Hiett Prize


The Hiett Prize in the Humanities is an annual award aimed at identifying candidates who are in the early stages of careers devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise and has a significant public component related to contemporary culture.
The opposite of a lifetime achievement award, the Hiett Prize seeks to encourage future leaders in the humanities by 1) recognizing their early accomplishment and their potential and 2) assisting their ongoing work through a cash award of $50,000.
The Hiett Prize was endowed by Kim Hiett Jordan, a Lifetime Board Member of the Dallas Institute, to honor her parents, who inspired in her a lifelong love of learning.

Hiett Prize in the Humanities Award Winners

Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson (2019)

Jessica Hooten Wilson is Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas in the Classical Education and Humanities Graduate Program. She is the author of three books: Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov, which received a 2018 Christianity Today book of the year award; Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence; and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. She is co-editor of the volume Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West, a collection of essays on the legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Currently, she is preparing Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? for publication.

Dr. Christopher J. Lebron (2018)

Dr. Christopher Lebron is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fields of Social Theory and Political Philosophy. His work currently focuses on political philosophy, social theory, the philosophy of race, and democratic ethics. His first book, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice In Our Time, published in 2013 by Oxford University Press, won the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize. His next book, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of An Idea, will be published in October 2018, also by Oxford UP, and presents an intellectual history of the Black Lives Matter movement, tracing its origins and connecting it to the long tradition of the struggle for freedom and equal rights for African Americans that includes such figures as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor Lebron writes articles and book reviews regularly for such publications as The New York Times, the Boston Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Dr. James Matthew Wilson (2017)

2017 Hiett Prize in the Humanities Recipient, Dr. James Matthew Wilson has been on a spiritual and intellectual quest since his undergraduate days at the University of Michigan: to discover for himself—and to recover for Western culture—the sense of purpose and meaning largely disavowed and abandoned in our skeptical age. As he puts it, the fruits of his work thus far “are my effort to draw out the implications for our lives of the essential truth, goodness, and beauty of reality as a whole.”After earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Irish Studies from Notre Dame University, he began his tenure at Villanova University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Religion and Literature. A widely published, award-winning poet, scholar, and public intellectual, James has written numerous essays and articles and several books, including The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition and Some Permanent Things, a collection of his published poems.

Alia Malek (2016)">Alia Malek">Alia Malek (2016)

2016 Hiett Prize Winner, Alia Malek was born in the U.S. of Syrian parents who planned to return to their homeland but instead began an unplanned life in diaspora as immigrants. Alia earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Johns Hopkins and a Juris Doctorate at Georgetown University Law Center. For several years her legal work in civil rights took her to Washington, the West Bank, and Lebanon. In 2006, she received a master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University and entered her writing career in earnest. After living and writing anonymously for two years in Damascus, Alia returned to the U.S. for the launch of Al Jazeera America. She is author of A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Re-told Through Arab American Lives and editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustices. Her book The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria was published in 2017.

Dr. Scott Samuelson (2015)

Dr. Scott Samuelson studied philosophy at Grinnell College and Emory University.  Since 2000 he has taught at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa.  In 2014 he was named Distinguished Humanities Educator by the Community College Humanities Association.  Inspired by his students, he wrote his first book The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone, which has been well received not just by prominent reviewers but by numerous non-philosophers who found their philosophical voice with its help.  The book is currently being translated into Chinese and Portuguese.  Samuelson also writes movie reviews for Little Village and hosts Ethical Perspectives on the News, a Sunday-morning talk show on KCRG, the local ABC affiliate. For a decade he moonlighted as a sous-chef at Simone's Plain and Simple, a French restaurant on a gravel road.  He's published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philosopher’s Magazine, and Christian Century.  His article “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers” in The Atlantic has been widely circulated.  He's been interviewed on NPR and given various public lectures and talks, including a TEDx talk “How Philosophy Can Save Your Life.”  On top of his job at Kirkwood, he teaches philosophy at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center.  He's currently working on his second book, Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering.

[Jared Farmer] (2014)

Dr. Jared Farmer is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. Through writing and photography, he illuminates the hidden histories of landscapes and habitats.
Farmer earned a B.A. from Utah State University, an M.A. from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape won five prizes, including the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best-written non-fiction book on an American theme, a literary award that honors the “union of the historian and the artist.”
His latest book, Trees in Paradise: A California History, received a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from Foundation for Landscape Studies. Farmer maintains a Facebook page devoted to the Golden State's treescape and dreamscape, and he tweets off and on.
Farmer frequently gives guest lectures and radio interviews. His essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as Science, Environmental History, Reviews in American History, High Country News, Western American Literature, and Religion Dispatches. He has also self-released three e-books, including The Image of Mormons: A Sourcebook for Teachers and Students.
Currently he is working on two book projects: Ancient Trees in Modern Times and The Aerial View.
For more information, visit Farmer's website, which includes photographic portfolios and occasional blog entries.

[William Deresiewicz] (2013)

Dr. William Deresiewicz is a full-time writer whose essays and commentaries about cultural issues, higher education, books, politics, and other subjects have gained international attention. His work has been translated into fifteen languages and anthologized in numerous books and college readers, and his essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” has been read over one million times. He has published two books—Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets and A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, which is currently under development as a television series. His third,, comes out in August 2014 from Free Press.
He is a contributing writer for The Nation and a contributing editor for The New Republic and The American Scholar, for which he wrote a weekly “All Points” blog on culture and society from 2011-2013. His essays and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Yorker online, and The London Review of Books. He was nominated for National Magazine Awards in 2008, 2009, and 2011 and won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona A. Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing in 2012.
He is a frequent speaker on college campuses, and his essay “Solitude and Leadership” has been taught across the US military, in the corporate world, at schools of business, and at the Aspen Institute. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was an English professor at Yale University from 1998-2008, where he taught courses in modern British fiction, the Great Books, Indian fiction, and writing. He returned to college life in Fall 2013, when he served as a William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. There, he led workshops on public writing for students and faculty and visited with students and classes. In 2015, he returned to the Claremont Colleges as the Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College.
He earned his B.A. in biology-psychology, M.A. in journalism, and Ph.D. in English all from Columbia University.
For more information about Dr. William Deresiewicz, visit his website.

[Elizabeth Samet] (2012)

Dr. Elizabeth D. Samet holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from Yale. She is a professor of English at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she has taught since 1997. Her books include Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers and the Progress of Consent in America,
1776-1898 and Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was named one of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2007. A new book, No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America, which will be released in November 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is also editing an anthology, Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, which will be published by Norton next spring.
Her essays and reviews have appeared in various venues, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. She has also appeared on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR, and the BBC World Service. Professor Samet was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, which helped support the research and writing of her current book project, Crimes of Odysseus: Imagining Postwar America, which traces mythologies of the war veteran in American culture, specifically in Hollywood cinema.

Diana Senechal (2011)

Dr. Diana Senechal holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale University, with a dissertation on Nikolai Gogol. Her translations of the Lithuanian poetry of Tomas Venclova have been published in two books: Winter Dialogue and The Junction. Her book Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture was released in January 2012 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group and was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2012 by Choice; a paperback edition appeared in March 2014. Her education writing has appeared in Education Week, The New Republic, Double X, American Educator, Educational Leadership, and several leading education blogs, including Gotham Schools, The Answer Sheet, Joanne Jacobs, The Core Knowledge Blog, and The Cronk of Higher Education. She also writes on her own blog. Her future projects include a study of the worship of change in American culture; an exploration of the teaching of Sophocles’ Antigone from coast to coast; and an analysis of Gogol's stories for a general audience.
Senechal has contributed to several education projects. She helped with the editing and documentation of Diane Ravitch's most recent book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. In December 2009, she served on the English Language Arts Work Team for the Common Core State Standards Initiative; in 2010 she was project writer and curriculum drafter for the Common Core Curriculum Mapping Project. In addition, she contributed to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's report The State of State Standards—and the Common Core—in 2010.
From 2005 to 2009, and from 2011 onward, Senechal has taught and served as curriculum adviser in New York City public schools. She teaches philosophy at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, & Engineering, and in February 2014 her students published the inaugural issue of a philosophy journal, CONTRARIWISE. She previously taught Russian as a graduate student at Yale and as a Mellon Fellow at Trinity College in Hartford.
Senechal has spoken on numerous radio programs and at venues around the U.S. In 2012, she delivered the principal address at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Schools of Music; in 2013, she was a keynote speaker and panelist at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. In April 2014, she took part in a discussion of solitude on BBC World Service's program The Forum.
She is a Fellow of the Dallas Institute and a member of PEN, ALSCW, and PLATO. In July 2011, she joined the faculty of the Dallas Institute's Sue Rose Summer Institute for Teachers.
In addition to writing and teaching, Dr. Senechal enjoys reading in various languages, playing cello, tackling unfamiliar subjects, rereading favorite literature, and memorizing poetry. She lives in Brooklyn.
For more information about Dr. Diana Senechal, visit her website.

Mark Oppenheimer (2010)

Dr. Mark Oppenheimer is a freelance writer, an editor, a lecturer in the English and Political Science departments as well as the Divinity School of Yale University, and the coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative. He received his B.A. in history from Yale in 1996 and earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies, also from Yale, in 2003, receiving the John Addison Porter Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. Dr. Oppenheimer is author of three books: Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture, Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America, and, most recently, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate. In 2003, he was the first Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes at Stanford University; he has also taught at Wesleyan, Hartford Seminary, and New York University. In 2010-2011 he taught creative writing at Wellesley College as the Robert Garis Visiting Fellow in Writing.
He presently writes a biweekly “Beliefs” column about religion for The New York Times, a column about fatherhood for The New Republic, and maintains a blog. His freelance writing on topics such as politics, urbanism, and family has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Slate, Details, Salon, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. In 2000 and 2001, Oppenheimer was religion writer for the Hartford Courant, and from 2004 to 2006 he was the editor of the New Haven Advocate, an alternative weekly paper. He is an editor of The New Haven Review and an occasional commentator on NPR.
His most recent publication is The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, an e-book published in a new series from The Atlantic about sex abuse in Zen Buddhism. He self-published an e-book titled Dan Savage: The First Gay Celebrity in 2012.
In the school year 2014-2015, Dr. Oppenheimer will be the Corcoran Visiting Professor of Jewish-Christian Relations at Boston College. He is currently writing about gender dynamics within the atheist and freethought movements and the problem of divorce in orthodox religious communities. He lives in New Haven, Conn., with his wife, four daughters, and two dogs.

James McWilliams">James E. McWilliams">James McWilliams (2009)

Dr. James E. McWilliams is a historian, writer, and Professor of History at Texas State University-San Marcos. In 2007-2008 he was an Associate Fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. His interests center on American history, with specializations in environmental, agricultural, and economic history. He is the author of five books: The Pecan: A History of America's Favorite Nut, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, Building the Bay Colony: Economy and Society in Early Massachusetts, and American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT.
In addition to writing academic books, McWilliams publishes frequently in the popular press, including The New York Times, Harper's, The Washington Post, Slate, The American Scholar, and The Texas Observer. He is a frequent contributor to Freakonomics.com, Conservation, Pacific Standard, Laika Magazine, and The Dodo, and from 2009-2012 he was an online columnist on food issues for The Atlantic Monthly. His literary non-fiction has appeared in The Millions, Quarterly Conversation and The New York Times Book Review. He also blogs regularly on his website.
Current projects include two books. One, tentatively titled A Graceful Distance: The Cultural Origins of Factory Farming in the United States, explores the transformation of the human-farm animal relationship that provided the cultural and psychological foundation for large-scale animal agriculture in the nineteenth century. The second, tentatively titled Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals, investigates the hidden ethical, environmental, and economic problems with small scale animal agriculture today, insisting that a plant-based diet is the most effective answer to the problems of industrial animal agriculture.
He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Georgetown University, an M.Ed. from Harvard University, an M.A. in American studies from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Austin with his wife, Leila Kempner, and two children.

David Greenberg (2008)

Dr. David Greenberg is Associate Professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. In Spring 2014 he was a Visiting Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in American political and cultural history. His first book, Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award, the American Journalism History Award, and Columbia University's Bancroft Dissertation Award. Calvin Coolidge, a biography for the American Presidents Series, published in December 2006, appeared on the Washington Post's list of best books of 2007. Presidential Doodles was widely reviewed and featured on CNN, NPR's “All Things Considered,” and CBS's “Sunday Morning.” He is currently working on a book project for W.W. Norton, tentatively titled Republic of Spin: Architects and Critics of the Modern Presidency, about the history of political spin. In 2010-2011, Professor Greenberg conducted research on this topic as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.
He has written for numerous scholarly and popular publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, The Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, and Daedalus. He was a regular contributor to the online magazine Slate, where he wrote the “History Lesson” column from 1998-2012 and other occasional reviews and essays. Formerly a full-time journalist, he served as Acting Editor and Managing Editor of The New Republic, where he remains a contributing editor.
In 2008, he was awarded the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. He has been recognized with award and fellowships from other organizations, including the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the White House Historical Association, and the Mrs. Giles R. Whiting Foundation.
He holds a BA, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in History from Yale University and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.

Tiya Miles">Tiya Alicia Miles">Tiya Miles (2007)

Dr. Tiya Miles is the former Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and professor in the Department of American Culture, Department of History, Department of Women Studies, and Native American Studies Program at the University of Michigan. She previously taught in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and creative interests include African American and Native American interrelated and comparative histories ; Black, Native, and U.S. women's histories; and African American and Native American women's literature; as well as public history, public humanities, and environmental humanities. In 2011, she was one of 22 “geniuses” awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Her first book, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, was published by the University of California Press in 2005 and received four awards from historical, humanities, American studies, and Native American studies associations, including the Frederick Jackson Turner prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best first book in American history and recognition from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association as one of the ten most influential books of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Her second book, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010, and was awarded three historical book prizes including the best book award from the National Council on Public History. She is the co-editor, with Sharon P. Holland, of Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country.
Dr. Miles has appeared on various NPR programs to discuss her research and to comment on contemporary issues regarding race and American culture. She has written commentary for The New York Times, CNN In America, and the Huffington Post on issues ranging from Cherokee racial politics to Black History Month, to Detroit public land. She has also worked on a variety of public history projects, which can be seen on her website.
Tiya is the founder of ECO Girls—Environmental and Cultural Opportunities for Girls in Urban Southeast Michigan—which she developed in 2005 after becoming concerned with environmental issues and climate change following Hurricane Katrina. She received a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship in 2013 and used the fellowship to study environmental history at Montana State University.
She received her A.B. in Afro-American Studies from Harvard University, her M.A. in Women's Studies from Emory University, and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota.
For more information about Dr. Tiya Miles, visit her website.

Hilaire Kallendorf (2006)

Dr. Hilaire Kallendorf is Professor of Hispanic and Religious Studies at Texas A&M University, where she also directs the doctoral program for the Department of Hispanic Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at UCLA and an American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow. In addition to the 2006 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, she has been awarded a Howard Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship from Brown University along with other research grants from the Renaissance Society of America, the Bibliographical Society of America, the Ford Foundation, Spain's Ministry of Culture, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her research and teaching deal with many aspects of religious experience, especially as belief relates to literature and culture. She is the author of three academic monographs, Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain ; Conscience on Stage: The Comedia as Casuistry in Early Modern Spain ; and Sins of the Fathers: Moral Economies in Early Modern Spain. She is general editor of A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, which won the 2011 Bainton Book Prize for Reference Works from the Sixteenth Century Society, and co-author with Cliff Richey of a memoir, Acing Depression: A Tennis Champion's Toughest Match. She translated Spanish Baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo's Silvas into English and has coordinated a translation team for two volumes of poetry by living Chilean poet David Rosenmann-Taub. Her edited volume A Companion to Early Modern Hispanic Theater was selected for inclusion in the Renaissance Society of America's new Texts and Studies.
She has also published articles in peer-reviewed journals on such topics as self-exorcism, piety and pornography, ghosts, Taíno religious ceremonies, and Christian humanism in the Renaissance, as well as entries on Spain, Spanish Literature, Miguel de Cervantes, and Hispanic Mysticism for the Renaissance and Reformation edition of the Oxford Bibliographies Online. Most recently she was commissioned by the Renaissance Society of America to edit A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance.

Brad Gregory (2005)

Brad S. Gregory is Professor of History and Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2003. He also serves as Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. From 1996-2003 he taught at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. He was the recipient of two teaching awards at Stanford and has received three more at Notre Dame. He specializes in the history of Christianity in Europe during the Reformation era and on the long-term influence of the Reformation era on the modern world. Before teaching at Stanford, he earned his Ph.D. in history at Princeton University and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He also has two degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium as well as an M.A. in history from the University of Arizona.
Gregory's first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe Dr. Brad Gregory, received six book awards. He has also edited The Forgotten Writings of the Mennonite Martyrs and co-edited Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion. His most recent book is a wide-ranging reinterpretation of the making of the modern Western world entitled The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. In addition to a short book on why history matters and another about the relationships among different sorts of knowledge, he is currently working on a history of conceptions of human nature from the Middle Ages to the present, the tentative title of which is “Embodied Souls and Their Rivals.”
Outside his study and the classroom, Gregory is an avid road cyclist and sings bass in the Notre Dame Basilica Schola. He is a sports-loving calligrapher who appreciates fine food and good wine.