Elizabeth A. Fenn, associate professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, has received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People. The $10,000 prize was announced on Monday after a year-long selection process. Each year, the Pulitzer Prize competition receives over 2,500 submissions in 21 categories.

Fenn is a historian of the early American West, with special interests in epidemic disease, ethnic studies, and environmental history. The Pulitzer jurors cited her work as “an engrossing, original narrative showing the Mandans, a Native American tribe in the Dakotas, as a people with a history.”

Also nominated as finalists in the history category were Sven Beckert (Harvard Univ.)for Empire of Cotton: A Global History and British author Nick Bunker for An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America.

Professors Fenn and Beckert are both AHA members. We commend the winner and finalists on their extraordinary achievements.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.