2 U. faculty awarded Dan David Prize

Two Princeton faculty members were named recipients of the 2015 Dan David Prize last month.

Both history professor emeritus Peter Brown and sociology lecturer Alessandro Portelli were awarded in the “Retrieving the Past” category of the prize.

They will be honored at a May 17 ceremony at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

According to its website, the Dan David Prize is an international enterprise that awards grants in three categories for outstanding interdisciplinary research in the sciences and humanities. Award recipients receive a monetary prize of $1 million. Dan David Prize laureates must donate 10 percent of their reward to support the studies of their graduate or doctoral students.

Brown and Portelli did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and representatives from the Dan David Prize declined to comment beyond a press release.

Brown earned recognition for having written a series of works on late Greco-Roman and early Medieval history throughout his career. Although these topics are ancient, there are lessons to be drawn for modern day’s numerous sociopolitical controversies, he wrote in a prologue to his book, “The World of Late Antiquity.”

“Only the ancient world in its fateful last centuries could explain the world in which I myself lived — a Protestant in an Ireland dominated by a Roman Catholicism which claimed direct continuity with the post-Roman, medieval past, and a boy who looked always to the Middle East where his father worked and where the ancient monuments of Egypt and the ruined cities of Hellenistic and Roman times stood in the midst of what are now Muslim societies,” Brown wrote.

According to a press release issued by the Dan David Prize, Brown’s work is made exceptional by his incorporation of a variety of sources written in a variety of languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Syriac, ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Old Norse.

Brown is currently writing a book examining attitudes towards wealth and poverty in the late Roman Empire.

“There are few scholars in the world with the skills to tap such a range of sources, and fewer still who can exploit them with such singular and prolific imagination,” the press release noted.

History professor Jack Tannous called Brown a supremely generous doctoral supervisor for his graduate work.

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“I remember I once gave him several hundred pages of written material on a Monday and he had them back to me with detailed comments by Wednesday,” Tannous said, praising Brown for genuinely caring about students. “People come from all over the world to Princeton to visit him, almost like making a pilgrimage. I honestly don’t know how he handles the volume of correspondence he gets and the number of visitors he receives.”

Tannous added that the breadth of Brown’s reading and the breadth of his experience are astounding.

“I mean, as a child, he was blessed by Haile Selaisse and the people he’s met and discussed and debated ideas with range from Michel Foucault to Isaiah Berlin to Joseph Ratzinger,” Tannous said.

Vanderbilt University history professor David Allen Michelson GS '07 described Brown, his Ph.D. supervisor, as “one of the first scholars who created the study of late antiquity,” which falls between the classical periods of Greek and Rome and the early Medieval Period.

Prior to Brown’s work, this transition period in history was often overlooked, Michelson added.

Portelli is a visiting professor and lecturer in the University’s sociology department. His work uses an ethnographic approach and focuses on the practice of oral history.

“Oral history, then, is primarily a listening art … It is not only about the event. It is about the place and meaning of the event within the lives of the tellers,” Portelli explained in his paper “A Dialogical Relationship: An Approach to Oral History.” “Orality, then, is not just the vehicle of information but also a component of its meaning.”

One of his influential works, “The Death of Luigi Trastulli,” centers on the 1949 killing of a trade union protester by presenting a conflicting mosaic of print reports. Portelli also analyzed various acts of Nazi atrocity against both Jews and non-Jews. According to a press release by the Dan David Prize, Portelli’s works are a reminder that printed evidence is not more immune to falsehood than oral sources.

“No one has written more thoughtful, insightful, methodological reflections on the promise and perils of oral history. Portelli makes sense of its living sources as no other historian has done,” the Dan David Award press release stated.

“It is hard for me to pinpoint ways in which doing oral history has changed me: I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years, and I guess I can say that most of who and what I am is a result of this work. Perhaps, the most important thing I’ve learned is respecting the agendas of other people. I hope I’ve been able to apply this lesson not only in oral history work but also in my own life,” Portelli wrote in “A Dialogical Relationship: An Approach to Oral History.”

Sociology professor Mitchell Duneier described Portelli as the leading practitioner of oral history today. His methodological and theoretical writings have set the new standards for collecting and representing the complexity of memory, Duneier added.

Duneier said he met Portelli in Rome two years ago while teaching a global seminar called “The Global Ghetto,” which examined the idea of the ghetto as a metaphor from 16th century Rome and Venice to the present.

“Professor Portelli is the author of an important oral history on the Nazi massacres of Jews in Rome,” Duneier said.

Portelli is a co-instructor of SOC 205: Sociology From E Street: Bruce Springsteen’s America. When Portelli learned from Duneier about the course on Bruce Springsteen, he disclosed that he had been the translator for many of Bruce Springsteen’s albums and made arrangements to co-instruct the course.