We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 Career Research Achievement Award: Distinguished University Professor John McNeill.
From left to right: Soyica Colbert and John McNeill.
The Office of the Provost is pleased to solicit nominations from members of the Main Campus tenure-line faculty for its Faculty Research Awards.
Career Research Achievement: Honors the contributions of a scholar to her/his field over the course of a career. The basis of this award is the standing which the faculty member enjoys in his or her scholarly discipline. Nominations should be accompanied by evidence that the nominees’ work is recognized as distinguished and influential well beyond the Georgetown community. Moreover, nominees should be at a stage in their career appropriate for an assessment of long term contributions and influence. Normally, only one of these awards will be made each year and this prize can be received once by any single individual.
Nominations made to the program remain active for three years (or two beyond the year in which the nomination is made) unless the individual is selected for an award in a given year.
Each recipient will receive a $10,000 cash prize, an award, and presentation and recognition at a University-wide Ceremony in the Fall. The most valuable prize, however, will be the recognition of achievement awarded by colleagues.
Eligibility
Main Campus tenure-line faculty.
Nomination Process
Main Campus faculty should submit their nominations for either award to the Office of the Provost via internalgrants@georgetown.edu.
The nominating officials/departments should provide a letter of nomination, a current version of the candidate’s vita, up to two additional letters from prominent scholars in the field of the candidate, and scholarly materials sufficient to allow evaluation of his/her merits. Nominators and supporting letters should explain the significance of awards or honors that the candidate has received. Occasionally more than one member in a department or unit is eligible and can be nominated. The materials should be submitted to Internal Grants at internalgrants@georgetown.edu by September 19, 2025. Hard copy materials such as books or journals can be submitted directly to the Vice Provost for Research. Supporting materials from other individuals or institutions may also be submitted to internalgrants@georgetown.edu.
Review Process
Recipient of the award will be selected by the Faculty Research Awards Committee. The Committee has the option of declining to make the award in a given year if, in its judgment, no nomination is sufficiently compelling.
2025: John McNeill John R. McNeill is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History, College of Arts & Science and School of Foreign Service. He joined Georgetown in 1985 and has held two Fulbright awards, and Guggenheim, MacArthur, and Woodrow Wilson Center fellowships. His books include: The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain (1985); The Mountains of the Mediterranean World (1992); Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World (2000), co-winner of the World History Association book prize, the Forest History Society book prize, and listed by the London Times among the best science books ever written (despite being a history book); The Human Web: A Bird’s-eye View of World History (2003); Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010), which won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association; The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene, 1945-2015 (2016); The Webs of Humankind, 2 vols. (2020); Sea & Land: An Environmental History of the Caribbean (2022). His books have been translated into 11 languages. He has published about 160 scholarly or scientific articles and since 2012 has been a member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of the Geological Sciences. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the Royal Academy of Morocco. In 2010, he was awarded the Toynbee Prize for ‘academic and public contributions to humanity.’ The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Heineken Prize for history in 2018. He was President of the American Society for Environmental History (2011-13) and the American Historical Association (2019).
2024: James B. Collins James Collins, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, with a career spanning four-and-a-half decades, has changed how historians think about, write about, and teach the history of the pre-revolutionary French state. Through seven single-authored books and nearly fifty articles and book chapters, he has successfully challenged previously conventional notions about the centralizing capacities of the so-called absolute monarchy. BY focusing on regional and local records rather than the well-studied archives of the central state, Collins has brought an entirely new perspective on the complex mechanisms of implementing monarchic demands and policies. Professor Collins’ body of work on a state whose history has long since served as a model for understanding the evolution of political modernity has enormous implications for comparative history, politics, and political theory. The research methods and analytical frameworks he has developed lend themselves to adaptive deployment in studying other policies, including the 21st-century state. Among the many markers of the international impact of James Collins’ scholarship is the history of his reception in France. Collins is one of the few Anglophone scholars appointed a Professor invité at the Collège de France – the country’s most prestigious research institute, founded in 1530. As part of his 2013 stint at the Collège, he gave a series of French lectures, subsequently published in expanded form as a book – La Monarchie républicaine.État et société dans la France moderne (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2016). Throughout his career, Professor Collins has advised nearly 20 doctoral students, many of whom have gone on to distinguished academic careers of their own.
2023:SuzanneStetkevych A specialist in Classical Arabic Poetry, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych has published extensively in English and Arabic. Her research is primarily concerned with the ritual, performance and performative underpinnings of classical Arabic poetry in its literary-historical settings. In studies ranging from the Pre-Islamic tribal and royal ode of the Jahiliyya, to the court praise odes of the Islamic caliphate, the devotional poetry of the Medieval Period and the Neo-Classical ode of the Nahdah and Colonial period, she engages ritual theory, rite of passage, gift exchange and sacrificial rituals to reveal the socio-economic role of the qasida, the ceremonial aspects of qasida performance as a courtly negotiation of status and legitimacy, and the spiritually and politically transformative role of madih nabawi (praise poems to the Prophet Mohammad). Her courses include Poetry and Empire: the Arabic Ode; Poetry as Performance; Pre-Islamic Poetry: Orality, Ritual and Performance; Theoretical Approaches to the Arabic Ode; Modern Arabic Poetry; and Classical Arabic Literary Texts. She is currently working on a project on the transformation of Arabic poetics and aesthetics from Classical to Post-Classical, the two poetry diaries of the celebrated blind Syrian poet, Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma’arri (d. 1058 CE).
2022: Der-Chen Chang Der-Chen Chang is the McDevitt Chair Professor in Mathematics and Computer Science in the Georgetown College. In 2002, Der-Chen received the Edward Bunn Award for Faculty Excellence, and was honored with the President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers in 2013. His prodigious research career has produced some 250 papers and 6 books. He serves as a senior advisor to the Provost for China initiatives and on many committees at the University and in the broader mathematical community. Prior to joining Georgetown in 1998, he served at the University of Maryland, College Park for 11 years. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1987, and an Honorary Doctoral Degree of Science from Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan in 2014.
