Dean Philip S. Khoury of the School of Humanities and Social Science has announced that the 1992 Levitan Prize in the Humanities has been awarded to Peter C. Perdue, associate professor of history and head of the History faculty.
The $20,000 prize was established through a gift from James A. Levitan, a 1945 MIT graduate in chemistry, a member of the MIT Corporation and a senior partner in the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom of New York City. The prize, first awarded in 1990, supports innovative and creative scholarship in the humanities by faculty members in the School of Humanities and Social Science.
Previous recipients were Professor Barry R. Posen of the Department of Political Science and Professor Joshua Cohen, who has joint appointments in the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy and Political Science.
Professor Perdue, a leading specialist in modern Chinese history, will use the prize to continue research into the Chinese conquest of Central Asia from 1680 to 1760. A past holder of the Ford International Career Development Chair, Professor Perdue received his doctorate from Harvard in 1981 and has been at MIT since 1980. His publications include Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 AD (1987).
A version of this article appeared in the March 4, 1992 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 36, Number 22).
