Graduate News and Awards 2019-2020
Summer 2020
Congratulations to our Summer Quarter PhD recipients, listed here with the titles of their dissertations:
Marcos Leitão de Almeida, “Speaking of Slavery: Slaving Strategies and Moral Imaginations in the Lower Congo (Early Times to the Late 19th Century).”
Keith Clark, “Defining China: Beijing, Taipei, and the United Nations’ ‘China Seat,’ 1949-1992.”
Gideon Cohn-Postar, “‘Mind How You Vote, Boys’: The Crisis of Economic Voter Intimidation in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States, 1873-1896.”
Myisha Eatmon, “Public Wrongs, Private Rights: African Americans, Private Law, and White Violence During Jim Crow.”
Will Fitzsimons, “Distributed Power: Climate Change, Elderhood, and Republicanism in the Grasslands of East Africa, c. 500 BCE to 1800 CE.”
Sean Harvey, “Assembly Lines: Maquiladoras, Poverty, and the Environment in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1966-1972.”
Laura McCoy, “In Distress: The Marketplace of Feeling in the Early American Republic.”
Current Grads
Michelle Bezark’s article, “‘Our arithmetic was unique’: The Sheppard-Towner Act and the Constraints of Federalism on Data Collection before the New Deal,” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Policy History. The editors plan to publish it in the Spring 2021 issue.
Alexa de Leon has won a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship to carry out her dissertation research in Japan.
Matthew Foreman’s article, “Racial Modernity in Republican China, 1927-1937,” has been accepted by the journal Asian Ethnicity, online version forthcoming in 2020, print version in 2021.
Katie Harvey was selected for a TAship in the Legal Studies program in 2020-21.
Youjia Li has won a Buffett Global Impacts Fellowship for 2020-21.
Robin Pokorski has published a review of Claire Taylor Jones’s translation, Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019). It will appear soon in the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, vol. 46, no. 2 (2020), pp.190-195.
Year-End 2019-2020
The History Department congratulates our 2020 departmental prize winners:
Luthfi Adam, Harold Perkin Prize for Best Dissertation, for “Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745-1917.”
Morgan Barry (co-winner), George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper, for “‘SUBJECT’s wife’: Gender, Anticommunism, and Black Women Activists in Early Cold War Chicago.”
Eunike Setiadarma (co-winner), George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper, for “NATION AT HOME: Women, Family, and Bangsa Tionghoa in the Writings of Kwee Thiam Tjing.”
Claire Arnold, T. W. Heyck Prize for Graduate Research in British or Irish History, for “The Demands of Distance: Global British Families and the World, 1830-1914.”
Vanda Rajcan, Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Excellence in Teaching
Aisha Valiulla, Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Excellence in Teaching
We also salute our spring PhD recipient, Luthfi Adam, whose dissertation is titled “Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745-1917.”
Spring 2020
Current Grads
Elizabeth Barahona has accepted a graduate internship with the WCAS Arch Scholars program for 2020-21.
Mian Chen has accepted an SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development summer program in 2020.
Keith Clark has accepted a position at the Hockaday School in Dallas, TX. He also has a book chapter, “May Fourth Memories: State, Municipal, and Student Media Representations of May Fourth after 1949 in the People’s Republic of China,” forthcoming this year from DeGruyter in Uses of the Past: Representations and Modern China. He has also published an op-ed in History News Network under a title he reports wasn’t of his choosing: “Who Can Learn from Taiwan? Apparently not WHO.”
Bright Gyamfi has received a Fulbright IIE fellowship to carry out dissertation research in Ghana. In addition, his paper, “From Nkrumah’s Ghana to the African Diaspora: Ghanaian Intellectual Activists and Black Studies, 1966 to 1980s,” was the inaugural winner of the GSA Conference Prize for Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Presented at the GSA Triennial Conference.
Jayson Porter has published two articles: one on arsenic in North America in English for Discurso; and another on political ecology in Guerrero in Spanish for Ecos. The latter has also already been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Istor. He has also been featured on the Archeology and Anthropology podcast to discuss his recent pieces.
Ana Rosado won the 2020 Higgins-Quarels Award from the Organization of American Historians to support her dissertation research.
Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic has been accepted to the École d’été franco-américaine sur le long XVIIIème siècle français, a highly-competitive summer program in Lyon for graduate students of early modern French history.
Melody Shum has received a Graduate Assistantship for 2020-21 in the International Studies Program in WCAS and has also been selected as a Kusang-Guro Scholar for the University of New South Wales and The University of the Philippines Open University’s volunteer teachers program. She also received a grant for Short-term Research Travel from the China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) of the Association for Asian Studies, with the support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (CCKF).
Alana Toulin has accepted a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada for the 2020-2021 academic year. Also, she has received the Award for Graduate Study in American History from the Illinois Society of The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America.
Guangshuo Yang has received a Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. His success in winning this award was a featured story in Northwestern Now.
Alum News
Alvita Akiboh (Ph.D. 2019) has accepted a position as assistant professor of history at Yale.
Jessica Biddlestone (Ph.D. 2019) is an academic adviser in the College of the University of Chicago.
Ryan Burns (Ph.D. 2019) has accepted a visiting assistant professorship for next year at Regis University in Denver.
Michael Falcone (Ph.D. 2019) has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale.
Teng Li (Ph.D. 2019) has accepted a position as a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Portland.
Joy Sales (Ph.D. 2019) has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Cal State Los Angeles; the department is part of Cal State LA’s new College of Ethnic Studies, only the second of its kind in the US.
Winter 2020
Congratulations to our 2020 PhD recipient, Michael Brownrigg, whose dissertation is titled “‘The Morphine Man’: The Emotional Politics of the Early War against Drugs, 1870s-1920s.”
Current Grads
Marcos Leitão de Almeida has been offered a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mahindra Center at Harvard University for 2020-21.
Anisha Bhat has received a Fulbright IIE award for her dissertation research.
Gideon Cohn-Postar has been offered a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania’s Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy.
Felipe Cole has been offered the Sharswood Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. This is a two-year residential fellowship that paves the way for the legal academic market.
Ruby Daily has had her article, “‘Dear Dr K’: Mobility, Sex and Selfhood in Alfred Kinsey's British World Correspondence, 1948-1958,” accepted for publication in Twentieth-Century British History where it is forthcoming.
Matthew Foreman won a Rockefeller Archive Center Research Award to visit the Rockefeller Archives.
Gabrielle Guillerm has received a McNeil Center Dissertation Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year.
Bright Gyamfi has received an SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship to support his work on the networks of transnational radical thought inspired by Kwame Nkrumah.
Sean Parulian Harvey has accepted the Bill and Rita Clements Fellowship at SMU’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies. This fellowship will allow Sean time to revise his dissertation and work alongside three other scholars writing books on topics related to the U.S. Southwest, U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Spanish borderlands, or Texas.
Jayson Porter was interviewed by The Guardian to provide expert contextual information for this article on the representation of Afro-Mexicans in Mexico's ongoing new census. He was also the spotlighted student in the April 2020 issue of TGS's Office of Diversity and Inclusion's newsletter, The Inclusive Voice.
Charlotte Rosen will be a Franke Graduate Fellow at Northwestern’s Kaplan Humanities Institute for 2020-21.
Melody Shum has had her panel, Zones of Conflict and Co-existence: Redefining Governance Strategies and Transnational Connections in Asian Borderlands, accepted by the Academic Committee of the Asian Borderlands Research Network for the international conference Borderland Futures: Technologies, Zones, Co-existences. The conference will be held from 25-27 June 2020 at Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea. Melody has also been selected to attend the Graduate Student Workshop at the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Annual Meeting held at Quinnipiac Law School on March 6, 2020. The workshop is designed for graduate students who are undertaking research that cuts across law, cultural studies, literature, philosophy, legal studies, anthropology, political science, and history, among others. The workshop is designed to afford graduate students the opportunity to experience the LCH community in a smaller venue with more sustained contact with one another and some faculty. The workshop also provides graduate students with an opportunity to discuss their research projects in a small group setting in anticipation of such things as job talks and publication.
Alana Toulin’s article, “‘Old Methods Not Up to New Ways’: The Strategic Use of Advertising in the Fight for Pure Food after 1906,” which was published by the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in October 2019, is the recipient of the SHGAPE Best Article Prize for 2020. The prize will be given at the annual luncheon of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the OAH in April.
Guangshuo Yang is a finalist for the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Alum News
Raevin Jimenez (Ph.D. 2017) has accepted the offer of an assistant professorship in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, where she has been in the Society of Fellows.
Teng Li (Ph.D. 2019) has accepted a position as the Post-Doctoral Global Fellow at the NYU University School of Law for 2020-21.
Emilie Takayama (Ph.D. 2018) has been offered a second postdoctoral fellowship year at the Harvard Business School.
Fall 2019
Current Grads
Michelle Bezark received an American Society for Legal History Fellowship to support her dissertation research and writing.
Dexter Fergie published “The Strange Career of ‘National Security’” in the 29 Sep 2019 issue of The Atlantic.
Summer 2019
Congratulations to our Summer Quarter PhD recipients, listed here with the titles of their dissertations:
Kevin Baker, “World Processor: Computer Modeling, The Limits to Growth, and the Birth of Sustainable Development.”
Jessica Biddlestone, “Empire of Ruins: France in Roman Africa, 1830-1900.”
Teng Li, “Judiciary at the Crossroad: Property Laws and Courts in Post-World War II Taiwan and Manchuria, 1945–1953.”
Current Grads
Gil Engelstein has a magazine article forthcoming with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz about one of the historical actors he’s writing about for his dissertation. He has also had an abstract accepted for a special issue of Contemporary British History.
Dexter Fergie published “Geopolitics Turned Inwards: The Princeton Military Studies Group and the National Security Imagination” in Diplomatic History.
Jayson Porter was featured on a podcast in September on his research and the use of social media as a graduate student. Jayson also had his 570 paper picked up by University Pittsburgh Press to become a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume on engineering in Modern Mexico.