NES Professor Cook awarded $1.5 M in Mellon research grant

Near Eastern Studies professor Michael Cook is still unsure how he will spend the $1.5 million he won for his research on Islam.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced late last week that Cook is one of five winners of its second annual Distinguished Achievement Awards, which honor special achievements in the humanities and provide grants of up to $1.5 million over three years for further work.

Cook said he has not yet had time to decide how he will use the grant, adding that he is taking suggestions from colleagues and friends and collecting them in a folder that he will examine next month during the winter recess.

"There are some books that I very much want to write," he said. "There are some events I'd like to organize, getting younger scholars together in certain areas."

Cook first learned of this honor several weeks ago — in a letter.

He opened the letter from the foundation thinking that it was a routine business communication, he said.

"I read the first two lines and I sort of blinked . . . and thought 'This can't be real,' " he said.

He looked at the rest of the day's mail before reexamining the letter and recognizing its significance, he said.

He was unaware that he had been nominated for the award by Patricia Crone, a professor of Islamic history at the Institute for Advanced Study.

The award honors scholars who have made significant contributions to the humanities and gives them funds to teach, do research and provide resources for scholarship at their institutions, according to the Mellon Foundation's website.

Cook's colleagues lauded his achievements and said the honor was much-deserved.

"He has really been in the vanguard of this field for a long time," said Andras Hamori '61, chair of the Near Eastern Studies program. "He has written many books, some of which have put forward highly original views of the beginnings of Islamic history and others that have been highly original works on the origins of Muslim theology."

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Michael Doran, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies, also praised Cook.

He is "one of the most extraordinary people working in the humanities on the Princeton campus," Doran said. Because Cook "works on subjects that aren't particularly accessible to the wider public," the award is especially significant, he said.

"It's a well-deserved recognition not just for Professor Cook, but also for the Near Eastern Studies program," he added.

One of Cook's studies, "Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought," published in 2000, is especially notable, Hamori said.

"What this book does in examining the relations between ethical resources and authority throughout Islamic history . . . opens up a field that has not really been examined before," he said.

Last year, in the inaugural year of the Distinguished Achievement Awards, the Mellon Foundation honored two University faculty members, history professor Peter Brown and philosophy professor Alexander Nehamas GS '71.

The other recipients of this year's awards are: Sheila Fitzpatrick, a history professor at the University of Chicago; Michael McCormick, a medieval history professor at Harvard University; Jerome McGann, an English professor at the University of Virginia; and Susan Wolf, a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.