Matthew Frye Jacobson, who has been awarded the 2025 Bode-Pearson Prize from the American Studies Association. The most prestigious prize awarded by the American Studies Association, the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize recognizes the outstanding achievement of an individual who has dedicated a lifetime of work to the mission and values of American studies. Previous winners have included Ralph Henry Gabriel, Bernice Johnson Reagon, John Hope Franklin, and Lisa Lowe. The prize will be announced at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Studies Association.
Professor Jacobson is Sterling Professor of American Studies & History and Professor of Black Studies here at Yale. He has established a tremendous record of achievement in American Studies, authoring eight books on race, politics, and culture in the United States. He also served as President of the American Studies Association in 2012-2013. In his presidential address, Professor Jacobson reminded us that as scholars located in the US, we are tasked with the interdisciplinary work of making sense of our own locatedness within a history of plunder and disposession. “As the contours of history are layered rather than merely sequential,” he said, “white primacy, righteousness, and an appetite for conquest remain discernible in a thousand big and small ways.” And, in this context, part of our work is to reclaim the mission of higher education:
American studies is especially well placed to document, recount, and situate the history of the institution, from the first land grants and the professionalization of the disciplines to the current trend of corporatization that menaces the university’s core mission; and in conjunction with organizations like the ACLS and the AAUP we must fight for that mission at every turn. Mentoring relationships are not market relationships; students are not clients or customers and ideas are not commodities; knowledge cannot be manufactured, packaged, and distributed as if it were a snack food; and—unequivocally—academic freedom and the rights of political expression are not divisible.
It is a good time to hold onto this lesson—one among many of the teachings Professor Jacobson has offered in his writings, his courses, and his generous public service.