The 2025 Belle da Costa Greene Award is being presented to Kartik Maini. Kartik is a PhD Candidate in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at The University of Chicago. Maini’s dissertation project—On Learning to Love the World— is a history of worldly renouncers in medieval & early modern South Asia, utilizing sources in Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, & Persian. Maini was most recently a recipient of the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2024-25).
Since 2019, the Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 has been granted by the Medieval Academy of America to a medievalist of Color to support research and travel. Belle da Costa Greene (1883-1950) was a prominent art historian and the first manuscript librarian of the Pierpont Morgan collection. She was also the first known person of Color and second woman to be elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1939). According to the Morgan Library & Museum website, “Greene was barely twenty when Morgan hired her, yet her intelligence, passion, and self-confidence eclipsed her relative inexperience, [and] she managed to help build one of America’s greatest private libraries.” She was, just as importantly, a Black woman who passed as White in order to gain entrance and acceptance into the racially fraught professional landscape of early twentieth-century New York. Her legacy highlights the professional difficulties faced by medievalists of Color, the personal sacrifices they make in order to belong to the field, and their extraordinary contributions to Medieval Studies.
