Pulitzer Prize - MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

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 Pultizer Prize recipients. Members of our community have been awarded Putlizer 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.

MIT News story Díaz’s website

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.

MIT News story Dower’s website

Deborah Blum

1992 | Deborah Blum

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.

MIT News story Blum’s website

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.”

Story at the Los Angeles Times Harbison’s website

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 interview Colen’s website