2018 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize awarded to three faculty members
Three Yale faculty members — Anne Eller and William Rankin in the Department of History and Anna Zayaruznaya in the Department of Music — were awarded the 2018 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research by untenured faculty in the humanities.
Anne Eller was honored for her book “We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom,” in which she traces the complicated history of Dominican emancipation and independence between 1822 and 1865. “‘We Dream Together’ is a stunningly rich, field-changing account of the shared anti-colonial and anti-slavery struggles of Dominicans, Haitians, and their neighbors,” says Joanne Meyerowitz, acting chair of the Department of History. “Eller rewrites the history of the 19th-century Caribbean by replacing nationalist myths with a people’s history of transnational cooperation in the work of emancipation.”
William Rankin was recognized for his book “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century.” In his book, Rankin reveals how shifts in mapping practices alter not only our geographic perspectives but also our political and social senses of territory. “‘After the Map’ tracks the changing science of cartography — from maps of terrain to coordinate grids to the GPS — and reconstructs radical transformations in our conceptions of geography,” says Meyerowitz. “The book is a brilliant history of everyday epistemology, of how we know, experience, represent, navigate, and govern our spatial world.” Read an interview with Rankin on “After the Map” in YaleNews.
Anna Zayaruznaya received the prize for her work on the book “The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet,” which explores the role of monstrous and hybrid exempla — chimeras, centaurs, and other creatures — in the musical aesthetics of 14th-century French motets. James Hepokoski, chair of the Department of Music, calls her widely acclaimed book “a tour de force, productively unsettling what was once thought long settled about that historically influential genre. Zayaruznaya proposes a more secular interpretation of the genre and advances new pathways for our construal of it. In highly imaginative ways, she reads these works’ rhythmic and melodic idiosyncrasies as underscoring a witty textual and musical hybridity.”
The prize carries a monetary award that may be used to support further research. The three winners will be honored with a dinner hosted by Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
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