Public Humanities Prize

About the Prize


The Clemente Course Public Humanities Prize honors a change-maker and thought leader whose work exemplifies the ideals of the Clemente Course and its belief in the transformative power of the humanities in public life.

The Prize is made possible through the generous support of the Mellon Foundation. In 2025, the Clemente Course awarded its first Public Humanities Prize to the novelist Phil Klay.  The award ceremony, held annually in late September, is always free and open to the public and includes a lecture and conversation.

Prize nominations are accepted from everyone in the Clemente network.  We especially welcome nominations from our students and alumni.  Submit here.

Our Awardees

Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre, and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. His novel Missionaries was named one of the Wall Street Journal's best 10 books of 2020, and listed by former President Barack Obama as one of the best books of the year. His nonfiction work won the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism in 2018. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Brookings Institution's Brookings Essay series. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University. His essay collection, Uncertain Ground, was released in May of 2022 with Penguin Press.

I had always loved the humanities, but after serving as a staff officer in the Iraq War, I came home with a set of questions about myself and my service and my country and my soul which could not be answered through technical expertise or vocational training. The humanities went from something I liked to the essential resource I had to think through questions not only of deep personal importance, but also of critical importance in thinking through what was sorely lacking in our public conversation about war and homecoming. I’m hardly the only person who, after their first burst of formal education, finds diving back into the humanities a necessity. In that regard, the Clemente Course in the Humanities is providing an invaluable service, especially as other institutions curtail these kind of courses, and I could not be more honored that they’d consider me worthy of the Clemente Public Humanities Prize.

- Phil Klay, Inaugural Clemente Course Public Humanities Prize Recipient