Bullets & bytes
2007 Levitan Prize awarded to
Meg Jacobs
The 2007 James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities was awarded in April to Associate Professor of History Meg Jacobs. Jacobs, who previously held the Class of 1947 Career Development Professorship, joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1999.
The $25,000 Levitan prize was established through a gift from the late James A. Levitan, a 1945 MIT graduate in chemistry, a member of the MIT Corporation, and Of-Counsel at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom of New York City. First awarded in 1990, the Levitan Prize supports innovative and creative scholarship in the humanities by SHASS faculty members.
The Levitan Prize will support Jacobs's research for her book, Panic at the Pump: How Conservatives Used the Energy Crisis to Start a Revolution, which examines the modern energy crisis in the 1970s—as a seminal event in American political history. According to Jacobs, the crisis allowed newly powerful conservative reformers (among them President Ford's Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his aide, Dick Cheney) to discredit the regulatory role of the federal government, and argue against any kind of liberal "New Deal" for energy.
Jacobs received the PhD from the University of Virginia in 1998. During 1999–2000, Professor Jacobs was a Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School. In 2003–2004, she was a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University. Her previous book, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, was published by Princeton University Press in January 2005, and received the 2006 Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
