Pulitzer Prize

Celebrating SHASS Pulitzer Prize Winners

Pulitzer Prizes are given each year for works of distinguished excellence in the genres of journalism, letters, drama, and music. SHASS is pleased to present a gallery of the Institute’s Pulitzer Prize recipients. Members of our community have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, music, journalism, and history.

Junot Díaz

2008 | Junot Díaz

Comparative Media Studies/Writing
MIT professor Junot Dí­az won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his acclaimed debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, just one month after receiving the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007.
Junot Díaz’s websiteLearn more
Usha Lee McFarling

2007 | Usha Lee McFarling

Director, Knight Science Journalism Program
Knight Science Journalism Program director Usha Lee McFarling won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for Explanatory Reporting.
Knight Science JournalismLearn more
John Dower

2000 | John Dower

Professor Emeritus, History
“John Dower is an historian of the highest caliber who has rightly earned nearly every major prize for Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II,” said Philip S. Khoury, Professor of History. Embracing Defeat also received the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
John DowerLearn more
Deborah Blum

1992 | Deborah Blum

Former director, Knight Science Journalism Program
For more than 15 years Blum worked as a newspaper science reporter, mainly at The Sacramento Bee, where she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her reporting on ethical issues in primate research.
Deborah BlumLearn more
John Harbison

1987 | John H. Harbison

Institute Professor, Music and Theater Arts
“I write for churches quite a bit, and that’s something not central to composers today,” Harbison told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “The piece is not part of the mainstream, so I’m very happy to have it recognized.”
John HarbisonLearn more
B.D. Colen

1984 | B.D. Colen

Lecturer, Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Writer and photographer B.D. Colen spent 27 years at The Washington Post and Newsday, and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for Newsday’s “Baby Jane Doe” series. He pioneered the coverage of bioethics in the mainstream media.
Boston Magazine interviewColen’s website

Sign up for the SHASS newsletter

* indicates required