Hiett Prize
The Hiett Prize in the Humanities is an annual award aimed at identifying candidates who are in the early stages of careers devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise and has a significant public component related to contemporary culture.
The opposite of a lifetime achievement award, the Hiett Prize seeks to encourage future leaders in the humanities by 1) recognizing their early accomplishment and their potential and 2) assisting their ongoing work through a cash award of $50,000.
The Hiett Prize was endowed by Kim Hiett Jordan, a Lifetime Board Member of the Dallas Institute, to honor her parents, who inspired in her a lifelong love of learning.
Dr. Jared Farmer is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. Through writing and photography, he illuminates the hidden histories of landscapes and habitats.
Farmer earned a B.A. from Utah State University, an M.A. from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.
His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008) won five prizes, including the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best-written non-fiction book on an American theme, a literary award that honors the “union of the historian and the artist.”
His latest book, Trees in Paradise: A California History (W. W. Norton, 2013), received a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from Foundation for Landscape Studies. Farmer maintains a Facebook page devoted to the Golden State’s treescape and dreamscape, and he tweets off and on.
Farmer frequently gives guest lectures and radio interviews. His essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as Science, Environmental History, Reviews in American History, High Country News, Western American Literature, and Religion Dispatches. He has also self-released three e-books, including The Image of Mormons: A Sourcebook for Teachers and Students (2013).
Currently he is working on two book projects: Ancient Trees in Modern Times (a history of the long search for the world’s oldest living thing, and a meditation on the future of long-lived trees in the Anthropocene) and The Aerial View (a global study of aerial photography, aerial surveillance, satellite imagery, and remote sensing).
For more information, visit Farmer’s website, which includes photographic portfolios and occasional blog entries.
Dr. William Deresiewicz is a full-time writer whose essays and commentaries about cultural issues, higher education, books, politics, and other subjects have gained international attention. His work has been translated into fifteen languages and anthologized in numerous books and college readers, and his essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” has been read over one million times. He has published two books—Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (Columbia University Press, 2005) and A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (Penguin, 2012), which is currently under development as a television series. His third, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, comes out in August 2014 from Free Press.
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