History alum receives Pulitzer Prize for story of dementia

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.

Her advisor at Cornell, Holly Case (now a history professor at Brown) remembers Engelhart well. In a recommendation letter for Engelhart, Case recalled a paper she wrote as a sophomore for HIST271, Politics of Violence in 20th Century Europe: “To say I have been impressed by Katie’s intellectual ability would be a gross understatement. I am not often floored by students’ writing, but when I received Katie’s first paper for 271, I knew she was very, very special."

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.


“She spoke about how broadcast journalism is based on depending on a fast turnaround and that she prefers long-form reporting,” said HSP director Durba Ghosh, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I remember the students were encouraged that she tried a number of different jobs before she landed her book contract for ‘The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die.’” 

The Pulitzer is only the latest in a series of awards Engelhart has received for her writing, including a George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting in 2021 for her investigation into the first COVID outbreak in an American nursing home and the rise of for-profit nursing homes. The same article also won the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism and the MOLLY Prize for Investigative Journalism and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing.

She also received a Canada National Magazine Award for her coverage of Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution while a reporter in Europe for Maclean’s, the largest news magazine in Canada. Previously, she worked for VICE News as a foreign correspondent based in London.

In addition to her writing, Engelhart is a documentary producer. She worked previously for NBC News as a documentary film correspondent and on-air producer at NBC News, making short documentaries. She also made appearances on The Today Show, NBC Nightly News and MSNBC.

Linda B. Glaser is news and media relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences.