Summer 2014
Around the Quads
In Lumine Tuo
KATZNELSON: Ira Katznelson ’66, the Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, was awarded the 2014 Bancroft Prize for his most recent book, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, in which he exposes the racial politics that enabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt to secure Congressional support for many New Deal measures.
The prize, which was established at Columbia in 1948 with a bequest from Frederic Bancroft, a preeminent historian, librarian, author and Columbia lecturer, is considered one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history. It is awarded annually by the University trustees to two authors of distinguished works in American history or diplomacy. Ari Kelman, a professor of history at UC Davis, also received the award this year for his book A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek.
AXEL: University Professor Richard Axel ’67 has been elected to The Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of science, as a foreign member. Axel, a professor in the Medical Center’s Departments of Neuroscience; of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics; and of Pathology and Cell Biology, has headed multiple studies in neuroscience and gene transfer techniques.
He is a member of The Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and of The Kavli Institute for Brain Science and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Along with Linda Buck, Axel was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2004 for a series of pioneering studies that clarified how the sense of smell works.