On behalf of the Interpretive Methods and Methodologies Section, I am proud to announce this year’s winner, Professor Timothy Mitchell of Columbia University. Mitchell is the William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. As a trail blazer in the fields of political science and postcolonial theory, Mitchell’s widely cited research has explored the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the management and disciplining of collective life.

As one may also learn from his website: Mitchell was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honors degree in History. He completed his PhD in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years 2 at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. At Columbia he offers courses on the history and politics of the Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.

Mitchell is the author of the pathbreaking book Colonising Egypt (University of California Press, 1991), in which he charted the emergence of modern modes of governance in Egypt’s colonial period. An influential theoretical investigation into the forms of truth, reason, power, and knowledge that helped make modernity what it is, the book was also a methodological tour de force. Inspired in part by a Foucauldian approach to discourse analysis, Mitchell examined the felicitous conditions under which colonialism’s specific “will to power” gained traction— and the kinds of work it accomplished refashioning subjects and reproducing the rule of Europeans abroad. The book was simultaneously an imaginative and sophisticated foray into the theory and methods associated with Bourdieu and with Derridean deconstruction. Mitchell’s insights into the peculiar ways in which the colonial encounter required that colonized populations be put on display—made visible, exoticized, and sanitized for western consumption—opened vistas for fruitful new research and attunements in the study of both politics and history.