Honorary Foreign Member
AHA members are invited to nominate distinguished foreign historians for this award. The Association has honored foreign scholars since 1885, when the AHA awarded Leopold von Ranke with its first testimonial of honorary membership.
According to the selection criteria, recipients of honorary memberships must be foreign scholars who are distinguished for their work in the field of history and who have markedly assisted the work of American historians in the scholar’s country. The AHA Council encourages nominations that address the need for broader geographic coverage; in recent years most nominations and honorees have been from western Europe. The Committee on Honorary Foreign Members and Awards for Scholarly Distinction will serve as the jury and will recommend an individual for approval by the Council. The Committee consists of the president, president-elect, and the immediate past president.
Nominations may be submitted at any time, but materials must be submitted by November 1, 2018, to be considered for the 2019 award, which will be presented at the January 2020 AHA annual meeting in New York City. It will be necessary to resubmit recommendations made earlier if they are to be considered again; files will not be reactivated. A complete nomination should include a letter of nomination that contains specific details addressing the criteria listed above, a two-page CV of the nominee with a summary of major publications, and a minimum of two supporting letters of recommendation. The package should not exceed 20 pages. Please email all submission materials to awards@historians.org and be sure to include “Honorary Foreign Member: [Nominee’s Name]” in the subject line.
For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.
2017 Honorary Foreign Member
Patrick Fridenson, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France
Patrick Fridenson is professor emeritus at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in Paris. The EHESS is one of the leading academic institutions in France, and Fridenson is one of its senior scholars and historians. His specialty is business, economic, and labor history, and his many books and articles in the field make him one of its international leaders. In particular, his magisterial Histoire des usines Renault on France’s great Renault automobile company has inspired generations of economic and social historians of France. The many works he has written or edited with international colleagues, especially American and Japanese, further testify to his global prominence as a scholar of business history. In addition, he has contributed to a new history of the French home front both in World War I and II. Fridenson has also shaped the field of modern business history through his prodigious labors as a mentor, and bears significant credit for the emergence of a vibrant and productive community of historians of France in the United States.