[Sugarman] Fwd: WiSER’s Keith Breckenridge wins the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF)’s first Humanities Book Award

[Daniel Herwitz]

Keith you truly deserve this. Bravo.

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Gabrielle Hecht <hechtg at umich.edu> wrote:

> A huge congratulations to Keith!
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From: *"WISER" <info.wiser at wits.ac.za>
> *Subject: **WiSER’s Keith Breckenridge wins the Academy of Science of
> South Africa (ASSAF)’s first Humanities Book Award*
> *Date: *March 1, 2017 at 06:18:16 EST
> *To: *Gabrielle Hecht <hechtg at umich.edu>
> *Reply-To: *"WISER" <info.wiser at wits.ac.za>
>
> *WiSER is extremely proud to announce that: *
>
> *Professor Keith Breckenridge, Deputy Director of WiSER, has won the The
> Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)’s inaugural  Humanities Book
> Award.*
>
> *The award will be presented to Professor Keith Breckenridge for his book
> Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in
> South Africa, 1850 to the Present. The book shows how the South African
> obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration
> served as a 20th century incubator for the current systems of biometric
> citizenship being developed throughout the South.*
>
> *The ASSAf Humanities Book Award is presented to a writer/s of a
> scholarly, well-written work of non-fiction, published up to three years
> prior to its nomination. The book should be noteworthy in its contribution
> to developing new understanding and insight of a topic in the Humanities.*
>
> Chosen from among 58 entries, this book is claimed to have reawakened
> international interest in the fine details of South African state-building,
> showing that our history can reveal and explain patterns of state-formation
> in Europe, the Americas and Asia, and our peer states on this continent.
> The book, as reviewers have commented, engages problems that have broad
> interdisciplinary significance, reworking them to place South African
> history at the centre of a new global explanation. It has produced new
> explanations of the roots of Galton's eugenics, of social Darwinism, of
> Gandhi's distinctive anti-progressivism, of the limits of the colonial
> state's will to know, of the surveillance capacities of the apartheid
> state, and the current global enthusiasm for biometric social welfare. The
> book does this by combining very wide comparative reading with the
> fine-grained archival research that has been the hall-mark of South African
> historiography for two generations. It is carefully and fluently written
> and encourages South African social scientists, historians in particular,
> to be comparative, and theoretically ambitious, deploying the detail of
> what we know best about our own society to shape debates in the global
> academy.
>
> *Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance
> in South Africa, 1850 to the Present was published by Cambridge University
> Press.*
>
> *Keith Breckenridge is a Professor and Deputy Director at the Wits
> Institute for Social and Economic Research. He writes about the cultural
> and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining
> industry, the state and the development of information systems.*
>
> *The prize will be awarded at the inaugural ASSAf Annual Humanities
> Lecture and Book Award event on 9 March 2017 in Pretoria.*
>
> Our warmest congratulations to Keith.
>
> Sarah Nuttall
>
> Director
>
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-- 
Daniel Herwitz
Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor
Department of Comparative Literature
University of Michigan
2010 Tisch Hall
435 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
tel: 734-764-8781
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