Two UC Berkeley Social Sciences alumni received 2025 Pulitzer Prizes — one for shedding light on the dangers of train crossings in Houston, and the other for revealing the history of Soviet dissent.
Anthropology alumna Sharon Steinmann, an opinion video journalist for the Houston Chronicle, was part of a four-person team that won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. History alumnus Benjamin Nathans, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for his book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Both recipients were awarded a $15,000 cash prize.
“Honestly, I was in disbelief in the moment,” Steinmann told Berkeley Social Sciences. “But I’m hopeful that our kids in Houston will get safer passages to school now that this series is getting attention.”
Nathans told Berkeley Social Sciences he was “stunned by this news, deeply honored, and grateful for the tremendous support” he received “from friends, family, and colleagues over the years.”
“Sharon Steinmann and Benjamin Nathans embody the very best of a Berkeley Social Sciences education," Social Sciences Dean Raka Ray said. "Their Pulitzer-winning work reminds us that rigorous scholarship and public service are powerful forces that create a better world.”
Nathans’s book “tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism,” and “explores the idea and practice of rights and the rule of law in the setting of ‘mature socialism,’” according to his UPenn biography.
“I am interested in how people who live in authoritarian societies construe their options for public political engagement — and how they act on them,” Nathans said. “My particular interest was in the Soviet Union, but the topic applies to many different societies.”
UC Berkeley History Professor Victoria Frede-Montemayor said Nathans’s book highlights heroes of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1960s and 1970s such as Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Andrei Sinyavsky, as well as other untold stories.
“They acted in the way they believed was right, not because it was a ‘sensible thing to do’, indeed knowing it was unsafe, and that the majority of their contemporaries would condemn them for it,” she said. “Defying the Soviet state brought harm to the few people brave enough to take the risk. That is precisely why we need to remember them.”
The Pulitzer committee praised it as “a prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.”
Steinmann and her Chronicle colleagues produced the editorial series “Dangerous Crossings” that focused on Houston’s East End neighborhood, which had the highest rates in the nation of trains blocking roadways and posed a daily risk to residents and students from nearby schools.
“When our first editorial and my accompanying video editorial of the series were published in June 2024, people were outraged at images of McReynolds Middle School students climbing on and darting across the path of oncoming trains,” she said. “We made a point to include the voices of the students as well. Their hopelessness with the situation was very disheartening.”
The team’s reporting sparked public outcry and encouraged local residents to demand change from the Union Pacific Railroad. Their advocacy — along with the death of a high school student struck by a Union Pacific train — prompted changes.
“This time, Union Pacific agreed to expand sidewalks and not to send trains past Milby High School around arrival and dismissal,” Steinmann said. “By April of this year, Union Pacific, the Houston Independent School District and the Texas legislature all had taken some action. Grants for pedestrian bridges are moving forward at both Milby High School and McReynolds Middle School.”
But she said much remains to be done, noting that many Houston public schools are located near dangerous rail crossings.
The Pulitzer committee called the Chronicle team’s work “a powerful series on dangerous train crossings that kept a rigorous focus on the people and communities at risk as the newspaper demanded urgent action.”
Steinmann credited her Berkeley anthropology education with laying the groundwork for her journalism career by teaching her to think critically and value multiple perspectives.
“During my time at Cal, I studied abroad in Costa Rica and learned Spanish,” she said. “That experience helped me become fluent in the language and prepared me for many assignments in Latin America as a photojournalist.”
Nathans said he “absolutely loved” his time at Berkeley as a history graduate student.
“The History Department was a place of great intellectual stimulation, and I owe a particular debt to my advisor, Professor Reggie Zelnik, who was both a great historian and a wonderful human being,” he said of the late Cal Russian history professor.
