Jury Members
2008 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Robert L. Middlekauff, Chair
University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Middlekauff is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of American 
History Emeritus
at the University of California, Berkeley.
His specialty is the
history of the English colonies in America in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries through the American Revolution, and he is
probably best known for his prize-winning 1982 book, The Glorious
Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Oxford). He earned his
B.A. at the University of Washington and his Ph.D. in history at Yale.
In 1972, he won the Bancroft Prize for The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (Oxford) and he is also the author of Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England (Yale). He has spent most of his career at UC Berkeley, where he has been chair of the history department three times, dean of social sciences, and dean and provost of the College of Letters and Science. He has also served as director of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, and was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. His most recent book is Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (California).
Elizabeth A. Fenn
Duke University
Dr. Fenn is an assistant professor of history at Duke University
whose book, Pox 
Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of
1775-82 (Hill and Wang), won numerous prizes and attracted a great deal of attention, both among historians and the general public, when it was published in 2001. Dr. Fenn earned her B.A. in history at Duke and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale. Pox Americana grew out of her doctoral thesis, which she wrote after working for a few years as an auto mechanic in Durham, North Carolina. She is also the co-author, with Peter H. Wood, of Natives and Newcomers: The Way We Lived in North Carolina before 1770 (North Carolina). Her field of study is early North America, with a focus on epidemic disease, Native American history, and social history. Her current book project, Encounter at the Heart of the World: The Rise and Fall of the Mandan People, 1738-1838, will examine the spectacular rise and equally spectacular collapse of the Mandan Indians in the first century after European contact.
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
University of Virginia
Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies
Dr. O’Shaughnessy is the Saunders Director of Monticello’s 
Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies
and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. A British-born scholar of American history, he is the author of An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Pennsylvania). His fields of expertise include Colonial America, the American Revolution, and the British Caribbean. He earned his B.A., his M.A., and his D.Phil. in history from Oxford University and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was a longtime member of the history faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where he was also department chair. At the International Center for Jefferson Studies, Dr. O’Shaughnessy oversees Monticello’s research, education, and archaeology departments; the Jefferson Library; and the editorial staff of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. He is an editor of the Journal of the Early Republic and co-editor of the Jeffersonian America Series at the University of Virginia Press. He is on the advisory board of the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies and has appeared on the History Channel.
2007 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Richard Lyman Bushman, Chair, Columbia University
Theodore J. Crackel, University of Virginia
Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2006 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Gordon Wood, Chair, Brown University
Carol Berkin, Baruch College
Walter Isaacson, Aspen Institute
2005 George Washington Book Prize Jury
Don Higginbotham, Chair, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Philip Morgan, Johns Hopkins University
Barbara Oberg, Princeton University
