University of Michigan Press author Jacob Soll named MacArthur Foundation Fellow

Jacob Soll, a Professor of History at Rutgers University who has published both of his books to date with the University of Michigan Press, was named this week as a 2011 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. The fellowship, which carries a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for the next five years, is awarded to scientists, researchers, and exceptional people in the public sector based on "creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future."

Soll's books were mentioned extensively in his biography at the MacArthur Foundation. Three University of Michigan faculty were also named as fellows.

"Jacob Soll is a historian whose meticulously researched studies of early modern Europe are shedding new light on the origins of the modern state," the Foundation's site reads. "Drawing on intellectual, political, cultural, and institutional history, Soll explores the development of political thought and criticism in relation to governance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Western Europe."

Soll's first book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism, won the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. His second, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System, sold out in hardcover and is now available in paperback.

Congratulations, Dr. Soll!