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News and Awards

Spring 2022

Current Grads

Katya Maslakowski received a postdoctoral fellowship at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University for next year, and then will be starting a tenure-track job at University of Southern Mississippi as their Modern British historian in August of 2023. 
 
Ryan Burns is off to start a tenure-track job in the History of Great Britain and the British Empire at Jacksonville State University. 
 
Bright Gyamfi has been awarded a Presidential Fellowship from The Graduate School at Northwestern. 
 
Fresh on the heels of his Ford Foundation fellowship award, Miguel Giron has also been awarded a fellowship to participate in the NYU Cities Collaborative-Mellon Summer Institute on Urbanism. 
 
Mian Chen is the recipient of a fellowship from the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation to support dissertation research! 
 
And speaking of Esherick-Ye Family Foundation, Ming-hsi Chu also won a research fellowship from them. Two in one year — go, Asianists! 
 
Melody Shum has selected to attend a fully-funded week-long summer school at the University of Venice on the theme of "Social Movements in Southeast Asia" at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She will present her paper, "What Remains: Trauma, Childhood, and the Revolutionary Experience in Central Vietnam.” In addition, Melody has won the Luce Southeast Asia Archives Fellowship at the University of Washington Libraries. Seattle. Melody reports that, "I’ll be directing a public history project that not only seeks to humanize and activate the archive as an important source of collective remembering, but to also build an ethics of care through the exchange of knowledge between Vietnam and Vietnamese American communities.” 
 
Dexter Fergie has obtained a Travel Award from the Buffett Institute at NU to support his dissertation research. 
 
And, not to be outdone, Eunike Setiadarma has also won a Travel Award from Buffett. Go, History! 
 
Alex Barna will send next year studying arabic abroad, thanks to a full-year fellowship from the Center for Arabic Study Abroad. 
 
Mikala Stokes has been appointed to the Membership Committee of the Organization of American Historians. She also won two research fellowships: the Mellon Scholars Program in African American History Short-Term Fellowship for archival research at The Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Illinois American History Award. 
 
Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic is the recipient of the Western Society for French History's Millstone Research Fellowship to support her research in France.
 
John Sullivan is the winner of a Bernadotte Schmitt Grant from the American Historical Association to help fund his research in the Giambattista Beccaria papers at the American Philosophical Society.
 

Heather Menefee has been named as one of next year’s Franke Fellows by the Kaplan Humanities Institute at Northwestern. 

John Pollard presented his work on the Lionheart Gay Theatre Company to the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives.

Norman Joshua received a TGS GRG grant for dissertation research support for 2022. Norman is also as part of the research team for the Indonesian Historical Encyclopedia (Ensiklopedia Sejarah Indonesia) project of the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (Kementerian Pendidikan, Kebudayaan, Riset, dan Teknologi Republik Indonesia). This is a large-scale, multi-year project conducted in cooperation with various public universities across Indonesia. The goal is to produce a reliable historical reference source for Indonesian schools, and public libraries. Last but not least, Norman has an upcoming article, “Counterinsurgency, Emergency and Civil-Military Relations in Indonesia” in the Marine Corps University Press’ Journal of Advanced Military Studies. 

John Sullivan has been awarded the Interamericas Fellowship to support three months of research at the John Carter Brown Library.

Elizabeth Barahona won the 2022 the Southern Studies Doctoral Fellowship at Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Travel and Research Grant. In addition, Elizabeth won the Frederick A. Cervantes award from the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies for her paper, “Fighting White Supremacy, Poor-Housing, and Over-Policing-Black and Latino Coalition Building in Durham, North Carolina.”

Jayson Porter has been awarded a Voss Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for the Environment and Society at Brown University. Following his stint at Brown, Jayson will take up a 2-year postdoc at the University of Maryland, after which he will start a tenure-track job at U of M!

Hope McCaffrey has been awarded the Gunther Barth Fellowship from the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

Ming-hsi Chu has been accepted to the Summer Academy for Legal History The Max Plank Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. 

Dexter Fergie has won a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Truman Library Institute. Dexter also recently published a book review, "How American Culture Ate the World” in The New Republic

Miguel Giron has won a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, which funds 3 years of graduate study.

Winter 2022

Current Grads 

Emiliano Aguilar has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Notre Dame in LatinX history.
Caitlin Monroe has accepted a tenure-track job at the University of Northern Colorado, and to boot she has an article coming out in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East  this August. It’s titled “Searching for Nyabongo: An Unconventional Ugandan Intellectual and the Limits of Global History.”
Guangsho Yang and Youjia Li both presented papers on the AHA panel, "Animated Capital and Capitalized Animals: Capitalism and the Negotiation of Modern Animality in East Asia." 
 
Mian Chen has won the 2022 Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History for “ ‘Let’s Have a Great Leap Forward in Printing!’: The Printing Industry and Radical Political Campaigns in Socialist China (1958-1962).” This award, from the American Printing History Association, will help Mian support his dissertation research. 
 
Holly Dayton has been accepted to the Business History Doctoral Colloquium, which will provide her an opportunity to attend the next Business History Conference where she will present and receive feedback on her scholarship from senior scholars in the field. 
 
Dexter Fergie won a GRG from TGS to support his dissertation research. 
 
Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic has won a Fulbright to travel to France for her dissertation research. 
 
Bright Gyamfi was selected as a 2022 Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society Inductee! The Society pays homage to Edward A. Bouchet, the first African American doctoral recipient in the United States and it recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement to promote diversity and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate.
 
Hope McCaffrey received the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics (Honorable Mention) to support her dissertation research.
 
Heather Menefee won an Emerging Scholars Research Grant from the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, which will fund visits to their collections this summer and editorial support on a resulting manuscript. Heather was also invited to present her research at the Boston University symposium, "Critical University Studies: Legacies of Slavery and Settler Colonialism," March 17-18. 
Jayson Porter has been awarded a Voss Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for the Environment and Society at Brown University.
 
Rachel Wallner has won a dissertation fellowship from the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science in East Asia.
 
Dexter Fergie won the Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grant, from the Society of Historians for American Foreign Relations. 
 
Madelyn Lugli has received a grant from the West Virginia & Regional History Center for her research on Pearl Buck.
 
Charlotte Rosen has had an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Policy History, and she published a review of an important new book on criminal justice reform in the Nation.
 
Angela Tate published an article in Volume 2, Issue 3 of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, "Sounding Off: Etta Moten Barnett’s Archive, Diaspora, and Radio Activism in the Cold War"; she was also featured in a podcast with Utrecht University's The Decolonisation Group on the episode "Unsettling Bridgerton: Race, Representation, and Royalty"; finally, Angela served as a panelist on WBEZ's episode about Juneteenth.
 
Melody Shum was invited to speak on a panel titled, “Getting There: Navigating Visas, Logistics, and Ethics of Research in and on Southeast Asia,” for the Public Universities Consortium of the New York Southeast Asia Network; Melody was also invited to give a talk at the University of Bristol’s Asian History Seminar next week — her talk is entitled, “Women and Revolution in Central Vietnam.” Last but not least, Melody’s paper, “Engendering the Revolution: Trần Thị Trâm and the Native Place in Central Vietnam,” has been accepted by the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference that will take place in Honolulu, Hawaii in March 2022.

Alum News

Laura McCoy has recently accepted a job at the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago as the coordinator for their Inclusion Chicago program. 
 
Our alums Ana Rosado and Gideon Cohn-Postar were two of the three lead researchers on a new student of how Reconstruction is taught in K-12, released by the Zinn Education Project. The study is discussed in Time.com.
Myisha Eatmon will be leaving her post at the University of South Carolina to accept a position as Assistant Professor in History and African-American Studies at Harvard. 

Fall 2021

Current Grads

Felipe Cole (JD/PHD) has accepted a job at Boston College School of Law!
Bright Gaymfi has been busy publishing. You can read his piece on Black Lives Matter here.  Bright also published "From Nkrumah’s Black Star to the African Diaspora: Ghanaian Intellectual Activists and the Development of Black Studies in the Americas," in The Journal of African American HistoryFall 2021 issue. 
 
Sean Harvey was awarded the W. Turrentine Jackson Award for the best dissertation from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Associaition. 
 
Mian Chen was awarded the Graduate Student Paper Prize from the China and Inner Asia Council for his presentation, “Great-Leap Forwarding the Great Leap Forward: The Institutional Change of the Propaganda Machines in Socialist China (1957-1960).” Mian has also been awarded a Buffett Graduate Dissertation Research Travel Award to support his dissertation research.
 
Hazal Ozdemir was awarded a research fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey to support her dissertation research.
 
Emiliano Aguilar presented his paper, “`To attain undreamed heights': Latino Leadership in Local 1010, Latinos as Establishment, and Sadlowski’s Steelworkers Fight Back Campaign, 1970-1981,” to the Newberry Library’s Labor History seminar. 
 
John Pollard received the Beiling Wu Award in Writing from TGS for his 570 paper. 
 
Elsa De La Rose received a fellowship from the Mexican Department of Education to support her graduate study.