Matthew Jacobson receives lifetime achievement award from American Studies Association
Jacobson, Sterling Professor of American Studies and History and Professor of Black Studies, has been awarded the 2025 Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize.
Matthew Jacobson, Sterling Professor of American Studies and History and Professor of Black Studies, has been awarded the 2025 Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize from the American Studies Association (ASA).
Awarded every other year, the ASA's Bode-Pearson Prize recognizes the “outstanding achievement of an individual who has dedicated a lifetime of work to the mission and values of American studies.”
Jacobson is a renowned historian and public scholar who has transformed our understanding of how race shapes political life and culture in the United States.
He has authored eight books, created three documentary projects, and curated numerous public humanities exhibits and community events that explore topics related to race and culture including immigration, diasporic communities, and legacies of the US civil rights movement. His books include Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era (2023); The Historian’s Eye: Photography, History, and the American Present (2018); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2005); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995).
Jacobson joined Yale's faculty in 1995 and was named a Sterling Professor, the university's highest academic honor for faculty, in 2021.
He is the fifth Yale professor to win the Bode-Peason prize, following in the footsteps of Lisa Lowe (2018), Michael Denning (2014), Ralph Henry Gabriel (1983), and Norman Holmes Pearson (1975), for whom the prize is co-named. Holmes Pearson was an editor, literary critic, archivist, and co-founded the American Civilization program at Yale—the predecessor of Yale's American Studies program—in the 1940s.
Jacobson, who was the president of the ASA from 2012–13, will receive lifetime membership in the association as part of winning the award. He will be honored at this year's annual ASA meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico from November 20–22.