The first $25,000 Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize for outstanding and lasting contributions to racial, ethnic and religious relations will be awarded late this month to Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah, currently a professor at Princeton University. The award honors the legacy of the late sociologist and Brandeis Prof. Joseph Gittler and his mother Toby. John Hose, executive assistant to University President Jehuda Reinharz and a member of the committee that selected Appiah to be the recipient of the award, said, "Upon [Gittler's] death, an endowment was created with funds for the award."

"Appiah embodies Brandeis' and Professor Gittler's fundamental belief in the importance of freedom, community and justice, and the need for continuous questioning and revision of our moral and ethical beliefs," President Reinharz said in a Brandeis press release.

"I was thrilled," Appiah said of receiving notification of the award via a letter two weeks ago.

Hose said Reinharz wrote to academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad several months ago informing them about the new prize. Reinharz asked that information about the award be shared with people who could nominate U.S. or international scholars online or by sending hard-copy nominations to the University.

"Over a period of months up until mid-April, nominations were received and reviewed by the committee," said Hose. Appiah was selected as the eventual winner for his lifetime of work and contribution to the field of racial, ethnic and religious relations.

According to an e-mail President Reinharz sent to the Brandeis community, Appiah is a London-born Ghanaian philosopher and novelist. He has taught philosophy and African and African-American studies at the Universities of Ghana, Cambridge, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Harvard and currently Princeton University. He published his first articles in the 1980s and his first novel in the early 1990s. In 1992, he won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English for his novel In My Father's House, which deals with contemporary African identity. The Herskovitz Prize is awarded to the author of the most important work in African Studies published in English throughout the year.

Appiah said he has spent most of his career working on African identity and racism. His early work focuses on African identity and American philosophy. "Then I started getting interested in the more general philosophy of identity," he said. He is now working on theories of cosmopolitanism, the idea that all human beings belong to the same moral community.

At the award ceremony on Oct. 27, Appiah will give a lecture on cosmopolitanism. The speech will include cosmopolitanism as an ideal, how it arose historically and its presence in his own life, Appiah said.

Currently, Appiah is "working on some things that have to do with the processes of moral change across the globe," he said. "Understanding how moral change occurs is important if you want to effect moral change.