In Short: June 2026

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Beth Lew-Williams

Sameer A. Khan / Fotobuddy / Princeton University

Professor Beth Lew-Williams received the Bancroft Prize in American history and diplomacy on April 23 for her 2025 book John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life Under American Racial Law. Lew-Williams, the director of Princeton’s Program in Asian American Studies, was one of two honorees this year, along with historian Emilie Connolly of Brandeis University. The Bancroft judges called John Doe Chinaman a “timely, humane, and necessary book” that “gives a new face to the story of Chinese immigrants, exposing the vast scale of legal limitations they endured.” The book, based largely on research at local courthouses, archives, and historical societies in the western U.S., covers a period of 70 years (1850-1920) during which thousands of laws were used to discriminate against and marginalize Chinese laborers.

Alumnus Albert Maguire ’82 and professor emeritus David Gross were honored with Breakthrough Prizes in life sciences and fundamental physics, respectively, at an April 26 ceremony in Los Angeles. Maguire, an ophthalmologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was recognized “for developing a therapy for inherited retinal degeneration that became the first FDA-approved gene therapy for a genetic disease.” The award citation for Gross, a 2004 Nobel laureate in physics, highlighted “a lifetime of groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics, from the strong force to string theory,” along with his advocacy for scientific research.

Additional honors for Princetonians included New Frontiers prizes for mathematics instructor Mingjia Zhang, physics graduate student Carolina Figueiredo, former astrophysics postdoc Mathew Madhavacheril (University of Pennsylvania), mathematician Anna Skorobogatova *24 (ETH Zürich), and physicists Thomas Dumitrescu *13 (UCLA), J. Colin Hill *14 (Columbia University), and Benjamin Safdi *14 (University of California, Berkeley).