The Professor Robert W. Hamilton Book Author Award is presented annually to the best book-length publication by a staff or faculty member of the University of Texas at Austin. It is chosen by a committee of various disciplines, who in turn were chosen by the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin.
All nominated books are honored at a ceremony, in addition to the prizewinners. $10,000 is awarded to the first prize winner, with four additional $3,000 prizes.
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.
Philip Chase Bobbitt, is an American author, academic, and lawyer. He is best known for work on U.S. constitutional law and theory, and on the relationship between law, strategy and history in creating and sustaining the State. He is the author of several books: Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution (1982), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002), and Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-first Century (2008). He is currently the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University School of Law and a distinguished senior lecturer at The University of Texas School of Law.
Eric Rodger Pianka was an American herpetologist and evolutionary ecologist.
Timothy James "T. J." Clark is a British art historian and writer. He taught art history in a number of universities in England and the United States, including Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.
Thierry de Duve is a Belgian professor of modern art theory and contemporary art theory, and both teaches and publishes books in the field. He is an art critic and curates exhibitions.
Barbara Ellen Rose was an American art historian, art critic, curator and college professor. Rose's criticism focused on 20th-century American art, particularly minimalism and abstract expressionism, as well as Spanish art. "ABC Art", her influential 1965 essay, defined and outlined the historical basis of minimalist art. She also wrote a widely used textbook, American Art Since 1900: A Critical History.
Apolinère Enameled was painted in 1916–17 by Marcel Duchamp, as a heavily altered version of an advertisement for paint. The picture depicts a girl painting a bed-frame with white enamelled paint. The depiction of the frame deliberately includes conflicting perspective lines, to produce an impossible object. To emphasise the deliberate impossibility of the shape, a piece of the frame is missing. The piece is sometimes referred to as Duchamp's "impossible bed" painting.
Leslie P. Peirce is an American professor in history. Her research interests include early modern history of the Ottoman Empire, gender, law, and society. She received her B.A. in History from Harvard College, her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and her Ph.D. (1988) in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. In 1988–1998 she was with the Cornell University. In 1998–2006 she was professor in the Departments of History and Near Eastern Studies the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2006 she is with Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies of the New York University, where she is the Silver Professor of History.
Linda Williams is an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.
De Corpore is a 1655 book by Thomas Hobbes. As its full Latin title Elementorum philosophiae sectio prima De corpore implies, it was part of a larger work, conceived as a trilogy. De Cive had already appeared, while De Homine would be published in 1658. Hobbes had in fact been drafting De Corpore for at least ten years before its appearance, putting it aside for other matters. This delay affected its reception: the approach taken seemed much less innovative than it would have done in the previous decade.
Aloysius Patrick Martinich, usually cited as A. P. Martinich, is an American analytic philosopher. He is the Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language ; the history of political thinking and Thomas Hobbes.
Thomas Walter Laqueur is an American historian, sexologist and writer. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. He is the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award, and is currently the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, located in Berkeley, California. Laqueur was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.
Mounira Maya Charrad is a Franco-Tunisian sociologist who serves as associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jeffrey Chipps Smith is an American art historian specialising in the Northern Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture. He has published a number of prize winning books on art history. In 2005 he wrote the introduction for a reprint of Erwin Panofsky's classic "The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer". He is an inaugural co-editor of the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art.
New possibilities opened up by the concept of four-dimensional space helped inspire many modern artists in the first half of the twentieth century. Early Cubists, Surrealists, Futurists, and abstract artists took ideas from higher-dimensional mathematics and used them to radically advance their work.
Dalia Judovitz is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. She is known for her work in the fields of 17th-century French literature and philosophy and modern/postmodern aesthetics.
Lucas A. Powe Jr. is an American lawyer, currently the Anne Green Regents Chair in Law at University of Texas at Austin, and leading Supreme Court historian of law.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson is an American art historian, educator, and curator. Henderson is currently the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on modern art, specifically twentieth-century American and European art.