandler - England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism
1999 André LaCocque & Paul Ricoeur - Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies
1998 Martin E. Marty - Modern American Religion (in three volumes)
1997 Marshall Sahlins - How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example
1996 W.J.T. Mitchell - Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
1995 Edward Laumann, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels - The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States
1994 David McNeill - Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought
1993 Gerald N. Rosenberg - The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?
1992 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff - On Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa
1991 Leszek Kołakowski - Modernity on Endless Trial
1990 Richard G. Klein - The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins
1989 S. Chandrasekhar - Truth and Beauty
1988 David Grene - Herodotus: The History (translation)
1987 Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner - The Founders' Constitution (in five volumes)
1986 Mircea Eliade - A History of Religious Ideas (in three volumes)
1985 Paul Ricoeur - Time and Narrative, Volume 1
1984 Richard Hellie - Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725
1983 Anthony C. Yu - The Journey to the West (in four volumes)
1982 James M. Gustafson - Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1: Theology and Ethics
1981 Wayne C. Booth - Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism
1980 Morris Janowitz - The Last Half Century: Societal Change and Politics in America
1979 Alan Gewirth - Reason and Morality
1978 Sewall Wright - Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 3: Experimental Results and Evolutionary Deductions
1977 Marshall Sahlins - Culture and Practical Reason
1976 Keith Michael Baker - Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics
1975 Eric W. Cochrane - Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes
1974 Stuart M. Tave - Some Words of Jane Austen
1973 Edward Shils - The Intellectuals and the Powers
1972 Edward Wasiolek - The Notebooks of Dostoevsky (in five volumes)
1971 Herrlee G. Creel - The Origins of Statecraft in China, Volume 1: The Western Chou Empire
1970 Gerald D. Suttles - The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City
1969 Leonard B. Meyer - Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Prediction in Twentieth-Century Culture
1968 Philip Foster - Education and Social Change in Ghana
1967 Donald F. Lach - Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume 1, Books 1 and 2
1966 A. Leo Oppenheim - Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization
1965 Tang Tsou - America’s Failure in China, 1941-1950
1964 William Hardy McNeill - The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
1963 Bernard Weinberg - A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance

References

External links

List and news coverage of Gordon J. Laing Award winners from the University of Chicago