People

Peter Brown, Princeton’s Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, has been named a co-winner of the 2008 Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity. He and Romila Thapar, a professor emeritus in history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, received the award in a ceremony Dec. 10 at the Library of Congress. They are the sixth and seventh recipients since the prize’s 2003 inception, and each will receive half of the $1 million award.

Ying-shih Yu, Princeton’s Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies Emeritus, won the award in 2006.Endowed by Library of Congress benefactor John W. Kluge, it is unique among international prizes at this monetary level in rewarding a wide range of disciplines.

Brown and Thapar are credited with bringing new perspectives to understanding vast sweeps of geographical territory and a millennium or more of time in, respectively, Europe and the Middle East, and in the Indian subcontinent. Brown has brought conceptual coherence to the field of late antiquity, looking anew at the end of the Roman Empire, the emergence of Christianity, and the rise of Islam within and beyond the Mediterranean world.

Brown is the author of a number of important works, including the St. Augustine biography “Augustine of Hippo” (1967), “The World of Late Antiquity” (1971) and “The Rise of Western Christendom” (1996). He is currently writing a book examining attitudes toward wealth and poverty in the later Roman Empire.

Princeton psychologist Anne Treisman, whose work has explored how brains build meaningful images from a sea of visual information, has won the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology.

Treisman, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, was honored for her idea, first proposed in 1980, that attention acts as a selective window in the brain, linking disparate features of the same object such as its color, shape, distance and motion — into an integrated whole. The award, in its ninth year, grants a $200,000 prize for outstanding contributions to the field of psychology.

Treisman’s theory of feature integration has prompted a wide range of study that continues today. Its concepts have been applied in a variety of ways, from airport baggage inspectors employing its principles to scope out hidden weapons to educators using its tenets to design classrooms that stimulate children without overloading them.

“Her theory explains why we see a red sports car driving by instead of an assortment of different features such as the color red, a shape in motion and so on,” said Woody Petry, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Louisville, who chaired the award committee.

The Grawemeyer award is one of five bestowed annually for music composition, ideas improving world order, psychology, education and religion.