Professor Gerald Markowitz Wins 2025 Columbia U. Press Distinguished Book Award

Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death and Inequality in American History by Dr. Gerald Markowitz, distinguished professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Dr. David Rosner from Columbia University, received a 2025 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award.

Dr. Jenny Davidson, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University & award jury member praised Building the Worlds That Kill Us as "enjoyably well written and easy to read…It synthesizes an enormous range of scholarship and thinking on the topic of health and society, and it has the potential to inspire new generations of reformers to take up the work of improving the health not just of the rich and powerful, but of every single individual in our society."

Building the Worlds That Kill Us, which was named a Best Book of 2024 by Smithsonian Magazine, explores how deep inequities in race, class and gender determine the disparate health experiences, underscores that powerful people and institutions have always seen some lives as more valuable than others and emphasizes how those who have been most affected by the disparities challenged and changed these systems.

Markowitz and Rosner have co-authored and edited several other books and articles on occupational safety and health including Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children; The Contested Boundaries of American Public Health; Are We Ready? The Public Health Response to 9/11; Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution; and Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the Politics of Occupational Disease in Twentieth Century America.

Markowitz has received numerous grants from private and federal agencies, including the Milbank Memorial Fund, National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, was elected as a  member of the National Academy of  Medicine, and won the Viseltear Prize for Outstanding Work in the History of Public Health from the American Public Health Association. He earned a PhD and an MA from the University of Wisconsin and a BA from Earlham College. Read more here.