On September 17, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named its 2014 class of MacArthur Fellows, recognizing talented individuals from a wide range of fields “who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.” The AHA is delighted to announce that two of the Association’s members, Pamela O. Long and Tara Zahra, are among the 21 individuals awarded this year’s prestigious grant. Each fellow, from poet to physicist, will receive a $625,000 unrestricted stipend to use in any way they wish, as a MacArthur Fellowship invests in both past accomplishment and future promise.

Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Pamela O. Long is an independent scholar of late medieval and Renaissance history and the history of science and technology. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1979. Long was nominated for the MacArthur Fellowship for “challenging our understanding of the role of scholarship and craftsmanship in Renaissance societies and demonstrating how technologies are deeply enmeshed within the broader cultural fabric.” In 2011, Long also received the Association’s J. Franklin Jameson Award for her achievement in co-editing The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, in three volumes (MIT Press). She is currently working on a book that explores the cultural history of engineering in Rome between 1557 and 1590. Long is the co-editor with Asif Siddiqi and Robert Post of the SHOT/AHA booklet series, Historical Perspectives on Technology, Society, and Culture.

Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Tara Zahra, a historian of modern Europe, is professor of east European history at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in 2005 from the University of Michigan, and has since published several books on topics of social and cultural history in 20th-century Europe. Zahra received the Association’s George Louis Beer Prize in 2012 for The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Harvard Univ. Press). The MacArthur Foundation is rewarding Zahra for her innovation in “combining extensive archival research with broad socio-historical analysis of notions of nation, family, and ethnicity to construct an integrative, transnational understanding of events in twentieth-century Europe.”

Congratulations to both historians.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.