Award for Scholarly Distinction Recipients
In 1984 the Council of the American Historical Association established an award entitled the Award for Scholarly Distinction. The awards go to senior historians of the highest distinction who have spent the bulk of their professional careers in the United States.
2016 Awards for Scholarly Distinction
Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia Univ.
Alice Kessler-Harris is one of the finest historians of our time: a writer and biographer of breathtaking eloquence, a pioneer of a social history that embraces women as well as men, a scholar who regularly engages the deepest moral and political questions that shaped American life. She has done more than any other single modern historian to reconstruct and draw attention to the history of women and work; she is acutely sensitive to dimensions of race and ethnicity.
Colin A. Palmer, Princeton Univ.
Colin Palmer has written extensively in an overlapping range of historical fields: African American, African diaspora, colonial Latin America, and the Caribbean. He is a wide-ranging scholar of the African diaspora as well as an extraordinary academic leader. For his innovative monographs and comprehensive collaborations; his commitments to teaching, to mentorship, and to departmental governance; and for his far-reaching service to the profession of history, the AHA awards Colin Palmer the Award for Scholarly Distinction.