“Caroline Bynum truly merits Columbia’s highest form of academic recognition,” said Provost and Dean of Faculties Jonathan Cole ’64. Praising Bynum as “one of the world’s great historians,” he cited her “all-too-rare ability to combine scholarly erudition with conceptual innovation.”

Bynum teaches all aspects of late antique and medieval history—to both undergraduates and graduate students. Her research for the last 10 years has focused on the history of the body. Her most recent book, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, published by Columbia University Press, was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize for the best book on “the intellectual and cultural condition of man” from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Jacques Barzun [’27] Prize from the American Philosophical Society for the best book in cultural history.