The American Philosophical Society has awarded MELC Emerita Professor Francesca Rochberg's recent book, Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity, An Anthropology of Science the 2025 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History. The Prize is awarded annually to an author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history.
The American Philosophical Society writes, "Francesca Rochberg’s Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity, An Anthropology of Science is a strikingly original contribution to cuneiform intellectual history and to the global history of science. Dr. Rochberg demonstrates that the astronomers of ancient Babylonia saw a world constituted by the distinctive ingredients of their culture, and did not simply record the fragments then visible of what modern astronomers take to be the actual world of the stars and planets. This persistently historicist approach to cuneiform learning enables Dr. Rochberg to critically engage a host of recent and contemporary theorists of science, including Nelson Goodman, Bruno Latour, Thomas Kuhn, Willard Quine, Ian Hacking, Richard Rorty, and Clifford Geertz, while simultaneously offering a critique of the standing historiography of ancient science as developed by Otto Neugebauer, David Pingree, Geoffrey Lloyd, and Olaf Pederson. This theoretically ambitious, rigorously argued, exhaustively documented volume is a highly distinctive challenge to Assyriologists and to contemporary historians, philosophers, and anthropologists of science."
The award will be presented during the Society’s Autumn General Meeting on November 14, 2025. Learn more here.