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Professor Stuart M. McManus from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)’s Department of History has won the Dan David Prize, the largest history prize in the world. The prestigious award recognises outstanding scholarship that illuminates the past and seeks to anchor public discourse in a deeper understanding of history. Professor McManus is the first scholar from a university in Asia to win the prize since it was established in 2001.

“It was an unexpected honour to be named among this year’s Dan David Prize winners. This is a recognition of my work over the last decade or more. I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the University for all its support, and I look forward to contributing more to our understanding of the global Renaissance [c. 1350-1750] and East-West relations in the future. The award will also help support my ongoing efforts to apply digital approaches to the study of the human past at CUHK,” Professor McManus remarked.

The Dan David Prize’s committee praised Professor McManus as “a historian of the Renaissance writ large”. Professor McManus’s scholarship addresses the spread of Renaissance culture from a global perspective, and the links between regions that are generally studied separately, such as the Americas, West Africa and South China. As a historian of the global Renaissance, his work examines both the brighter and darker sides of this important early period of globalisation: the histories of slavery, the spread of renaissance humanism and the connected histories of law and religion.

Nine scholars, including Professor McManus, were awarded the prize and US$300,000 each in recognition of their achievements and to support their future endeavours.