Historian Daniel J. Sherman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been honored with two distinguished prizes for his book, “French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975.”
The book, published by the University of Chicago Press, was awarded the David H. Pinkney Prize as the best book in French history in 2011 written by a citizen of the United States or Canada or someone with a full-time appointment at a college or university in the two countries.
The annual award is given by the Society for French Historical Studies, the oldest professional association in North America devoted to French history.
In the prize citation, the awards committee noted that it was “impressed by [the book’s] conceptual sophistication in addressing political history, anthropology, the fine arts, and, most significantly, the museum culture of France all in a specific way through the prism of ‘primitivism.””
Sherman also won the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. The Heggoy prize is given for the best book published during the previous year dealing with French colonial experience from 1848 to the present.
The Heggoy awards citation reads: “This is a beautifully argued, deeply evidenced and important book, which concerns France but speaks to how understandings and relationships anchored in empire shaped late twentieth-century modernity …”
Sherman came to UNC in 2008 and specializes in modern art and French cultural history. He is a professor of art history in the department of art and an adjunct professor in the department of history, both in the College of Arts and Sciences.
