McNeill Receives Heineken Award

May 2, 2018 — Professor John R. McNeill of the Department of History and the Walsh School of Foreign Service has been named a 2018 recipient of the A.H. Heineken Award in History for his work on integrating environmental science and global history.

The Heineken Awards are conferred every other year by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on leading Dutch and international scholars in medicine, environmental science, cognitive science, biochemistry and biophysics, history, and art.

McNeill has served on the Georgetown faculty since 1985, has become one of the world’s preeminent scholars on the burgeoning field of environmental history. He has published six books on subjects ranging from the effects of mosquito-borne diseases on Caribbean colonies to the way humans have changed the environment over the course of the 20th century. He teaches a seminar on international history and supervises the Department of History’s Ph.D. program in environmental history.

McNeill has received multiple Fulbright awards, a MacArthur grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Wilson Center. He is the president-elect of the American Historical Association for the term beginning in 2019.

“John McNeill’s meticulous, imaginative, and brilliantly written work has changed the way we understand our relation to the planet and its evolution,” said Georgetown College Dean Christopher Celenza. “Georgetown College is so proud to count John among our colleagues, and we are delighted that he has been honored with the Heineken Prize.”