Masha Gessen to Receive the 2025 Courage in Public Scholarship Award
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), in collaboration with the NSSR-Europe Collective, is deeply honored to announce that Masha Gessen has been named the recipient of the seventh annual Courage in Public Scholarship Award.
Bestowed each year, the award honors distinguished scholars, writers, and public intellectuals whose work reflects a rare combination of moral clarity, intellectual rigor, and unwavering public engagement with the most urgent and difficult issues of our time.
Masha Gessen’s fearless and profoundly humane voice has been indispensable in exposing the inner workings of authoritarian regimes, the precariousness of democratic institutions, and the human consequences suffered by those denied agency and visibility. Their work exemplifies the very essence of the courage this award seeks to recognize—bold, principled, and unrelenting in its pursuit of truth and justice, even in moments of deep uncertainty.
Gessen joins a distinguished cohort of previous honorees, including: Ann Barr Snitow, feminist writer and educator; Ágnes Heller, philosopher and advocate for ethical thought; Jan Gross, historian of twentieth-century Europe; Professor Ewa Łętowska, jurist and former judge of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal; Osman Kavala, publisher and defender of civil society in Turkey; and Elżbieta Matynia, sociologist and historian of ideas. Each has left an indelible mark on public discourse through their commitment to intellectual integrity and social responsibility.
The NSSR-Europe Collective, established in 2014 by TCDS alumni, serves as an intellectually engaged extension of NSSR in the context of contemporary Europe. The Courage in Public Scholarship Award emerged from a shared recognition of the profound ethical and intellectual challenges confronting public life today and is awarded to individuals whose work bridges scholarship and civic engagement with rare distinction.
The award will be presented during the 31st annual Democracy & Diversity Summer Institute, hosted by TCDS in Wrocław, Poland, in July 2025. In keeping with tradition, the honoree will receive a sculpture specially created by Tadeusz Włodarczak, a renowned Wrocław artist and long-time friend of the Institute.
