History Department

Congratulations to Sofia Hosseinzadeh on her 2nd Place Lang Prize win for her honors thesis “‘How that Stevenson Rumor Started’: The 1952 Election and Cold War Gender and Sexuality”! Hosseinzadeh‘s research sheds new light on the role of gender and sexuality in Cold War-era American society. She examined newspaper articles, gossip magazines and FBI transcripts to unpack the origins of the rumor that 1952 presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson was gay.

Amy Fallas will join the UC Davis Department of History in Fall 2025 as a UC Davis Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow. Currently finishing her PhD in History at UC Santa Barbara, Fallas specializes in modern Egypt as well as transnational exchanges between Latin America and the Arab Middle East. Her research examines religious difference, communal institutions, charitable networks, sectarianism, and collective memory.

The UC Davis History Department would like to congratulate PhD Candidate ibrahim Bàbátúndé Anọ́ba who won a Huntington/Birmingham Exchange Fellowship for the 2025-2026 academic year!l He will be in residence for one month at the Cadbury Research Centre, University of Birmingham, working on materials related to Òrìṣà Religion’s encounters with Western-articulated modernities.

The UC Davis History Department would like to congratulate PhD student Charlotte Hansen Terry on her appointment as Assistant Professor in U.S. history at Utah State University Uintah Basin campus starting this fall. She will complete her PhD. this spring. Her dissertation explores Mormon missionization efforts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and responses to these efforts by Pacific Islanders and their governments, U.S. imperial agents, and other missionary organizations.

The UC Davis history department would like to congratulate graduate student Brianna Tafolla Riviere, who will be awarded her Ph.D. in June 2025 for her appointment as Assistant Professor of History at Boston University, starting in Fall 2025! Her dissertation “Reel Red Power: Indigenous Activism, Visual Sovereignty, and the Film Industry” focuses on the effort of Native American activists to remake the representation of Indigenous Peoples and United States history in film.

UC Davis History Professor Adam Zientek has been awarded the Norman B Tomlinson Jr prize. This prize is awarded annually by the World War One Historical Association for the best work of History in English on the topic of the First World War. Congratulations, Professor Zientek! Check out his award winning book A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front.

Professor Kathy Stuart was awarded an “Excellence in Teaching for Global Learning Award” at the UC Davis Global Affairs International Connections Reception on March 12. Read the award announcement below: 

The UC Davis History department would like to congratulate Manoel Rendeiro Neto on his new position as a Yale Postdoctoral Associate for 2025-2026 and an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Yale University starting Fall 2026!

Professor Kathy Stuart was awarded the 2024 Natalie Zemon Davis Book Prize for Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation. Prof. Stuart’s research on Suicide by Proxy was the basis for the 2024 feature film The Devil’s Bath, directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.

Congratulations to UC Davis Professor Lisa Materson on having her new book Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico's Independence be named one of the best feminist books of the year by Ms. Magazine. Lisa G. Materson is a historian of US women’s and gender history. Her work is focused on women’s participation in social and political justice movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ph.D. student Faith Bennett has been awarded an AAUW Dissertation Fellowship! The American Association of University Women’s American Fellowship Program began in 1888, a time when women were discouraged from pursuing an education. It is AAUW’s largest fellowship program and the oldest non-institutional source of graduate funding for women in the United States. (https://www.aauw.org/.../current-opportunities/american/) Faith also received 2024 Alice Kessler-Harris Dissertation Prospectus Award!

Dante Barksdale, ABD, has accepted a tenure-track position in the History Department at Sacramento City College in African American, African, and Africa Diaspora History. Dante's research focuses on the Haitian Revolution and Atlantic and Caribbean history. Congratulations, Dante!

Second-year PhD student Fransisca Espinosa has been awarded the James R. Scobie Memorial Award. This highly competitive travel grant, awarded by the AHA affiliated Conference on Latin American History, will support her pre-dissertation fieldwork in Chile this summer. Congratulations, Francisca!

Graduate student Temirlan Tileubek has been awarded the Maya K. Peterson Dissertation Research Grant in Environmental Studies. This extremely prestigious grant, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, will support his dissertation fieldwork in Kazakhstan this summer. Congratulations, Termirlan!