The Washington University International Humanities Prize is awarded biennially to a person who has contributed significantly to the humanities through a body of work that has dramatically impacted how we understand the human condition. In 2022, the humanities center will honor cartoonist-memoirist Alison Bechdel. Past recipients are as follows: Sir David Adjaye (2018), Bill T. Jones (2016), Marjorie Perloff (2014), Ken Burns (2012), Francine Prose (2010), Michael Pollan (2008), Orhan Pamuk (2006).
The prize amount was increased to $50,000 in 2023. The recipient gives a public lecture on the Washington University campus, as well as interacting with students and community members throughout their visit.
A selection committee constituted by Washington University humanities faculty convenes to review nominated candidates and their body of work. The director of the Center for the Humanities invites the selected recipient approximately one year prior to the award ceremony. Faculty and student engagement with the recipient’s work is encouraged (including reading groups and special course work). During the visit, the recipient interacts with a wide range of members of the campus community, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and senior administration.
International Humanities Prize 2022: Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel. Photo by Elena Seibert.
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel, known for her groundbreaking, richly layered depictions of queer life and family relationships, will receive the 2022 International Humanities Prize from Washington University in St. Louis.
Awarded by the university’s Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences, the biennial prize honors the lifetime work of a noted scholar, writer or artist who has made a significant and sustained contribution to the world of arts and letters. Bechdel will receive the prize, which is accompanied by a $25,000 award, during a public ceremony November 9 in the Clark-Fox Forum in WashU’s Hillman Hall. (The event is free and open to the public.)
Born and raised in central Pennsylvania, Bechdel earned an associate’s degree from Bard College at Simon’s Rock in 1979 and a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Oberlin College in 1981.
In 1983, Bechdel launched the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which she memorably described as “half op-ed column and half endless, serialized Victorian novel,” in the feminist newspaper WomaNews. Eventually syndicated to dozens of independent gay and lesbian publications, it ran continuously for 25 years.
Her 2006 memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic chronicles Bechdel’s youth in the small town of Beech Creek, where her closeted father, Bruce, taught English and operated a funeral home. He also conducted numerous affairs with men, a fact Bechdel only learned after coming out herself. Filled with mythological and literary references — from Icarus to James Joyce and Rita Mae Brown — the book explores their fraught relationship with warmth and empathy, in a visual style marked by blue and gray washes.
Bechel published a second memoir, Are You My Mother?, in 2012. A companion to Fun Home, the book explores the author’s relationship with her mother, Helen — an amateur actor whose own creative ambitious were stymied, in part, by her unhappy marriage — while also contemplating the work of Virginia Woolf, Dr. Seuss and, especially, pioneering psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, among others. Bechdel’s most recent book is The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), which recounts her lifelong pursuit, if not quite apprehension, of physical exercise.
Bechdel’s numerous honors include a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship as well as Eisner, Inkpot, Lambda, Harvey and American Library Association awards. In 2015, the Broadway adaptation of Fun Home, featuring book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori, won the Tony Award for Best Musical. In 2017, Bechdel was named cartoonist laureate of Vermont.
Past Recipients
International Humanities Prize 2018: Sir David Adjaye
Sir David Adjaye OBE is recognized as a leading architect of his generation. Adjaye was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents and his influences range from contemporary art, music and science to African art forms and the civic life of cities. In 1994, he set up his first office, where his ingenious use of materials and his sculptural ability established him as an architect with an artist’s sensibility and vision. In 2017, Adjaye was recently knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for services to Architecture, following the previous award of an OBE in 2007. The same year, he was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people of the year by TIME magazine. He has additionally received the Design Miami/ Artist of the Year title in 2011, the Wall Street Journal Innovator Award in 2013 and the 2016 Panerai London Design Medal from the London Design Festival.
International Humanities Prize 2016: Bill T. Jones
Bill T. Jones, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts and Artistic Director/Co-Founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, is a multi-talented artist, choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer who has received major honors ranging from the 2013 National Medal of Arts to a 1994 MacArthur “Genius” Award and Kennedy Center Honors in 2010. Mr. Jones was honored with the 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award, recognized as Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2010, inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009 and named “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure” by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2000. His ventures into Broadway theater resulted in a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography in the critically acclaimed FELA!, the new musical co-conceived, co-written, directed and choreographed by Mr. Jones. He also earned a 2007 Tony Award for Best Choreography in Spring Awakening as well as an Obie Award for the show’s 2006 off-Broadway run. His choreography for the off-Broadway production of The Seven earned him a 2006 Lucille Lortel Award.
International Humanities Prize 2014: Majorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost American critics of contemporary poetry. She teaches courses and writes on 20th- and now 21st-century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. She is professor emerita of English at Stanford University and the Florence R. Scott Professor of English Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
International Humanities Prize 2012: Ken Burns
Ken Burns has been making films for more than 30 years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Burns has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made. A December 2002 poll conducted by Real Screen Magazine listed The Civil War as second only to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North as the “most influential documentary of all time,” and named Burns and Flaherty as the most influential documentary makers of all time. In March 2009, David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun wrote, “Burns is not only the greatest documentarian of the day, but also the most influential filmmaker period. That includes feature filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. I say that because Burns not only turned millions of persons onto history with his films, he showed us a new way of looking at our collective past and ourselves.” The late historian Stephen Ambrose said of his films, “More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source.” Burns’ films have won 12 Emmy Awards and two Oscar nominations, and in September of 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, he was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
International Humanities Prize 2010: Francine Prose
Francine Prose has been a prolific and much-honored author of both novels and non-fiction books. Her fiction include A Changed Man, Blue Angel, Hunters and Gatherers, Bigfoot Dreams, Primitive People, and Guided Tours of Hell. Among her nonfiction works are Sicilian Odyssey, Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins, and Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and numerous other publications. She is a contributing editor at Harper's, writes regularly on art for The Wall Street Journal, and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
International Humanities Prize 2008: Michael Pollan
Pollan is the author of five books, most recently the bestseller In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (2008), which examines the seemingly simply yet often difficult question of what, from the perspective of health, to eat. His previous volume, Omnivore’s Dilemma, was named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the James Beard Foundation’s 2007 award for best food writing.
International Humanities Prize 2006: Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk’s books have been translated into 61 languages, including Georgian, Malayan, Czech, Danish, Japanese, Catalan, as well as English, German and French. Pamuk has been awarded The Peace Prize, considered the most prestigious award in Germany in the field of culture, in 2005. In the same year, Snow received the Le Prix Médicis étranger, the award for the best foreign novel in France. Again in 2005, Pamuk was honored with the Richarda Huck Prize, awarded every three years since 1978 to personalities who “think independently and act bravely.” In the same year, he was named among world’s 100 intellectuals by Prospect magazine. In 2006, TIME magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential persons of the world. In September 2006, he won the Le Prix Méditerranée étranger for his novel Snow. Pamuk is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and holds an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University. He is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the Chiese Academy for Social Sciences. Pamuk gives lectures once a year in Columbia University. Lastly, he received the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the second youngest person to receive the award in its history.
