Michael Cook, the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies, has been awarded the 2020 Middle East Medievalists Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of long and distinguished contributions to the fields of Islamic and Middle East studies and to the promotion of the profession at large.
A Princeton faculty member since 1986, Cook is a highly regarded Islamicist who has made major contributions to the intellectual history of the medieval Islamic world. His research is primarily concerned with the formation of Islamic civilization and the role played by religious values in that process.
Cook’s book “Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought” won the 2001 Middle East Studies Association Albert Hourani Book Prize, which recognizes the best in Middle East studies scholarship, and the 2002 Kuwait British Friendship Society Book Prize. Cook was general editor of “The New Cambridge History of Islam,” which won the 2011 American Historical Association Waldo G. Leland Prize.
Cook is a recipient of the Balzan Prize for Islamic Studies (2019), the Holberg Prize (2014), the Farabi International Award in the Humanities and Islamic Sciences (2008), and the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2002). At Princeton, he has received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016) and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (2006).
He is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, a member of the American Philosophical Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.