Faculty
Dan Berger was pleased to see the overhaul and relaunch of the Washington Prison History Project website, which coincided with an expansion of the project’s collection that includes dozens of new oral histories, photographs, and other donated materials. Dan presented the Washington Prison History Project during his 2026 History Lecture Series Talk.
Ross Coen has published an article in the Spring 2026 issue of Columbia, the magazine of the Washington State Historical Society. Titled "Pioneers: Bringing Pacific Northwest History to Seattle's Airwaves in the 1930s," the article examines a live radio drama named "Pioneers" that was the first to include reenactments of events in the region's history.
Mark Letteney had his new book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration, featured in UW’s The Daily recently as well as The New Yorker. This book was featured in Letteney’s 2026 HLS talk and in an interview with UW History.
Laurie Marhoefer co-wrote an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court case West Virginia v. B.P.J. which was signed by hundreds of professional historians.
Scott Noegel currently has a book in press, Ambiguity and Empire: A Literary Appreciation and Commentary for the Book of Daniel (Eisenbrauns, 2027) and this past year has published several articles.
Margaret O’Mara has joined the board of directors of the Social Sciences Research Council and was recently elected to the Society of American Historians. O’Mara also appeared in an NPR story discussing new labor practices within the tech industry.
Lynn Thomas, along with four other researchers, published a forum on “Traveling Histories of Abortion” in the March 2026 edition of the American Historical Review.
Christopher Tounsel book Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity is a finalist for the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. His article, “A Tale of Two Divestments: South Africa, Sudan, and Howard University,” was awarded honorable mention for the 2025 African Studies Review Best Article Prize. Tounsel was also interviewed by Al Jazeera this past winter and connected the proposed arch in Washington, D.C. to the longer history of imperial arches stretching to North Africa and the Roman Empire, he also appeared on PBS News Hour in a report titled “Sudan’s cultural heritage becomes a casualty in its civil war.”
Grad Student
Jacob Beckert has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in American Jewish Economic History at Tulane University’s Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience.
Joana Bürger received a Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies, an international program that supports students focusing on Holocaust research.
Arija Forsyth has been awarded the Arcadia Graduate Student Fellowship from the Center for Jewish History for the 2026-27 academic year. The fellowship provides a full year of funding for archival research in addition to offering opportunities for public scholarship and collaboration at the Center for Jewish History's Institute for Advanced Research in New York City.
Sierra Mondragón has received the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies' Graduate Student Research Grant, which she will use to fund her archival and oral historical research for her dissertation this summer. Sierra has also been selected to attend the NCAIS Spring Workshop on Oral History and Embodied Knowledge-Keeping.
Undergrad Student
The UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, which celebrates undergrad research at UW, featured several history students this year: Thomas Boyd, Elizabeth Brown, Grant Deines, Rowan Herron, and William Brooks.
Alumni
Jennifer Ott (History, 1993) was featured in the UW Magazine for her new book Where the City Meets the Sound: The Story of Seattle’s Waterfront (UW Press, 2025).