February 6th 2025 in News

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, Ada Ferrer, to chair 2025 Cundill History Prize

Ada Ferrer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, previously a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, will chair the 2025 jury.

A Cundill History Prize finalist in 2022 for Cuba: An American History, Ferrer is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. Having recently started her role at Princeton, Ferrer taught in the History Department and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University for almost 30 years, from 1995 to 2024.

Born in Cuba and based in the US, she is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University.

Ada Ferrer said: “Historians know that history is everywhere. The Cundill History Prize does an extraordinary service by shining a spotlight on the best of history—compellingly written, deeply researched, and urgently relevant for understanding the world and its present. I look forward to working with my fellow jurors, to reading great history, and to bringing to it the attention it so richly deserves.”

Ferrer will chair a panel of world-class historians, which will be announced in April. The shortlist and finalists chosen by the jury will be revealed in September, followed by the winner announcement in late October as part of the annual Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal.

Submissions opened on 6th January and have already reached record numbers at the halfway stage. Publishers have until Friday, 28th February to submit their best works of history for consideration. Administered by McGill University, the prize is open to authors from anywhere in the world, regardless of nationality or place of residence, and to books translated into English.

As of 2020, the Prize has transitioned to a fully digital submissions process. For further information, eligibility details and to submit, please visit: www.cundillprize.com/submit.

A prize of US$75,000 is awarded to the winner, making the Cundill History Prize the largest purse for a work of non-fiction written in or translated into English, with US$10,000 awarded to each of the two runners-up. The prize is awarded to a work of outstanding history writing and is open to books from anywhere in the world, regardless of the author’s nationality.

The 2025 winner will join an alumni list of world-leading historians and authors: Kathleen DuVal (2024); Tania Branigan (2023), Tiya Miles (2022), Marjoleine Kars (2021), Camilla Townsend (2020), Julia Lovell (2019), Maya Jasanoff (2018), Daniel Beer (2017), Thomas W. Laqueur (2016), Susan Pedersen (2015), Gary Bass (2014), Anne Applebaum (2013), Stephen Platt (2012), Sergio Luzzatto (2011), Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010), Lisa Jardine (2009), Stuart B. Schwartz (2008).

Last year the jury, chaired by Rana Mitter, awarded the prize to Kathleen DuVal, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House). Mitter praised the winning book, commenting: “One of the most wonderful things about Native Nations by Kathleen DuVal is that it brings unexpected and, to many readers, unknown aspects of that story, to prominence. She does this by bringing in historians and analysts of the Indigenous American experience from within their own scholarship, bringing the story to the forefront of our wider understanding in this huge sweeping history that starts more than 1000 years ago and brings us up to the present day.”

The two fellow finalists in 2024 were Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, for Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Picador), and Dylan C. Penningroth, a professor of law and history at the University of California, for Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright Publishing).