Cornell University History Alumnus Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Dementia Narrative

Katie Engelhart ’09 has won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her article, “The Mother Who Changed: A Story of Dementia,” published in the New York Times Magazine. Her citation for the $15,000 award says it was bestowed “for her fair-minded portrait of a family’s legal and emotional struggles during a matriarch’s progressive dementia that sensitively probes the mystery of a person’s essential self.”

Based in Toronto and New York, Engelhart is a journalist and contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a Fellow at New America, with a reporting focus on ethics and medicine.

She majored in history at Cornell, then studied history and philosophy as a graduate student at Oxford University, where she received a Master of Philosophy from St. Antony’s College.

Engelhart spoke to students in the Humanities Scholar Program (HSP) in 2021 as part of the program’s Humanities Compass series, which invites humanities alumni who are working in a related career.