Peter Brown wins Kluge Prize

A pleasure to report fantastic news. Peter Brown, the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton, and the man who has inspired more people than anyone else to study late antiquity, has been named co-winner of the 2008 Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity:

Peter Brown, Princeton's Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, has been named a co-winner of the 2008 Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity.

He and Romila Thapar, a professor emeritus in history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, will receive the award in a ceremony Wednesday, Dec. 10, at the Library of Congress. They are the sixth and seventh recipients since the prize's 2003 inception, and each will receive half of the US$1 million award.

The press release continues:

As both scholar and teacher, Peter Brown has worked at the highest level of intensity and creativity for more than 40 years. His books have captivated thousands of readers, and his celebrated lectures and seminars have inspired students and younger scholars around the world.

Brown is the author of a number of important works, including the St. Augustine biography, "Augustine of Hippo" (1967); "The World of Late Antiquity" (1971), in which he wrote about 200 to 1000 C.E. as a whole new period that had not previously been seen as such and set the agenda for a new field of study; and "The Rise of Western Christendom" (1996), in which he showed the rise of Christianity as the emergence of a new social and intellectual world long before the Renaissance.

He currently is on sabbatical writing a book examining attitudes toward wealth and poverty in the later Roman Empire. In addition to the major European languages, Brown has developed a capacity in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Syriac and Turkish.

Full document here.

Comments

[David]

You can count me among his disciples. Before I read "The Holy Man in Late Antiquity" for an undergraduate medieval history survey, my exploration of the period was confined to textbooks and browsing applicable articles on a very young Wikipedia. After that class (taught by one of his protégées), I switched my major from "anything as long as it's a diploma" to history.

I was fortunate enough to meet him at a conference at Villanova in fall 2006. I was a stammering groupie, and he was incredibly gracious. Asked me who I was studying with, what we were reading, and so forth. I'd have settled for a handshake. Wonderful man.

[adrianmurdoch]

It was the World of Late Antiquity for me.