MacMillan Center Awards Yale Faculty Baldwin and Ng with 2026 International Book Prizes
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies has awarded its distinguished International Book Prizes to two Yale faculty members, recognizing outstanding scholarship on the institutions that defend democracy and the forms that shaped the Renaissance built environment.
Established in 2004 to honor two former directors of the MacMillan Center, the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize celebrates the most outstanding book by a Yale ladder faculty member, and the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize honors the best first book by a Yale ladder faculty member. Recipients receive a research appointment at the MacMillan Center along with funding to support their continued scholarship.
Kate Baldwin, Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs, received the 2026 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for Faith in Democracy: The Logic of Church Advocacy for Liberal Democratic Institutions in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Baldwin asks who stands up for democracy under difficult conditions, and finds an answer across dozens of sub-Saharan African countries in the Protestant and Catholic churches. Where nationalist and heavy-handed ruling regimes have moved against them — often in contests over control of mission schools, long a principal source of literacy, civic exposure, and national leadership — churches have proven potent institutions that are not easily suppressed.
In defending themselves, Baldwin shows that they have advanced a broader case for fair elections, separation of powers, and rights of conscience and expression that amounts to a liberal democratic program, and they have frequently prevailed. The prize committee noted that her account "jars against the conventional view" that church establishments are natural enemies of democracy, praising the book's "enormous knowledge, a sharp eye for theory," and its command of survey and other evidence.
Morgan Ng, Assistant Professor of the History of Art, received the 2026 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 2025). Ng approaches military architecture from an unexpected angle, tracing the deep structural kinships between Italian fortifications and other domains of sixteenth-century art and design: terraced gardens, palaces, and urban infrastructure.
His concept of "cognate technologies" offers a framework for recovering the shared lineages and underlying functions that connect artifacts otherwise distinct in style and purpose. Drawing on archival manuscripts, printed treatises, photographs, and drawings, Ng reconstructs a sustained dialogue among art, design, and engineering — from the long afterlife of Archimedes' inventions to the fortification work that Michelangelo, Donato Bramante, and Leonardo da Vinci undertook alongside military commanders.
The committee praised the book's "depth of analysis and remarkable scholarship," which brings "conceptual and practical unity to diverse domains from art to everyday life."
Ng is abroad this fall on a research fellowship; his colleague Joanna Fiduccia, Assistant Professor of History of Art, accepted the prize on his behalf.
Last year, the MacMillan Center awarded the 2025 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize to Lauren Benton, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History and Professor of Law, for They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press), and the 2025 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize to Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Assistant Professor of English, for Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press).