Journal of the History of Biology - Everett Mendelsohn Prize
2018 Everett Mendelsohn Prize (this opens in a new tab)
Winner: Marco Tamborini (this opens in a new tab)
2017 Everett Mendelsohn Prize (this opens in a new tab)
Winner: Rachel Mason Dentinger (this opens in a new tab)
Everett Mendelsohn Prize
The first Everett Mendelsohn Prize was awarded in 2017 to mark the 50th volume of the Journal of the History of Biology. This prize is awarded annually to the author of an article published during the previous three years in the Journal of the History of Biology. Every article published in the preceding three years are automatically considered for the Mendelsohn Prize. The Editors-in-Chief and the Associate Editors of JHB act as a committee to award the prize and judge all entries on the basis of their originality, scholarship, and significance for the history of biology. Each year’s winner will be announced in JHB and will receive an honorarium of $500.00.
It is most appropriate for the journal to recognize the many contributions of Everett Mendelsohn with this eponymous prize. Everett founded the Journal of the History of Biology in 1968. For its first 31 years, he oversaw JHB’s publication and in doing so shaped the scholarly foundations for the field of history of biology. Everett joined the faculty in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in 1960, where he remains as an Emeritus Professor today. Over the course of his career, he wrote and edited an impressive array of books and artic les including Heat and Life: The Development of the Theory of Animal Heat (1964), Human Aspects of Biomedical Innovation (1971), Sciences and Cultures: Anthropological and Historical Studies of the Sciences (1981) , Science, Technology, and the Military (1988), Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism (1993), Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors (1994), The Practices of Human Genetics (1999), Science in Culture (2001), and Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in Honour of I. Bernard Cohen (2003). As his many students will attest, Everett is also a superb mentor and teacher. The same insight, patience, and support benefitted generations of historians who published their work in JHB. Those of us who published our first articles in JHB, we will be forever grateful to Everett for his hard work guiding our scholarship through review and revision toward eventual publication. Creating JHB as a scholarly venue and then fostering the hundreds of articles and reviews that have filled its pages has had an immeasurable, lasting, and profoundly positive effect on our field and the history, philosophy, and sociology of science more generally. It is an honor to recognize Everett’s lasting contribution to the history of biology and inaugurate this prize in his name.