Did you write a really great research paper this year? Were you involved in an awesome group project? Have you spent hours immersed in the library, your head in primary and secondary documents?
Then you should be applying for this award!
Each year, the University of Washington Library awards cash prizes for exceptional undergraduate work, from $250 up to $1000, for both individual and group projects and papers. For this year’s award projects completed between Spring 2017 and Spring 2018 are eligible. The deadline is May 7th and more information about the application can be found here.
Last year’s top winners included two of the Department of History’s very own.
Hannah Fumiko Takemori was awarded for her senior thesis, “It Must be Odd to be a Minority”: Multiracial Japanese Americans, Racial Segregation, and the U.S. Empire.” This paper “examined multiracial families and surveillance during the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.” Working closely with Professor Moon-Ho Jung, Hannah undertook original archival research to study attempts to reconcile what she calls the “monoracial logic” behind Japanese incarceration “with the multiracial reality that exposed it—the U.S. government’s Mixed Marriage Policy (MMP).”
Laura Christman received the award for outstanding non-thesis senior paper for her work, “Four Papers Exploring Victorian Scientific Culture: Mock Turtle Soup, Cosmetics, Bicycles, and Psychical Study.” Each of the four papers in this collection focused on a different aspect of Victorian scientific views through one specific example. Laura explains, “The research was based largely on primary sources and I wrote about animal rights through examining cookbooks, cleanliness and hygiene through cosmetics, women’s reproductive health through bicycles, and psychical research through a skeptical member of the leading paranormal society of the Victorian era.”
Another former Husky Historian recipient is Simeon Man, who won the award way back in 2005 for his paper, “Internationalizing the "Negro" and "Oriental": Rethinking Race in the Age of Empire.” Simeon is now Assistant Professor of History at UC San Diego, where he teaches “Asian American history and transnational U.S. history, with a focus on the politics of race and empire.” His first book, “Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific,” was published in 2018.
Could you be next? Apply and find out.