Graduate News and Awards 2023-2024
Current Graduate Students
SUMMER 2024
John Branch won a Rockefeller Archive Center research stipend to support his dissertation research in the RAC’s collections.
Rachel Sarcevic-Tesanovic received the AHA's Albert J. Beveridge Grant to support her in conducting additional research this summer for her dissertation.
John Pollard received a dissertation fellowship from the Sexualities Project at Northwestern.
Hope McCaffrey has been awarded two predoctoral fellowships to support her dissertation writing: the predoctoral fellowship from the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State, and a dissertation fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Hope also presented at the 2024 Boston University American Political History Graduate Student Conference, her paper was entitled "'White Husbands or None': White Women and Democratic Politics in the Free States."
Alison Choi was accepted to participate in the Michigan Korean Studies Summer Institute, which is a week-long residential intensive program that focuses on collaborative learning, collective thinking, and interdisciplinary agenda-setting around a key critical issue central to Korean Studies.
Dexter Fergie published a piece in Diplomatic History: “Stewards of Internationalism: United Nations Tour Guides, Gender, and Public Diplomacy, 1952-1977,” here.
Madelyn Lugli published a piece in Modern American History: “Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Yugoslavia: How an Internationalist's Idea of a New State Made Interwar-Era Foreign Affairs—and Foreign Affairs”; here. Madelyn was also awarded a postdoc, the Ernest May Fellowship in History & Policy through the Belfer Center at Harvard University.
Hazal Ozdemir has been awarded two postdocs, which she will take sequentially. One is at the University of Michigan Armenian Studies program, and the other is the Laureate Postdoctoral Fellowship in History & Population at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Hazal ALSO won the Lacey Baldwin Smith prize for the best TA in History this year.
Holly Swenson’s prize-winning article, "A ‘High Quality’ Deal: The Business of British Comedy Television in Australia, 1960–90,” was published in Modern British History, Volume 35, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 115–132, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae003.
Elsa de la Rosa was awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.
Danylo Leshchyshyn received an honorable mention for the graduate student prize from the Canadian Slavic Studies Association.
Savoy Curry won the 2024-25 Crown Graduate fellowship from the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern.
Alexandra Keith was inducted into the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society and received the following fellowships: Buffett Institute for Global Affairs Graduate Student Research Grant to support a research trip to Trinidad and Tobago; the Gale-North American Conference on British Studies Digital Scholar Lab Fellowship.
Esther Ginestet received the Prix Jeune Chercheur (Young Researcher Prize) from the Fondation des Treilles. Esther also published a chapter entitled “Mission Education and the Powers of the Written Word
along the Northeastern Shores of Lake Victoria, 1890s-1940s” in an edited volume, History through Narratives of Education in Africa, Social Histories in Times of Colonization and Post Independent, 1920s-1970s (ISBN: 978-90-04-69016-5).
Mian Chen has been busy as well. He presented “Intellectuals and Popular Opinions in Maoist China”, at the Association for Asian Studies 2024 Annual Conference, Seattle, and published an article, “Made for Hong Kong: Transborder Staffing, Flexible Strategizing, and the Making of Communist Propaganda Outlets in Hong Kong (1945–1956)”, Twentieth-Century China 49, no. 2 (2024): 111-130, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/925423.
Mila Kaut wrote two pieces while interning for the National Endowment for the Humanities, both of which were published on EDSITEment, the NEH's K-12 humanities education website. The first is a Teacher’s Guide for exploring Reconstruction through place-based inquiry. The second is a short piece on Black women’s contributions to the Colored Conventions movement.
Bogdan Pavlish has been appointed to the Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellowship in Armenian History co-hosted by the Center for Armenian Studies and the Department of History at the University of Michigan.
Lizzie Howell received two grants for summer research in Germany: an AHA Bernadotte Schmitt Grant and a Buffett Institute International Research Travel Award.
Ziyana Fazal received a dissertation fellowship from the Sexualities Project at Northwestern.
SPRING 2024
Lauren Cole has a raft of feathers in her cap. She was accepted to present at 4 different panels at the International Medieval Congress UK in July, 2024; she published a book review in the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, vol. 49, no. 2; she was awarded a place on the Kaplan Public Humanities Graduate Practicum, which provides funding for her YouTube series on medieval European medicine. And, last but not least, Lauren has won a 12-month DAAD fellowship to fund her dissertation research abroad next year.
Hazal Ozdemir has been awarded a two-year Laureate Postdoctoral Fellowship in History & Population at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Madelyn Lugli has also won a postdoc. Next fall, Madelyn will take up the Ernest May Fellowship in History & Policy. The fellowship is part of the International Security Program and the Applied History Project, which operate within the Belfer Center at Harvard University. Madelyn also recently published an article in Modern American History:” Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Yugoslavia: How an Internationalist's Idea of a New State Made Interwar-Era Foreign Affairs—and Foreign Affairs.”
Zoe Senecal will begin a job in Fall 2024 as a full-time lecturer in European History at the University of Vermont. She is thrilled to be returning to her hometown.
Jojo Galvan Moro was featured in an episode of WBEZ’s Curious City on how Chicago’s Indian Boundary Park got its name. https://www.wbez.org/stories/history-of-indian-boundary-park-in-chicago/225c2684-a657-4d44-bdf6-2d39d68ed71c
Marquis Taylor has been featured in several publications and on television for his work creating the first exhibit about African-Americans at the Tenement Museum in NYC. Published coverage and the TV spot on NYC’s ABC affiliate are here: (NY Times and The Gothamist) and an interview with ABC7. The exhibit has also been covered in The New Yorker.
Mary Kate Robbett has won two research awards: the Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the National Museum of American History (NMAH) and the Colonial Dames of America’s American History Award. Both awards will support dissertation research.
Holly Swenson has won the 2023 Duncan Tanner Prize from Modern British History for her article "A “High Quality” Deal: the Business of British Comedy Television in Australia, 1960-1990.” And as if that were not enough, Holly also recent published an article, “The Vital Link”: British Print Media Export to Australia, 1853–1980,” in Enterprise & Society.
John Branch has received two research fellowships, the Sam Fishman Travel Grant from the Walter P. Reuther Library Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs and the Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Travel Fellowship from the Business History Initiative at Harvard Business School. Both support John’s dissertation research. John also won the Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award from Weinberg College!
WINTER 2024
John Sullivan received a one-month fellowship from UCLA's Clark Memorial Library to work with the manuscripts of the eighteenth-century French geologist Fleuriau de Bellevue.
Hope McCaffrey is serving as the Andrew Mellow Predoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society.
Elizabeth Barahona received a full-year Mellon Dissertation Grant from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.
Madelyn Lugli is serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Visiting Scholar Predoctoral Fellow with International Security Studies (ISS) at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University this year.
Heather Menefee has won a Presidential Fellowship from the Society of Fellows at Northwestern University, which provides 2 full years of fellowship funding.
Ming-hsi Chu has a raft of good news! First, Ming-hsi was awarded Buffett Institute's Global Impacts Graduate Fellowship for 2023-2024. Second, he attended the Max Planck Institute's Chinese Legal Tradition Workshop in summer 2023. Last but not least, Ming-hsi’s presented a paper, "From Tax Farming to Fiscal Miracles: The CCP's Legal Strategies for Tax Collection in China, 1931-1952," at the 17th Annual Conference of the European China Law Studies Association (ECLS) in September 2023.
Aisiha Valiulla won the Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award for all of Weinberg College for 2022-2023.
Mian Chen presented “Farewell to Revolution: Radical Leftist Cultures and the Colonial Government’s Responses in Hong Kong (1949-1952)” at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, January 2023. Mian also won a research grant from the Library of Congress, The Asian Division Florence Tan Moeson Research Fellowship.
Anqi Pan won a dissertation fellowship from the Sexualities Project at Northwestern.
Charlotte Rosen won the Graduate Student Paper Prize from the Law and Society Association for her paper, "Harris v. Philadelphia and the Dilemma of Mass Imprisonment in Law and Order Philadelphia, 1986-2000.”
Maria Katsulos won funding from the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN) for archival research in the UK. She also presented a paper, "Queer Masculinities and Gender Performance in Jacobean Portraiture,” at the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore in November.
Bogdan Pavlish published an essay, "Wandering Thoughts on Wandering Histories,” in Ab Imperio, vol. 2023 no. 1, 2023, p. 99-106. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/imp.2023.0008.
Semiu Adegbenle won a TGS Graduate Research Grant, the Program of African Studies Travel Grants and Panofsky Award, as well as the Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA-Nigeria) Project Fund to help fund his predoctoral research in Togo.
Morgan Barry published an article, “`SUBJECT’s Wife': The Racialized Gender Logics of Anticommunism and State Surveillance,” in Signs 48 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1086/724246.