Awards & Scholarships

The National Association of Scholars upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.

Awards and Scholarships


  

The National Association of Scholars offers three awards and one scholarship. Awards are given out yearly or bi-yearly, while the Fraser Barron Memorial Scholarship is given out every year during the Spring semester to students studying renaissance history. For questions or submissions, please write to [email protected].

Click through the buttons below to see award and scholarship descriptions and past awardees.

The Sidney Hook Memorial Award was established in 1989 to honor the memory of Dr. Hook. It is granted to an individual for distinguished contributions to the defense of academic freedom and the integrity of academic life. Recipients of the Sidney Hook Memorial include:

James S. Coleman (1990)

Fang Li-Zhi (1991)

Donald Kagan (1994)

Wilcomb Washburn (1996)

Thomas Sowell (1997)

Gertrude Himmelfarb (1999)

Eugene Genovese (2001)

Harvey Mansfield (2002)

Stanley Rothman (2004)

Robert P. George (2006)

Ward Connerly (2009)

Midge Decter (2013)

The Peter Shaw Memorial Award was established to honor the memory of Professor Shaw who, at the time of his death, was the editor of Academic Questions and chairman of the NAS Board of Directors. It is given to recognize exemplary writing on issues pertaining to higher education and American intellectual culture. Recipients of the Peter Shaw Memorial Award include:

Herbert I. London (1996)

Mary Lefkowitz (1997)

John Ellis (1999)

Robert Conquest (2001)

Paul Hollander (2002)

Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom (2004)

Donald A. Downs (2006)

Victor Davis Hanson (2009)

Russell Nieli (2013)

Amy Wax (2018)

Heather Mac Donald (2019)

The Barry R. Gross Memorial Award was established in 1996 to honor the memory of Professor Gross who, at the time of his death, was NAS National Program Director and Treasurer. It is bestowed on an NAS member for outstanding service – through the medium of the organization or responsible citizenship – to the cause of academic reform. Recipients of the Barry R. Gross memorial award include:

David Mulroy (1996)

Alan Charles Kors (2001)

Norman Fruman and Jeremiah Reedy (2002)

Miro Todorovich (2004)

Candace de Russy (2006)

Carol Iannone (2009)

Lauren Noble (2013)

The Fraser Barron Memorial Scholarship in Renaissance & Western History supports scholarly research in rennaissance and western history, especially by subsidizing travel funds. The Scholarship may go to professors, graduate students, or, in exceptional circumstances, undergraduates.

Fraser Barron Memorial Scholars:

Eleanor Schneider (2018)

Research: English humanist education during the Reformation

Dr. Schneider received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2015, and was a Fellow at the Liberty Fund when she received the Scholarship. She used the scholarship to follow up on her dissertation research by exploring precisely how institutions of Catholic humanist education in England survived—or failed to survive—the financial, institutional, and religious stresses of the Protestant Reformation. She examined why parents sent their children to humanist schools; how teachers appealed to the broader society that funded schools and scholarships through a variety of funding mechanisms; how humanist schools were transformed by the double conversion from Catholic to Protestant and from local support to state support; and how the student population changed during the Reformation.

Dr. Schneider used the Scholarship to visit the archives of Durham Cathedral, Sedbergh School, and Christ Hospital of Horsham. These three institutions allowed her to include archival material from a monastic school (Durham Cathedral), a school that went through process of losing its endowment (Sedbergh school), and an entirely new Reformation-era foundation (Christ Hospital).

Janice Gunther Martin (2019)

Research: early modern Spanish science and medicine

Ms. Martin was a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame when she received the Scholarship. She used the scholarship to extend her dissertation research by investigating the reception of Renaissance Italian equestrian culture in the Spanish royal milieu, in order to examine the relationship between the Italian and the Spanish Renaissance. In the sixteenth century, the influential Neapolitan riding academy developed the precursor of dressage, and a groundbreaking treatise on equine anatomy was published in Venice in 1598. Vigorous Iberian equestrian and equine medical traditions tempered Italian influence in Spain, however: Spanish elites exercised a distinctive style of riding, and Spanish equine doctors published their own genre of medical treatises. She examined how Spaniards in such a context responded to Italian developments.

Ms. Martin used the Scholarship to visit the Real Biblioteca in Madrid, located in the Royal Palace. There she examined the marginalia of key Italian texts of horsemanship and anatomy for clues about what the readers found most interesting and useful, what they found objectionable, and why. She also consulted seventeenth-century manuscripts containing equine anatomical drawings in order to evaluate the influence of Italian equine anatomy in noble Spanish households.