Skip to main content

Graduate News and Awards 2018-2019

Year-End 2018-2019

The History Department congratulates our 2019 departmental prize winners:

Alvita Akiboh (co-winner), Harold Perkin Prize for Best Dissertation, for “Objects and Identity in the U.S. Colonial Empire.”

Aram Sarkisian (co-winner), Harold Perkin Prize for Best Dissertation, for “The Cross between Hammer and Sickle: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1908-1928.”

Madelyn Lugli (co-winner), George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper, for “A Federation of Sections: The Creation of Interwar Yugoslavia as an International Ideal.”

John Sullivan (co-winner), George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper, for “The 1783 Calabria Earthquakes: Nature and Reform in Late-Eighteenth-Century Naples.”

Katya Maslakowski, T. W. Heyck Prize for Graduate Research in British or Irish History, for “Knowing Violence: Knowledge Production and Counterinsurgency Expertise in the Kenyan Police Force during the Kenyan Emergency, 1952-1960.”

Michael Falcone, Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Seminar Teaching Excellence

Emily Bailinson, 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:

Alvita  Akiboh, “Material Culture and Constructions of National Identity in the U.S. Colonial Empire, 1898-1959.”

Juri Bottura, “Shaping the Body of the Nation: ‘Organicist Agrarianism’ in 1930s Brazil.”

Ryan Burns, “Potential Protestants: Catholics, Conformity and Conversion in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1780.”

Yuri Doolan, “The First Amerasians: Mixed Race Koreans from Camptowns to America.”

Bonnie Ernst, “Women in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Punishment, Rights, and Resistance in Michigan.”

Michael Falcone, “The Rocket's Red Glare: Global Power and the Rise of American State Technology, 1940-1960.”

Mariah Hepworth, “When the Bestial War Shall Rule No More: D.W. Griffith, World War I, and the Antiwar War Film.”

Amanda Kleintop, “The Balance of Freedom: Abolishing Property Rights in Slaves during and after the US Civil War.”

Julia Miglets, “Holy Mediocrity: Saintly Matrons and the Dominicans in Late Medieval Italy.”

T.R. Noddings, “Main Street Jesus: Small-City Revivalism, Chautauqua, and the Birth of Religious Conservatism, 1880-1930.”

Joy Sales, “Diasporic Struggle: Transnational Activism, Migration, and Anti-Imperialism in Filipino America, 1964-1991.”

Melissa Santana-Rivera, “Latino Migration Politics in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1970s.”

Aram Sarkisian, “The Cross Between Hammer and Sickle: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1908-1928.”

Leigh Soares, “Higher Ambitions for Freedom: The Politics of Public Black Colleges in the South, 1865-1915.”

Emilie Takayama, “Civilizing Japanese Bodies: A History of Self-Improvement and the Beauty Industry in the Japanese Empire, 1868-1945.”

Alexandra C. Thomas, “Reason of State and the Politics of Botero, Campanella, and Sarpi in the Waning of the Renaissance.”

Spring 2019

Current Grads

Claire Arnold has been admitted into and received funding from the SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program for this summer.

Michelle Bezark has won a Dirksen Congressional Research Grant to support her research.

Colin Bos has received both a Council on Library and Information Resources/Mellon Fellowship and an SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship to support his dissertation research next year.

Holly Dayton has been accepted to participate in the two-week NU/U Cologne Summer Institute in Cologne this summer, including funding for travel and accommodation.

Gil Engelstein has published an article, “Crossing borders and demolishing boundaries: the connected history of the Israeli transgender community 1953–1986,” in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (vol. 18, issue 2).

Michael Falcone will be a postdoctoral fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding starting in the Fall.

Dexter Fergie has received a 3-year SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship from the Canadian government to support his graduate training. He has also published a review of Megan Black’s The Global Interior in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Mathew Foreman has received a Council on Library and Information Resources/Mellon Fellowship to carry out his dissertation research next year. He also received a full scholarship to the Russian Summer School, Middlebury College.

Esther Ginestet has received a grant from the Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA) in Nairobi to fund her summer research.

Bright Gyamfi has been admitted into and received funding from the SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program for this summer.

Lois Hao has received a China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) of the Association for Asian Studies grant (with support from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation) to support her dissertation research.

Sean Harvey has been invited to participate in the annual Western History Dissertation Workshop at the Huntington Library in May.

Lizzie Howell received a Fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey for advanced Turkish training in Istanbul this summer.

Jayson Porter has received a Fulbright-García Robles (IIE) grant for 2019-2020 to fund his dissertation research in Mexico.

Joy Sales has accepted a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Immigration, Cultures, and Law in the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Melody Shum has received a Henry Luce Foundation/ ACLS Program in China Studies Predissertation-Summer Travel Grant.

Leigh Soares will spend the upcoming year as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at The Pennsylvania State University, before beginning her position as Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University.

Angela Tate has been admitted into and received funding from the SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program for this summer and has also received a 2019 Digital Humanities Fellowship Award from The History Makers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history collection, as well as a Graduate Fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year from the Field Foundation of Illinois.

Rachel Wallner has been awarded a Travel Grant from the China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) of the Association for Asian Studies. She has also been invited to conduct research (Fall 2019) as a foreign scholar at the Institute for Modern History of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. She has also received a TGS Graduate Research Grant to support her dissertation work in China.

Alum News

Laila Ballout (Ph.D. 2017) has accepted a position as tenure-line Assistant Professor at Wichita State University.

Michael Martoccio (Ph.D. 2015) has been named a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University to work on a project on the European Fiscal Military system.

Marlous van Waijenburg (Ph.D. 2017) has accepted a tenure-track offer from the Harvard Business School. She’ll complete her final year in the Michigan Society of Fellows next year and then take up the Harvard post in 2020.

Winter 2019

Current Grads

Alvita Akiboh received a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows.

Kevin Baker published a piece in Logic on the strange, surprising prehistory of SimCity.

Andrea Christmas has accepted a position as the Summer School Coordinator at the American University in Paris.

Gideon Cohn-Postar published “A brief history of North Carolina’s 9th District contested election – in 1898,” in The Conversation. He also won a Dirksen Congressional Research Grant to support archival work in Wisconsin, Maine, and Washington, DC.

Ruby Daily has been awarded a Visiting Graduate Student Fellowship by the Beinecke Library at Yale.

Holly Dayton published “Lady Randolph Churchill’s ‘Tremendous, Ridiculous, Costly Hats’: A Material Culture Approach to His Borrowed Plumes” in the Winter 2018 issue of Theatre Notebook.

Yuri Doolan has accepted an offer from Brandeis University as Assistant Professor of History and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and will be starting Brandeis’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program.

Myisha Eatmon will be starting a tenure-track position in the History Department at the University of South Carolina. South Carolina has also offered her a 1-year postdoc.

Mitch Edwards has been invited (and funded) to participate in the International Committee of the Red Cross’s “Global Humanitarianism Research Academy” this summer in Mainz, Germany and Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to participating in the seminars, he will conclude the program by publishing an entry in the Online Atlas on the History of Humanitarianism and Human Rights.

Bennett Jones has received a fellowship from Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.

Niko Letsos has been offered admission into the joint JD/PhD program at Northwestern.

Jayson Porter has had an article, “Plagas, Pesticidas, y Ciencias Agrícolas entre Revoluciones,” published by the Fideicomiso Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca (Mexico City’s principal presidential archive) as the sole item in their Boletín. An English-language version is out on the influential Age of Revolutions blog.

Charlotte Rosen was selected to be an 2019-2020 Arlen Specter Research Fellow at the Arlen Specter Center in Philadelphia next year. This fellowship will support archival research at the Arlen Specter Collection at the University of Pittsburgh.

Leigh Soares has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University starting this fall.

Emilie Takayama, who defended her dissertation in December, has secured a Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business History at the Harvard Business School.

Alana Toulin has published “‘Old Methods Not Up to New Ways’: The Strategic Use of Advertising in the Fight for Pure Food After 1906” in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Oct 2019).

Rachel Wallner received a TGS Graduate Research Grant to support her dissertation work in China.

Alum News

Bonnie Ernst (Ph.D. 2018) has accepted a position as tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida.

Peter Thilly (Ph.D. 2015) was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies.

Fall 2018

Current Grads

Marcos de Almeida has had his article, “African Voices from the Congo Coast: Languages and the Politics of Identification in the Slave Ship Jovem Maria (1850),” accepted for publication in the Journal of African History.

Mian Chen received a research travel grant from the East Asian Library of Stanford University.

Andy Rosengarten received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to carry out research in Namibia and South Africa.

Alum News

Rachel Taylor (Ph.D. 2018) began a position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford, as part of the Comparing the Copperbelt project.

Summer 2018

Current Grads

Ryan Burns has won the Bernard Aspinwall Memorial Essay Prize from the Scottish Catholic Historical Association for his essay, “Enforcing Uniformity: Kirk Sessions and Catholics in Early Modern Scotland, 1560–1650.”  This prize is for the best essay by an early-career researcher on any aspect of Scottish Catholic history.

Myisha Eatmon has been selected as a 2018 Preyer Scholar by the American Society for Legal History.

William FitzSimons has published “Sizing up the ‘small wars’ of African empire: an assessment of the context and legacies of nineteenth-century colonial warfare,” in the Journal of African Military History, vol. 2, no. 1 (2018), pp. 63–78.

Matthew Foreman has received the Percy Buchanan Prize from the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs for his essay, “Racial Modernity in Republican China, 1927–1945.”  This prize is for the best essay by a graduate student on China and Inner Asia.

Alum News

Marlous van Waijenburg (Ph.D. 2017) has won the Dissertation Competition (20th Century) at the World Economic History Congress.