Leah DeVun (Columbia History, Ph.D. 2004) awarded the Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America
The Medieval and Renaissance Studies program is delighted to announce that a recent book by a Columbia doctoral alumna in History has received one of the foremost book prizes in medieval studies. The Medieval Academy of America has awarded the Haskins Medal to Leah DeVun (History, Ph.D. 2004), The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021).
The Haskins Medal is awarded annually by the Medieval Academy of America for a distinguished book in the field of medieval studies. It is the Academy's most prestigious award and is usually granted to a relatively senior scholar for a work of their maturity. First presented in 1940, the award honors Charles Homer Haskins, the noted medieval historian, who was a founder of the Medieval Academy and its second President.
De Vun, who is Professor of History at Rutgers University, is the third Columbia-affiliated medieval historian to be honored with the Haskins Medal in recent years. The 2017 awardee was Joel Kaye's A History of Balance, 1250-1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and the 2011 awardee was Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).