It is with great joy that we share some of the recent accomplishments of our history community.
Faculty
Liora Halperin has received one of two inaugural Linda and Stewart Rescnick Fellowships at the National Library of Israel. The award supports a period of in-person research at the library as well as remote support for digitization of materials. She will be working on her research over the diverse Jewish communities who lived in Palestine prior to the founding of the Zionist movement and the ways that their descendents commemorated and made sense of these histories over the course of the twentieth century.
Raymond Jonas has released Habsburgs on the Rio Grande (2024, Harvard University Press). It was recently reviewed by the New York Times.
Mark Letteney has won the 2024 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise for his book The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations (2023, Cambridge University Press).
Ileana Rodriguez-Silva has been granted an National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend to work on her manuscript, “Cimarrón Citizenship: Luis Felipe Dessús and the Afro-Puerto Rican Middle-Class Politics in Early-Twentieth Century Puerto Rico.”
Quintard Taylor (professor emeritus) was presented with the 2024 Owen Wister Award by the Western Writers of America. It is the organization’s highest honor. Past recipients include Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, and Elmore Leonard.
Christopher Tounsel has published his second book, Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (2024, Cornell University Press).
Dan Waugh (professor emeritus) has published Cross-Cultural Communication in Early Modern Russia: Foreign News in Context with coauthor Ingrid Maier, University of Uppsala.
Graduate Students
Oya Aktas has received the 2023-24 Blau Award for Excellence in Research from the Simpson Center for Humanities.
Jacob Beckert has received a Society of Scholars fellowship.
Alvin Bui has accepted a position as an assistant professor of history of Asian peoples in diaspora at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He will begin spring 2025.
Frances O’Shaughnessy has been named to the Husky 100.
Brian Park is the recipient of a Blakemore-Freeman fellowship to study language in Japan for the 2024-25 academic year, as well as a Fulbright International Education fellowship and a UW International Research fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year to support his dissertation research.
Undergraduate Students
The Phi Alpha Theta (history honor society) held their regional conference at Eastern Washington University in Cheney this spring. Three UW undergrads presented papers: Nolan Degarlais, Jason Grossmann-Ferris, and Owain Waszak. Grossmann-Ferris was nominated for a prize for his senior thesis, Silence Equals Death: Lou Sullivan and Community Building Among Transgender Men During the HIV/AIDS Crisis, which was supervised by Professors Laurie Marhoefer and Adam Warren. He also had his research for this project on display in Allen Library as part of their AIDS Awareness Month project in January.
Alumni
Mike Allen (PhD 1985, professor emeritus, UW Tacoma) has published a new book, Mississippi River Valley: The Course of American Civilization (2023, Iowa State University Press).
Ned Blackhawk (PhD 1999) received the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction and the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction for his book The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023, Yale University Press).
Katia Chaterji (PhD 2023) has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in Asian and Asian American studies at Loyola Marymount University.
Kayhan Nejad (BA 2014) has been appointed the Farzaneah Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies in the history department at the University of Oklahoma.
Dịu-Hương Nguyễn (PhD 2017) received a faculty award for her project “Eve of Destruction: A Social History of Vietnam’s Royal City, 1957-1967,” which looks at the perspectives of residents of Hue, the former royal capitol.