Ribuffo Prize Announcement

Heartiest congratulations to the winner of this year’s Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. intellectual history: Charles Petersen, for “Meritocracy in America, 1885-2007” (Harvard University, 2020).

The Ribuffo Prize was launched last year and is named in recognition of Leo’s exemplary teaching and mentorship during his long and illustrious career at George Washington University.

Here is what the prize committee wrote about Petersen’s extraordinary work:

“In the meticulously researched dissertation, “Meritocracy in America, 1885-2007,” Charles Petersen tracks the evolution and devolution of this ideal. Meant to replace an old elite with a more egalitarian evaluative technique, meritocracy took hold in the groves of academe, entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley, and Cold War discourses about political economy. Petersen excavates the “hidden injuries” of meritocracy in a post-industrial capitalist order, by showing the way adherents legitimated economic inequality, reinscribed racialized and gendered forms of inequality, and restructured subjectivity. Ambitious in scope, innovative in conception, Petersen’s work intervenes in multiple histories to reveal the contexts, meaning, significance, and perils of meritocracy.”

Samuel Klug also received an Honorable Mention for his dissertation, “Making the Internal Colony: Black Internationalism, Development, and the Politics of Colonial Comparison in the United States, 1940-1975” (Harvard University, 2020). The prize committee noted:

“In his dissertation, “Making the Internal Colony: Black Internationalism, Development, and the Politics of Colonial Comparison in the United States, 1940-1975, Samuel Stearns Klug exhibits powerful writing and a mastery of multiple literatures. This dissertation provides strong analysis of how ideas circulate and convincing rereadings of classic texts from the Black Power movement. Klug offers an important de-centering of the Cold War in showing the significance of the “internal colony” metaphor across multiple fields of formal thought and policymaking.”

Congratulations to Charles and Samuel, and many thanks to the members of the prize committee: Chair Lisa Szefel (Pacific University), Michael Brown (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Ethan Schrum (Azusa Pacific University).