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Date: September 18, 1997
Princeton Professor Wins 1997 Balzan Prize
Princeton, N.J. -- Charles C. Gillispie, Dayton Stockton Professor of History, emeritus, and professor of the history of science, emeritus, has been awarded the 1997 Balzan Prize in the History and Philosophy of Science. The International Balzan Foundation, based in Switzerland, cited Gillispie for "the extraordinary contribution he has made to the history and philosophy of science by his intellectually vigorous and exacting works."
Gillispie, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1947, founded Princeton's history of science program in 1960. He is the editor of the 16-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography and the author of The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas, among other works. In the 1980s, he divided his time between Princeton and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, located in Paris. In 1987, Gillispie retired from the Princeton faculty. He continues to publish and consult with graduate students.
Gillispie's interest in combining his technical background with his interest in history goes back to his days as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, where he majored in chemistry with a minor in history. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year in 1940-41 before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. (He rose to the rank of captain.) He then enrolled at Harvard, determined to become an historian rather than an engineer. Gillispie's 1949 doctoral dissertation, "Genesis and Geology," dealt with the relations of science and religion in the British context in the pre-Darwin period. It was published by the Harvard University Press and has remained in print ever since.
The Balzan Foundation was founded in 1956 with a gift from Angela Lina Balzan, an Italian heiress who established the foundation in her father's memory. The foundation honors achievement in fields ranging from the arts to medicine. The prize includes a cash award of approximately $338,000 U.S. dollars. Gillispie will receive the prize at a ceremony in Bern, Switzerland, on Nov. 18.
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