award

Jeffrey Herf's most recent book, lsrael's Moment; International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2022)  has received the Bernard Lewis Prize awarded annually by the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) .

According to the Award letter, the Bernard Lewis Prize recognizes the work of scholars engaged in the study of issues on antisemitism that were of great importance to ASMEA's founding chairman, Bernard Lewis. "While Christian antisemitism is well-studied, a stigma remains around addressing antisemitism in the Muslim world. Beyond this, relatively few scholars focus on the Middle Eastern dimensions of Christian antisemitism in religious and cultural terms, much less the political impact in the West. ASMEA was founded 15 years ago by the  historians Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, both of whom made major contributions to the scholarship on the modern Middle East."

Jeffrey Herf adds: "Israel's Moment is a history of how the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Soviet bloc reacted to the Zionist project in the crucial years of 1945 to 1949. It also addresses debates, especially in the United States, and at the United Nations, about Zionist aspirations, antisemitism, and the aftereffects of Nazism and the Holocaust. I am pleased that as a historian whose past work is on modern European history, my study of its aftereffects around the world and in the Middle East has received this acclaim among scholars of the Middle East as well." 

Review by Daphne Kalotay

Each year, among the new fiction collections fighting for attention are a handful published neither through mainstream houses nor the usual small press alternatives but via a third avenue: book prize contests.

Some of these competitions, such as the AWP Grace Paley Prize, have been around for 40-plus years and rely on coordination with university and indie presses. Others, such as the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, are held by the press itself. Monetary awards can range from $1,000 to $15,000, but what all winners share is the challenge, once their collections launch, of being noticed by the public. With that in mind, here are 10 notable prizewinning collections published in 2022.

Rich with dreams and ghosts, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes’s “Are We Ever Our Own” (BOA Short Fiction Prize) follows descendants of a Cuban family to America and beyond. Yet its true subject is female artists overshadowed by their male counterparts.

“You say my work is disappearing,” one character writes in a letter. “Turning in on itself — getting smaller and smaller. You say ‘domestic, tidy, craft.’ You don’t mean ‘craft’ in that nice way the boys upstate with their forged steel boxes do.”

In other stories, Fuentes adopts elegant expository summary that can create emotional distance, but immediacy returns whenever we hear these women’s voices directly. “Palm Chess” alternates between a screenplay and journal entries by a female filmmaker who has left her artist husband — movingly connecting the private and creative selves.

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By Jessica Weiss ’05 

John Horty, professor of philosophy and affiliate professor in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany. 

The award, named after the late Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, recognizes leading researchers of all disciplines across the world in recognition of their academic record to date. To promote international scientific cooperation, award winners are invited to spend a period of up to one year collaborating on a long-term research project with colleagues at a research institution in Germany. 

Horty is an internationally known expert on several topics that connect philosophy, logic and artificial intelligence (AI) and he was among the first philosophers to apply methods from computer science to philosophical questions concerning legal and moral reasoning. In recent years, his work has focused on the growing field of “machine ethics” or “humane AI,” whose goal is to develop the—conceptual and technical—framework needed to advance AI in a way that is ethical and that promotes human wellbeing. Horty’s work seeks to show ways in which autonomous AI systems can engage in normative reasoning in real time. That work could eventually help to make computational tools that would assist people in their thinking about legal and moral problems. 

Horty is the author of three books as well as papers on a variety of topics. He has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities and several grants from the National Science Foundation. He has also held visiting fellowships at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His forthcoming book will focus on the logic of precedent. He is also working with colleagues across campus to organize a center on “Ethics and AI” at the University of Maryland. 

Horty earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a bachelor of arts in philosophy and classics from Oberlin College.