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Graduate News and Awards 2017-2018

Year-end 2017-2018

The History Department congratulates our 2018 departmental prize winners:

Alex Hobson, Harold Perkin Prize for Best Dissertation, for “Chains of Vengeance: The United States and Anti-Imperialism in the Middle East, 1967-2001.”

Claire Arnold (co-winner), George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper, for “‘More than a Brother’: Siblings and the Making of the Bonham Carters.”

Dexter Fergie (co-winner), George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper, for “Satellite State: Power, Networks, and ‘the Paradox of Pax Americana.’”

Katya Maslakowski, T. W. Heyck Prize for Graduate Research in British or Irish History, for “Men of Violence: Counterinsurgency and British Colonial Violence at the End of Empire.”

Jessica Biddlestone, Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Seminar Teaching Excellence

Caitlin Monroe, Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Excellence as a Teaching Assistant

We salute of all our of recent Ph.D. graduates, listed here with the titles of their dissertations:

Laila Ballout, “Saving Lebanon: American and Lebanese Visions of Rescue During the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990.”

Charlotte Cover Moy, “The Enclosed Renaissance: Intellectual and Spiritual Learning in Early Modern Venetian Convents.”

Emma Goldsmith, “In Trade: Wealthy Business Families in Glasgow and Liverpool, 1870-1930.”

Beth Healey, “Nazi Crimes, British Justice: The Royal Warrant War Crimes Trials in British-Occupied Germany, 1945-1949.”

Alex Hobson, “Chains of Vengeance: The United States and Anti-Imperialism in the Middle East, 1967-2001.”

Raevin Jimenez, “Rites of Reproduction: Tradition, Political Ethics, Gender and Generation among Nguni-speakers of Southern Africa, 8th-19th Century CE.”

Valeria Jiménez, “Brokering Modernity: The World's Fair, Mexico's Eighth Cavalry Band, and the Borderlands of New Orleans Music, 1884-1910.”

Matthew June, “Protecting Some and Policing Others: Federal Pharmaceutical Regulation and the Foundations of the War on Drugs.”

Samuel Kling, “Taming the Crabgrass Frontier: Regional Planning and the Metropolitan Idea in Chicago, 1890-1935.”

Jesse Nasta, “Making Slavery's Borders: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Slavery's Northwestern Frontier, 1787-1860.”

Rachel Taylor, “Crafting Cosmopolitanism: Nyamwezi Male Labor, Acquisition and Honor c.1750-1914.”

Marlous van Waijenburg, “Financing the African Colonial State: Fiscal Capacity Building and Forced Labor.”

SPRING 2018

Current Grads

Alvita Akiboh has been awarded the Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant from the American Historical Association. She has also received the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences’ Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award for 2017–18.

Anisha Bhat was selected as an Academic Year Urdu Fellow by the American Institute of Indian Studies. This fellowship will pay for her tuition and airfare, as well as a living stipend, to study Urdu (and possibly Persian as well) in Lucknow, India, for nine months.

Colin Bos has been selected as one of the 2018-2019 participants in the Northwestern University/Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Program.

Ryan Burns has published an article entitled “Unrepentant Papists: Catholic Responses to Cromwellian Toleration in Interregnum Scotland,” in History, vol. 103 (2018), pp. 243­–261.

Andrea Christmas’s article, “Conscription in the Orchestra: Militarization and Masculinity at the Paris Opéra, 1789-1814,” has just been published in European Drama and Performance Studies.

Gideon Cohn-Postar and Angela Tate have received fellowships to enable them to participate in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop.

Gideon Cohn-Postar has also been awarded the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s Scholarly Fellowship for research in New York City.

Ruby Daily has been awarded a 2018-2019 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mitch Edwards has been awarded a three-year doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Mitch Edwards and Moritz Nagel have received Hans E. Panofsky Pre-dissertation Research Awards from the Program of African Studies.

William FitzSimons has published an article entitled “Warfare, Competition, and the Durability of Political Smallness in Nineteenth-Century Busoga,” in the Journal of African History, vol. 59 (2018), pp. 45–67.

Brian Forman has received a 2018–2019 Chateaubriand Fellowship from the Embassy of France in the United States, to support his research in France next year.

Gabrielle Guillerm has received the 2018 Carl J. Ekberg Research Grant from the Center for French Colonial Studies. She has also been awarded a $2,500 Graduate Student Research Grant from the American Catholic Historical Association.

Bright Gyamfi has received a Hans E. Panofsky Pre-dissertation Research Award and a Morris Goodman Award from the Program of African Studies.

Sean Harvey recently was awarded first prize in the “Three Minute Thesis” competition at the American Society for Environmental History meeting in Riverside, CA.

Bennett Jones has been awarded residential fellowships at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Huntington Library.

Amanda Kleintop’s article, “Life, Liberty, and Property Rights in Slaves,” based on her dissertation research, will be published in the June issue of Slavery & Abolition. She also has accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of U.S. History at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Katya Maslakowski has been awarded a dissertation research grant from the North American Conference on British Studies.

Laura McCoy has received the Monticello-McNeil fellowship, co-sponsored by the McNeil Center and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.

Caitlin Monroe has received a Fulbright scholarship to support her research in Uganda in 2018-2019.

Sian Olson Dowis has received the Franke Graduate Fellowship for 2018-2019 from Northwestern’s Kaplan Humanities Institute.

Robin Pokorski has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship. She will be spending next year in Munich and Freiburg conducting research on her dissertation project, “Reform Networks and Community among Dominican Nuns in Late Medieval Germany.”

Andrea Rosengarten has been selected to receive a Council on Library and Information Resources Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources. This award will support her dissertation research in 2018-2019.

Joy Sales has been awarded a Ford Foundation 2018 Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

Melody Shum has been accepted, with full funding, to the Max Planck Summer Academy for Legal History in Frankfurt am Main.

Rachel Wallner has received a Fulbright scholarship to support her research in China in 2018-2019.

Guangshuo Yang has been awarded a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies Predissertation-Summer Travel Grant for his work on his dissertation project, “Animal Kingdom and Modern States: Buddhist Animal Protectionism and the Transcultural Making of Chinese Modernity.” He was also admitted, with funding, to the Bielefeld-Wesleyan Summer School on Theories for Historical Research, which will be held in Bielefeld, Germany, in July 2018.

Alum News

Teri Chettiar (Ph.D. 2013) has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Payson Croy (Ph.D. 2017) has published an article entitled “Tethered to Socialism: The Cultural Work of the German Minority in the Czech Lands around the Time of the Prague Spring, 1968–70,” in the Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 49 (2018), pp. 238–57.

Samuel Kling (Ph.D. 2017) has been appointed as a two-year Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow. He will be working as a research associate at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Joel Penning (Ph.D. 2017) has accepted a job teaching Western Civilization at Liberty Common High School in Ft. Collins, Colorado.

Karin Steinbrueck (Ph.D. 2017) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Humanities at National Louis University in Chicago.

Abigail Trollinger (Ph.D. 2014) has published an article entitled "Revealing the 'Social Consequences of Unemployment': The Settlement Campaign for the Unemployed on the Eve of Depression," in the Journal of Social History, vol. 51 (2018).

Winter 2018

Current Grads

Elsa De La Rosa has been awarded the Beca Complemento de Apoyo al Posgrado Ciclo by the Dirección General de Relaciones Internacionales of the Secretaria de Educación Pública.  She will hold this award for the academic year 2017-2018.

Myisha Eatmon has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her dissertation, Public Wrongs, Private Rights: African Americans, Private Law, and White Violence During Jim Crow.

Gil Engelstein has been awarded a ten-month dissertation fellowship from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies of the German Studies Association.

Bonnie Ernst has accepted an appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Criminal Justice Department of Indiana University.

Gabrielle Guillerm has been awarded a Vincentian Studies Institute Grant from DePaul University. She has also received the Peter d'Agostino Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.

Matt June has accepted a position teaching history full-time at the Latin School of Chicago.

Kathleen Noll has been awarded a research grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to support her research in Venice on Sex and Fama in Late Medieval Italy.

Leigh Soares has published an article on OAH’s Process History blog, based on her dissertation research.

Alum News

Kyle Burke (Ph.D. 2015) has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship in the Department of History at Hartwick College.

Raevin Jimenez (Ph.D. 2017) has accepted a tenure-track position in the History department at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania.

FALL 2017

Current Grads

Elsa de la Rosa was awarded an honorary mention for her Master’s thesis in the Premio Genaro Estrada for this year, which is the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s prize for historical work on international relations.

Alexa De Leon has received a Toshiba Foundation fellowship for research funding and Japanese language training for 2018-19.

Bennett Jones has been awarded a 2017 Gilder Lehrman Scholarly Fellowship.

Jonathan Ng has been awarded the W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. This fellowship will support Jonathan's work on "An Empire of Arms: The United States and the International Arms Trade, 1960-1985."

Alana Toulin has been selected to be a Graduate Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library for 2017-2018.

Marlous van Waijenburg, who is heading to the Michigan Society of Fellows this fall, has had articles accepted in two leading journals:

Alum News

Will Cavert (Ph.D. 2011) has been awarded the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize for the best first book on British or Irish history, for his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016).