Michael Cook chosen for Mellon award

Michael Cook , the Cleveland Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, has been selected by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as one of five winners of its Distinguished Achievement Award. The awards, in their second year, are intended to honor scholars who have made significant contributions to the humanities and to provide the recipients and their institutions with resources to deepen and extend humanistic research.

The three-year awards, amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, aim to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation's intellectual life. In contrast to other notable academic award programs that benefit the individual scholar exclusively, the Distinguished Achievement Awards are designed to recognize the interdependence of scholars and their institutions. Accordingly, while this grant program recognizes the achievements of individuals, the grants themselves will support specific programs of activities that will enhance scholarship and teaching more broadly at the recipients' institutions.

Cook, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1986, is widely considered among the most outstanding Islamicists in America today. He has made major contributions to the intellectual history of the medieval Islamic world. His works on Muhammad and early Islamic theology have become classics.

Cook's recently published pioneering study of the interaction between morality and authority in Islamic belief and thought has garnered praise throughout the field and beyond. His scholarship draws upon a wide range of medieval and modern legal, literary and philosophical sources from across the lands and languages of the Islamic world.

The full story is available in a news release.

Contact: Eric Quinones (609) 258-3601