Upon completion of the defense, the Chair of the Dissertation Defense Committee shall ask for nominations from members of the Defense Committee. In order to be accepted for final consideration for the Bancroft Awards and/or the Baron Prize (described below), the vote must have the unanimous endorsement of the candidate's Dissertation Defense Committee.

Bancroft Awards

The Bancroft Awards were established by the Trustees of the University in 1963 to make possible the annual publication of a two dissertations, successfully defended during the preceding year, in the areas of American history (including biography), diplomacy, or international relations. These awards include a publication subvention (increased in 1992) that is payable to a press of the author’s choice with which the author has negotiated a contract.

Though the terms of the awards are a special encouragement of excellence in doctoral dissertations from the Departments of History and of Political Science, a liberal interpretation of those terms, agreed upon by the Trustees, allows that the awards be given to two dissertations with an appropriate topic submitted from another program in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Thus, a literary biography on James Fenimore Cooper or a sociological analysis of the rise of life insurance in the United States may also be considered eligible for the awards.

The Bancroft Awards Committee, composed of two members of the faculty and the Dean of the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, should be guided by the following considerations:

• The chief purpose of the Bancroft Awards is to encourage excellence. A secondary purpose is to convey to Ph.D. candidates and to the larger community of scholars the University's standards of excellence.

• There is no single criterion for the excellence of a dissertation. Different disciplines and subjects propose different modes of treatment and have different virtues. Yet certain principles may guide the judges of the Bancroft Awards in making their choice. The first consideration should be the importance and originality of its subject as judged by scholarly standards. No dissertation accepted by a department/program of the University will be without some degree of importance and originality. The Awards Committee will therefore base its decision upon its judgment that the subjects of the dissertations have a more than usual interest for scholars in the field in which they were written. Dissertations whose interests reach beyond their own fields and engage the attention of scholars in other fields should be considered to have special eligibility for the Awards. Dissertations may be considered to have a further degree of excellence if they are judged to be of interest not only to an unusual number of scholars but also to the general educated public.

• In most universities, it is recognized that there is a difference between a "dissertation" and a "book." Implicit in this distinction is the fact that a few dissertations will be made into books at a later point in the scholar’s career. Thus works being considered for the Awards should be scrutinized in point of form and language: brevity is considered a virtue and gratuitous use of technical language should be avoided. At the same time, technical terms can scarcely be considered a fault in works of special and technical scholarship and nothing that has been said about the criterion of general interest should be taken as implying the contrary.
  
  

Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies

The Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies has been established by Salo and Jeanette Baron to honor excellence in a dissertation in Jewish studies successfully defended during the preceding four years. The terms of the Prize invite a liberal interpretation, opening competition for the Award to graduate students from Ph.D. programs in most of the Humanities and Social Sciences and on occasion in the Natural Sciences.

In selecting a dissertation for consideration the following general criteria should be considered: (a) originality of the work and significance of the contribution to current research in the field, (b) quality of basic research of presentation, (c) elegance and economy of style.