“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.