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. See the list of past recipients.
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, 2019, to be considered for the 2020 award, which will be presented at the January 2021 AHA annual meeting in Seattle. 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.
2019 Honorary Foreign Member
Ramachandra Guha, India
Ramachandra Guha, an independent scholar based in Bangalore, India, and author of some 20 books, has made landmark contributions in environmental history, sports history, biography, and Indian history generally. His first book, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989), marked the beginning of environmental history in South Asia and was the first work to articulate connections between colonialism and ecological decline in South Asia. Guha’s illustrious career includes teaching engagements at Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oslo, and London School of Economics. He has won multiple honors and prizes, including the Fukuoka Prize (2015), for outstanding academic contributions to the world’s understanding of Asia. For decades he has extended collegial assistance to many US-based environmental historians and historians of India.