Brandeis Professor Emilie Connolly wins prestigious Bancroft Prize
March 12, 2026
Emilie Connolly, an assistant professor of history at Brandeis, has received the 2026 Bancroft Prize, considered one of the most prestigious honors for scholars of American history.
Connolly received the award for “Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States,” her examination of how the federal government became both dispossessor of and trustee to the continent's first peoples. She argues that federal trusteeship, often cast as a benevolent practice, in fact advanced an imperial strategy named "fiduciary colonialism": a form of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Indigenous wealth.
As is customary, the awards were announced March 12 in the New York Times.
