Dan David Prize awarded to 9 historians and archaeologists to back their research

The Dan David Prize will award nine historians and archaeologists with $300,000 apiece to recognize their work and support future research, the foundation announced Tuesday.

The scholars are from around the world and have pursued research on a variety of issues.

For example, Max Bergholz of Montreal’s Concordia University has studied violence and historical memory in the Balkans, Matthew Champion of the University of Melbourne has studied how medieval societies perceived and structured time, and Giancarlo Marcone of the Universidad de Ingenieria y Tecnologia has looked into how ancient Inca road networks influenced modern infrastructure in central Peru.

Other winners are historian Howard Chiang of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has analyzed the history of sex change in China and proposed a new paradigm for transgender history centered around geopolitics. Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University, focuses on how civilizations have adapted to past ice ages.

Andrew Lipman of Barnard College, Columbia University, has studied how Native peoples in North America and the British Atlantic contributed to the creation of a connected maritime world. Roland Betancourt of the University of California, Irvine has explored art and culture from the Byzantine to the modern period.

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Verena Meier, of the University of Heidelberg and the Technical University of Berlin, has focused on the Sinti and Roma genocide during Nazism and its post-World War II legacy, while R. Isabela Morales, a US public historian, has worked on using individual, local, and family stories to define the landscape of race and slavery in the 19th-century United States.

The winners received the award at a recent gathering in Italy.

The Dan David Prize was established in 2001 by the late Israeli entrepreneur and philanthropist Dan David to reward innovative and interdisciplinary work that contributed to humanity.

Twenty years later, the prize was relaunched with a focus on historical research, and now rewards early and mid-career scholars to help them at a time when many university departments are threatened with closure, and budgets for research, archives, libraries, and museums are being slashed or eliminated.

“Five years ago, we relaunched this Prize with a conviction that supporting historians at pivotal moments in their careers could make a lasting difference,” said Ariel David, board member of the Prize and the son of Dan.

“They challenge us to see the past, and our present, in a new light,” he added.

Previous recipients include Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale”; renowned American cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and US infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Jessica Steinberg contributed to this report.