The Renaissance Society of America is pleased to announce the recipients of the RSA awards and prizes for 2021. These scholars will be honored at the Society’s virtual Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, 13 April 2021, at 4:00 p.m. (EDT). All RSA members will receive an invitation to join the Zoom event.
The RSA’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award honors a lifetime of uncompromising devotion to the highest standard of scholarship accompanied by exceptional achievement in Renaissance studies. The RSA Board of Directors is delighted to announce that the recipient of the Paul Oskar Kristeller Award for 2021 is William J. Kennedy, Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Cornell University. Because we were unable to properly celebrate the recipient of the 2020 award due to Covid and the cancellation of our Philadelphia meeting last spring, we will also honor the immediate past recipient of this award, Patricia Fortini Brown, Professor Emerita of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.
The honor of presenting the RSA’s Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture at the Annual Meeting to be held in Dublin, Ireland, in March 2022 has been conferred on Barbara E. Mundy, Professor of Art History at Fordham University.
The RSA’s William Nelson Prize for the best article published in Renaissance Quarterly during 2020 has been awarded to Chloe Ireton for her article, “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire” (73.4, Winter 2020). Chloe Ireton is Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500–1800 at University College London.
The RSA awards the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize for the best book in Renaissance studies. The recipient of the 2021 Gordan Prize, for a book published between 1 July 2019 and 30 June 2020, is Sharon T. Strocchia. She is the author of Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019). Sharon Strocchia is Professor in the History Department of Emory University.
The recipient of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Book Prize in Renaissance Venetian Studies for 2021 is Jodi Cranston, for Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice (Penn State University Press, 2019). This award is for a book in Venetian studies published between 1 July 2018 and 30 June 2020. Jodi Cranston is Professor of Renaissance Art at Boston University.
The RSA’s Digital Innovation Award recognizes excellence in digital projects that support the study of the Renaissance. This year the prize is awarded to the English Broadside Ballad Archive, a project directed by Patricia Fumerton, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Honorable mention for the Digital Innovation Award goes to the Tasso in Music Project, directed by Emiliano Ricciardi, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
We hope you will join us online on April 13 as we honor the recipients of these awards and prizes, as well as the recipients of RSA research fellowships, recognized here on the RSA website.
Congratulations to all of our winners!
