Concordia history professor Max Bergholz is one of nine recipients of the 2026 Dan David Prize, an international award recognizing leading scholarship on the human past and the world's largest prize in the field of history.
Each laureate receives $300,000 USD in recognition of outstanding contributions to historical research. The prize draws nominations from around the world and is adjudicated by an international committee of scholars based at leading institutions. The 2026 committee included scholars from Oxford University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Sciences Po in Paris.
The selection committee lauded Bergholz's original and fundamental insight into the history of intercommunal violence and warfare in the Balkans and his use of microhistory to decode a specific historical situation in ways that shed light on comparable situations around the world.
"I am deeply grateful to the Dan David Foundation for its profound commitment to providing extensive support for the study of the human past," said Bergholz. "This award provides me with critical support to push the limits of my current work on how memories of intercommunal violence structure the prospects for reconciliation or renewed violence in our deeply-divided world."
A professor at Concordia since 2011, Bergholz studies how intercommunal violence, nationalism, and historical memory shape culture, society and politics in modern Europe, with a focus on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. His research combines deep archival work with oral history interviews in small towns and villages across this region and has won support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and Cornell University's Society for the Humanities, among others.
His first book, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016), examines how a once peaceful multiethnic community in present-day Bosnia and Croatia descended into mass violence in 1941, and how those events reshaped local identities over time. The work has received multiple international awards and has been translated into several languages.
Bergholz is currently working on a second book, Our Truths: Violence and the Challenge of a Common Humanity, which explores how successive governments and local actors in the Croatian town of Glina have confronted - and at times bitterly contested - the memory of violence in their community from the Second World War to the present.
"Max's work reflects the kind of careful, grounded scholarship this prize was created to recognize," says Tim Evans, Vice-President, Research, Innovation and Impact. "His research helps illuminate how communities understand and live with difficult histories."
The Dan David Prize has an annual purse of $3 million USD. Now in its fifth year since being relaunched in its current form, the award has recognized 45 scholars and practitioners worldwide and awarded more than $13.5 million USD in support of historical research across disciplines and geographies.
Learn more about Concordia's Department of History.
