Penn history professor Benjamin Nathans wins general nonfiction Pulitzer Prize

Penn history professor Benjamin Nathans won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction on Monday. 

The award — and a $15,000 cash prize — recognized Nathans’ latest work, “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement,” which explores dissent in the Soviet Union from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism. He currently holds the role of Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term professor of history at Penn and teaches imperial Russian and Soviet history, modern Jewish history, and the history of human rights. 

“I’m stunned by this news, deeply honored, and grateful for the tremendous support Penn has given me over the course of a quarter-century on the history faculty here,” Nathans wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian. “I consider it a privilege to work at such a great university, and never more so than now, when our deepest values and traditions are under assault.”

The Pulitzer committee described the book as a “prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent,” adding that it is “populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.”

The book explores governance in “mature socialism” and looks into how dissidents in the Soviet Union arrived at “a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms,” according to Nathans’ Department of History staff page.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley, Nathans previously taught history at Indiana University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and University College London.

His 2002 work “Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia,” was awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards in the history category.