Graduate Student News
Graduate Student News
From Paul Gillingham, Director of Graduate Studies
Here is the impressive and deeply varied assortment of news from 2024-2025:
Elizabeth Barahona accepted a job as Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Alexander Barna was awarded a T.H. Breen Graduate Fellowship from the CCHS.
Morgan Barry also won a T.H. Breen Graduate Fellowship from the CCHS.
Gabriel Ben-Jacob won the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives.
John Branch will publish his article, “Union Exemption: Nonprofit Work and the Boundaries of the Commercial Economy, 1951-1976,” in Modern American History. The article won the journal’s Brooke L. Blower and Sarah T. Phillips Essay Prize. He also published a review essay in Public Books.
Alison Choi accepted a TGS interdisciplinary GAship in the Asian American Studies Program for the 2025-26 academic year.
Ming-hsi Chu won Law & Social Inquiry's Graduate Student Paper Competition for her dissertation chapter, "Taxing Aliens and International Law: Nationalist China's (1928–1949) Income Tax Negotiations with Treaty Powers." The manuscript is scheduled for publication in Spring 2026, following a revision process.
Lauren Cole was awarded the Presidential Fellowship for 2025-2027; published an article with our very own Lydia Barnett: “Teaching with Isis: From the Cultural Turn to TikTok,” Isis centennial issue, vol. 115 no. 3 (2024). Lauren also accepted a position on the Board of Directors for Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages. In her spare time she recorded a podcast episode, continued her TikTok career, and presented a public lecture and an invited talk on Hildegard of Bingen. As one does.
Mariana Charry Esguerra received a James R. Scobie Award for research from the American Historical Association, was accepted to the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Archive Seminar, and gave a talk in Bogotá at the Universidad del Rosario on music and sound in colonial Latin American written sources.
Matthew Wong Foreman published his epistolary novel Sunset at Lion Rock to enthusiastic reviews. The book takes the form of a letter from a nephew to his uncle who died before he was born. It serves as a window into parts of a Eurasian child’s life that his family can never know, documenting his attempt to navigate racial confusion, religious trauma, the meaning of friendship, and the struggle for self-discovery in a shifting culture on the eve of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRO). The U.S. version is due in 2026.
Juan Fernando Leon was awarded a CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship.
Xi Min Ling was awarded two quarters of research fellowship from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
Jojo Galvan-Mora was one of six scholars from across the university to be inducted to the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, which recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate. He also won a Nancy Hanks Award for Rising Stars from the American Alliance of Museums.
Miguel Giron won a Mellon Fellowship in Latino Studies at Santa Fe School for Advanced Research, a residential fellowship with a stipend and free apartment from Sept 2025-May 2026.
Andy Holter received a Library Research Support Grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a grant from the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research.
Mila Kaut received two grants, one from the Friends of UW-Madison Libraries to conduct dissertation research at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the other the National Council on Public History (NCPH) to attend its 2025 conference in Montreal. She was also accepted to present in the NCPH's “Decolonial Approaches to America 250” working group.
Alice Laburthe won a T.H. Breen Graduate Fellowship from the CCHS.
Jacqueline López completed a CCHS Fellowship at the Newberry Library, working with Rose Miron on the Indigenous Chicago exhibition, website, and curriculum. During Fall quarter she began a year-long Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship with the Block Museum, working closely with the curatorial staff on upcoming exhibitions: Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland, and It takes a long time to stay here: Paintings by Jordan Ann Craig, both of which opened in January. She also contributed a chapter for the book associated with the Woven Being exhibit.
Heather Menefee added to her collection of awards, which includes but is not limited to a Presidential Fellowship, the T.H. Breen Graduate Fellowship from the CCHS.
Jan Michael was co-winner of a prize generously gifted to U.S. history students by Barbara Posadas and Roland Guyotte, department alumni. Jan will use her award towards forming a historical archive of homeschooling textbooks.
Anastasiya Novatorskaya was awarded a dissertation fellowship from the Buffett institute for Global Affairs.
Daniel Ospina was awarded a TGS Graduate Research Grant.
John Pollard had his article, "Staging a Crusade: Queer Activism and the Lionheart Gay Theater of Chicago," accepted for publication by the Journal of the History of Sexuality
Erika Revelo was accepted at the Ethnography Summer School at the University of Texas at Austin.
Mary Kate Robbett was awarded the Quinn Fellowship from the CCHS.
Elsa de la Rosa has an article forthcoming in the journal Hermès, which is not published by a prestigious luxury brand but rather by the prestigious Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Both Parisian. Her article is entitled “Mexican Nationalism, Chinese Immigration, and the U.S. Example: The Rise of Anti-Chinese Sentiment in Sonora in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.”
Kenneth Salter was selected for The Graduate School’s Dissertation Development Program, which offers research funding and a series of interdisciplinary workshops to promote excellent scholarship.
Hannah Richardson Simmons won a TAship in Gender & Sexuality Studies and was co-winner of a prize generously gifted to U.S. history students by Barbara Posadas and Roland Guyotte, department alumni. Hannah will use the support for a project on recovering the everyday lives of enslaved people in the Old Northwest.
Sara Simon will publish the article “Operation Voder: AT&T, Bell Labs, and the Labor of Techno-Utopia at the 1939 New York World’s Fair” in the Spring issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
Weiliang Song won two quarters of research fellowship from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
Mikala Stokes won a CCHS Postdoctoral Fellowship in Public History to work with the online journal, Open Rivers.
Aisha Valiulla, feeling “why stop while you’re ahead?” added to her Buffett Dissertation Fellowship a CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship. She was also accepted to a 3-day graduate workshop at NYU-Abu Dhabi.
Many congratulations one and all.