Graduate News and Awards 2024-2025
Current Graduate Students
Year-End 2024-2025
The History Department congratulates our 2025 departmental prize winners:
Hope McCaffrey, (Co-winner) Harold Perkin Prize for Best Dissertation, for “White Husbands or None”: Free-State White Women and Democratic Party Politics, 1840-1864.
Bogdan Pavlish, (Co-winner) Harold Perkin Prize for Best Dissertation, for Nothing Exotic but Ourselves: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Armenian Diaspora of Poland-Lithuania in the Seventeenth Century
Bennett Miller, (Co-winner) George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper
Cole Roecker, (Co-winner) George Romani Prize for Best First-Year Paper
Maria Katsulos, T. W. Heyck Prize who is working on a thesis on transmasculinity and violence in Britain and France from 1550 to 1750.
Anastasiya Novatorskaya, Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Excellence in Teaching
Maria Katsulos (head TA), Hugh Milner, and John Sullivan, Henry Binford Prize for Best Teaching Team
We also salute our spring PhD recipients, Kathryn Harvey (Billboards and Ambulances: The Business of Tragedy.), Max Lewontin ("Black Powers Across Borders."), Mikala Stokes (Born of Hardship, Trial, and Suffering: Black Men, Family, and Activism, 1830-1861."), John Sullivan (Fractious Knowledge: Earthquakes and Engineering in Eighteenth-Century Italy and the Spanish Atlantic.), Eunike Setiadarma (The Craft of Care: Household, Emotions, and Thought in Indonesia, 1890s-1960s.), Hope McCaffrey ( “White Husbands or None”: Free-State White Women and Democratic Party Politics, 1840-1864.)
We also celebrate all the students who earned their PhDs since June 2024, including Sarah-Louise Dawtry (Summer 2024), Alexandra De Leon (Fall 2024), Zoe Senecal (Fall 2024), Emily Lyon (Fall 2024), Bogdan Pavlish (Summer 2024), Dexter Fergie (Fall 2024), Madelyn Lugli (Fall 2024), and Hazal Ozdemir (Summer 2024), Hirano Yu (Fall 2024).
spring 2025
Heather Menefee added to her modest collection of awards, including but not limited to a Presidential Fellowship, the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies Quinn Fellowship.
Aisha Valiulla similarly feeling “why stop while you’re ahead?” added to her Buffett Dissertation Fellowship a Chabraja Center for Historical Studies Teaching Post-Doctoral Fellowship. She was also accepted to a 3-day graduate workshop at NYU-Abu Dhabi..
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); and 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.
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.”
Mariana Charry Esguerra received one of the highly competitive James R. Scobie Awards 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.
Erika Revelo was accepted at the Ethnography Summer School at the University of Texas at Austin.
Daniel Ospina was awarded a TGS Graduate Research Grant.
Sara Simon Is publishing 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.
Jan Michael was co-winner of a prize generously gifted to US history students by Barbara Posadas and Roland Guyotte, department alumni. Jan will use his award towards forming a historical archive of homeschooling textbooks.
Hannah Richardson Simmon won a TAship in Gender & Sexuality Studies and was co-winner of a prize generously gifted to US 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.
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
Elizabeth Barahona accepted a job as Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Alison Choi accepted a TGS interdisciplinary GAship at the Asian American Studies Program for the 2025-26 academic year.
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.
Ming-hsi Chu had a dissertation chapter, "Taxing Aliens and International Law: Nationalist China's (1928–1949) Income Tax Negotiations with Treaty Powers," selected as the winner of Law & Social Inquiry's Graduate Student Paper Competition. The manuscript is scheduled for publication in Spring 2026, following a revision process.
Gabriel Ben-Jacob won the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Fellowship for the 2025–2026 academic year.
John Branch is to 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.
Jojo Galvan-Mora was one of only six scholars from across the College to be inducted to the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, which recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate.
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.
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’s Graduate Student Travel Award to attend their 2025 conference in Montreal. She was also accepted to present in the NCPH's “Decolonial Approaches to America 250” working group.
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 opening January 25th; she contributed a chapter for the exhibition book that will be coming out for Woven Being.
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 which 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 US version is due in 2026.
fall 2024
Elizabeth Barahona accepted a job as Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
John Branch is to 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, the committee describing it as “an impressively researched essay [thst] constitutes a significant contribution to the way in which a capitalist society simultaneously valorizes and sidelines nonprofit labor.” He also published review essay in Public Books earlier this summer.
Lauren Cole 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). She also accepted a position on the Board of Directors for Medica: The Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages.
Jojo Galvan-Mora was one of only six scholars from across the College to be inducted to the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, which recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate.
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.
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’s Graduate Student Travel Award to attend their 2025 conference in Montreal. I was accepted last fall to present in the NCPH's "Decolonial Approaches to America 250" working group.
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 opening January 25th; she contributed a chapter for the exhibition book that will be coming out for Woven Being.
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.”
Aisha Valiulla was accepted to a 3-day graduate workshop at NYU-Abu Dhabi in February.
Matthew Wong Foreman published his epistolary novel Sunset at Lion Rock in Hong Kong 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 which 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 US version is due in 2026.