Professor of History Andrew Lipman has been named a recipient of the 2026 Dan David Prize, an annual collection of awards that provides exceptional scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines with $300,000 to support future projects.
“I’m honored and truly overjoyed to receive the Dan David Prize, which will be a huge help as I begin work on my next book,” said Lipman, who began teaching at Barnard College in 2015. “While I'm still in the early stages of research, it is set to be a fresh look at colonial New York City under British rule, allowing me to explore the origins of this city and its dynamic social world.”
This year, nine historians and archaeologists, including Lipman, were selected by an international committee of experts that included peers at the University of Oxford, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Sciences Po in Paris.
The selection committee noted Lipman’s “imaginative approach to the history of the early Americas” and his deft navigation of “profound archival silences to recover Indigenous voices through a unique blend of creative biography and environmental history.”
The prize, which was founded in 2001 and reimagined to focus on the historical disciplines in 2021, distributes up to nine annual awards in celebration of “scholars and practitioners whose work illuminates the human past and can enrich public discourse with a deeper understanding of history.” It is the largest prize for early to midcareer scholars in the field.
Lipman’s area of specialization is the Atlantic World and North America, with research that has earned support from the American Philosophical Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Huntington Library. 
His first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015), provided new insight into colonial violence in the seventeenth-century American Northeast, earning the Bancroft Prize in American History.
The next book project will be his third, following the acclaimed biography of Squanto, the Native American interpreter and guide often associated with the first Thanksgiving. Squanto: A Native Odyssey (Yale University Press, 2024) earned four major awards, including the PROSE Award in Biography from the Association of American Publishers.