Current Student Achievements
2024
Joel Daniel Olea-Calixto has been nominated to participate in the Newberry Consortium in American Indian History and Indigenous Studies Summer Institute. He will spend four weeks doing research at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Second-year PhD student Francisca Espinosa not only published her first book, Justicia material y políticas de consumo en el gobierno de la Unidad Popular (1970-1973 (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2024), but a leading newspaper, La Tercera, cited it as one of the must reads in 2024.
Two history graduate students were awarded Suad Joseph Graduate Research Awards with the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program. Xiwen Yang is a first-year doctoral student studying the history of science in the Ottoman Empire. Temirlan Tileubeck is a third-year doctoral student studying the Russian Empire in Central Asia. The Joseph Award is granted to outstanding graduate students whose research connects with Middle Eastern, North Africa, South Asian, and Central Asian studies. This year, history graduate students received two of five available awards.
Manoel Rendeiro Neto had been awarded the Dibner Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library. The award will fund his dissertation research in the library's collections in Summer 2024.
Faith Bennett has won the 2024-2025 Jack Henning Graduate Fellowship in Labor Culture & History! The Fellowship was established to encourage innovative study of the expressive culture of working people in the United States, their identities, philosophies, and the problems they encounter.
Both Bàbátúndé Anọ́ba and Daniel Castaneda were awarded the Library Graduate Prize for outstanding public scholarship using library resources. Through their research, Bàbátúndé Anọ́ba and Castaneda (respectively) explored topics including the lasting impact of British interference with indigenous customs in the Lagos Colony (part of present-day Nigeria); and the inspiring life and influence of Cruz Reynoso, the first Latino Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court. Bàbátúndé Anọ́ba’s research explores the imposition of British laws on the Lagos Colony — a Yorùbá territory and part of present-day Nigeria — and how those laws clashed with Yorùbá customs, particularly with regard to inheritance. He synthesizes colonial court records with first-hand accounts by Yorùbá colonial subjects to demonstrate how Britain interfered with indigenous customs and the lasting effect of this interference in post-independence Nigeria.
Erika Schumacher was awarded a Klassik Stiftung Weimar Fellowship. In Fall 2024 Erika will spend two months in Weimar, Germany, conducting research at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv. Her research project, entitled "Classical Landscape Architecture and the Garden as Utopia," focuses on landscape architecture styles in central German gardens and what role they played in the emergence of national culture.
2023
Ashley Lewis has been awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. Administered by the National Research Council, the predoctoral fellowship will provide three years of support for Lewis’s dissertation research.
Joel Daniel Olea-Calixto has been announced as a 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow. This award will support Olea-Calixto’s dissertation, “Studying for Corporate Imperialism: Mining Colleges, Racial Capitalism, and the Rise of Mexico’s Mining Technocrats, 1908-1996,” during the 2023-24 academic year.
Charles Sills has been awarded a Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) Fellowship for 2023-24. Charles will join the Center’s intensive Arabic language study program in Meknes, Morocco.
Charlotte Terry is awarded the Graduate Research Fellowship in Mormon Studies at the University of Utah. Terry will conduct dissertation research for the Tanner Humanities Center’s 2023-2024 Mormon Fellow.
Nina Farnia (Ph.D. 2022) is awarded the Julien Mezey Dissertation Prize by the Law & Humanities Association for her dissertation, "Imperialism in the Making of U.S. Law."
Ibrahim Anọ́ba has been awarded the 2023 Scholz Prize for his essay, “"Inheriting from the Dead: Race, Mimicry, and 'English Justice' in Colonial Lagos (1876-1937).” The Emile Scholtz G. Prize is awarded to second-year PhD students and recognizes excellence in written research.
Jennifer Alpers has been awarded the 2023 Scholz Prize for her essay, “Hell's Belles and B.A.D.D. Moms: Race, Childhood, and Satanic Panic in 1980s United States.” The Emile Scholtz G. Prize is awarded to second-year PhD students and recognizes excellence in written research.
Zephaniah Fleetwood has received the Hoover Institution’s 2023 Silas Palmer Fellowship at Stanford University, which supports his summer research into the Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan Era.
Ibrahim Anọ́ba has received the Hoover Institution’s 2023 Silas Palmer Fellowship at Stanford University, which supports his summer research on twentieth century Nigeria.
2022
Manoel Rendeiro Neto has been awarded the 2022 Scholz Prize for his essay, “A Desert in a Sea of River and Runaways: Empires, Maps, and Fugitivity in Amazonian Borderlands (1777-1800).” The Emile Scholtz G. Prize is awarded to second-year PhD students and recognizes excellence in written research.
Mehmet Çelik has received a Gerda Henkel Fellowship for 2022-23! The fellowship will support research on Çelik’s dissertation, “Land, Labor, and Class Making in the Seventeenth Century Ottoman Empire.”
Charlotte Terry has been awarded a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship. This award will support her dissertation, "Mormons, Pacific Islanders, and the Borders of Belonging in the Age of Empire."
Daniel Castaneda is accepted into the 2022-23 UC Davis Professors for the Future Program for 2022-23. The Professors for the Future (PFTF) Program is a competitive, leadership-development program that workshops and supports outstanding Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars.
Charles Sills has accepted a Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic in Tangier, Morocco, for Summer 2022. CLS is funded by the U.S. Department of State and provides summer language training.
2021
Lucia Luna-Victoria Indacochea has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The fellowship will support Indacochea as she completes her dissertation, “Urban Battleground: Survival in Lima's Shantytowns During the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict.”
Dmitri Joseph Brown has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The fellowship will support Brown as he completes his dissertation, “Tewa Pueblos at the Dawn of Atomic Modernity.”
Julio Aguilar has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The fellowship will support Aguilar as he completes his dissertation, “A Thirsty Colonization: Water and Urban Political Ecology in the Silver City of Potosí, 1573-1770.”
Mehmet Çelik has been awarded a Research Fellowship with the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul. The fellowship will support Çelik’s dissertation research during the 2021-22 academic year.
Alejandro Renteria is awarded the 2021 Scholz Prize for his essay, “A Cultural Repercussion: Native Idolatry and the Paradox of Popular Religion in Early Colonial New Spain, 1525-1540.” The Emile Scholtz G. Prize is awarded to second-year PhD students and recognizes excellence in written research.
Ellie Kaplan has been awarded the Western Historical Association’s Disability Studies and Disabled Scholars Award. The award promotes and supports disability studies in the history of the American West.