The Founders’ Dissertation Fellowship is an annual $1000 award to a graduate student who show promise of significant contributions to historical scholarship. Funds from these Awards may be used for purposes directly or indirectly related to the dissertation, such as expenses for research, attendance of scholarly conferences, and the preparation of the dissertation.
Applicants to the Founders’ Dissertation Fellowship must be current members of WAWH when they submit their application. Current WAWH board members are not eligible to apply. Applicants for the fellowship may apply for it more than once but may win only once. All recipients shall be graduate students engaged in scholarship that is historical in nature, although the degree may be in related fields, have been advanced to candidacy, and are writing the dissertation at the time of application. They should expect the Ph.D. no earlier than December of the calendar year in which the award is made. Award bylaws are available.
To apply for the Founders’ Dissertation Fellowship, please visit our WAWH 2021 Prize Submission Form here.
For questions about the Founders Student Fellowship, please contact the Current Chair.
WAWH is working to re-endow its awards and prizes. Please consider a donation, of any amount, to support any of our eight awards and prizes. Donate now!
Previous Recipients
2020
Alana de Hinojosa, University of California, Los Angeles
“Unruly Terrains of Struggle: The Contested and Unresolved Terrains of of the Chamizal Land Dispute”
From the Award Committee:
Alana de Hinojosa’s dissertation, “Unruly Terrains of Struggle: The Contested and Unresolved Spaces of the Chamizal Land Dispute,” calls into question the idea of a “static border” between the United States and Mexico. Her work focuses on the Chamizal—a piece of disputed land on the U.S.-Mexico border— and, in particular, she explores the people that lived in, moved through, and helped define this fluid space. By tracing the movement of the Rio Grande, which refused to stay fixed in place, de Hinojosa’s work offers an innovative geographical reading of the changing border and the land disputes that resulted. Her dissertation, which brings together the fields of Chicana/o Studies, Geography, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous Studies, is built on four-years of careful research in a wide variety of archives as well as oral interviews conducted with the Chamizal residents. The committee was impressed by the timeliness and sensitivity of de Hinojosa’s work, which is grounded in stories and lives often overlooked by history and poses important questions about how nations define and defend their borders.
2019
Kimberly Killion, University of California, Berkeley
“The Chemist at the Table: Nutrition Science and the Politics of Food in the United States, 1885-1930.”
Honorable Mentions
Jaclyn Schultz, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Learning the Values of a Dollar: Childhood and Cultures of Economy in the U.S., 1825–1900”
Jelena Golubovic, Simon Fraser University
“Lowered Voices: An Oral History of Serb Women in the Siege of Sarajevo”
2018
Trish Kahle, University of Chicago
“The Graveyard Shift: Democracy in an Age of Energy Crisis, 1963–1981”
2017
Sarah Mellors, UC Irvine
“From Vinegar and Cotton Balls to Diaphragms and Vasectomies: Birth Control in Republican and Mao-Era China”
From the Judging Committee:
Mellors’s dissertation proposal about birth control in China before the One Child Policy exudes an academic clarity and an innovative maturity on nearly every front. She has a clear grasp of the historiography and where her interventions lie not just for a period of Chinese history, but for studies of birth control and personal agency most broadly. She has already done impressive research in oral history and diverse archival sources like court records, advertisements, and hospital records. She methodically distinguishes herself from previous approaches by “emphasiz[ing] the roles of individuals in shaping their own reproductive futures, giving users of birth control agency in a scholarly discourse dominated by top-down state policies.” Not only is her topic timely given the Chinese debates over the One Child Policy and its reverberations in international discussions, her own intervention arrives at a junction in which historians of gender are searching for new tools that stretch beyond binaries of resistance and domination and that reach deep into the paradoxes of everyday life. As Mellors argues “While clearly the coercive and violent nature of reproductive policing in the 1970s and 1980s can hardly be called feminist, the state’s expansion of access to birth control in the 1950s and 1960s could have been empowering for women. Yet, gender equality was also consistently subordinated to inherently patriarchal national interests.” The messiness between these two poles provides fertile ground for Mellors’s work.
2016
Jennifer Robin Terry, UC Berkeley
“Making Believe: The Business of Denying Child Labor in America”
2015
Katelyn Aguilar
“A ‘Cane’ Thing?’ Football, Race, and American Conservatism”
2014
Brianna Theobald, Arizona State University
“The Simplest Rules of Motherhood’: Settler Colonialism and theRegulation of American Indian Reproduction, 1910-1976.”
2013
Nikki Malain,University of California, Santa Barbara
“The Pope and the Pirates: Genoese Piracy, Diplomacy, and Trade in the High Middle Ages”
2012
Katie Jarvis, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Politics in the Marketplace: The Popular Activism and Cultural Representation of the Dames des Halles during the French Revolution”
2011
Sarah Keyes, University of Southern California
“Beyond the Plains: Migration to the Pacific and the Reconfiguration of America, 1820-1900”
2010
Elaine M. Nelson, University of New Mexico
“Dreams and Dust in the Black Hills: Contested Identities in America’s ‘Land of Promise”
2009
Robin Sager, Rice University
“Marital Cruelty in Antebellum Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin”
2008
Lindsay Holowach, University of California, Irvine
“Women in Revolution: A Biogaphy of Rosalie Ducrollay Jullien”
2007
Lauren Kientz, Michigan State University
“Cosmopolitan Ambitions: African-American Scholars in Europe, 1919-1939”
2006
Liz Willis-Tropea, University of Southern California
“Hollywood Glamour: Sex, Power and Photography, 1925-1939”
2005
Eleonory Gilburd, UC Berkeley
“‘To See Paris and Die’: Foreign Culture in the Soviet Union, 1956-1968”
2004
Bonnie Miller, Johns Hopkins University
“‘The Spectacular Little War’: A Study of Spanish-American War Visual and Popular Culture”
2003
Amanda Littauer, University of California, Berkeley
“V-girls, B-girls and Vagrants: Women, Sexuality and Criminality in the Wartime and Postwar Urban West, 1943-1960”
2002
Amy Meschke, Southern Methodist University
“Bender and Inheritance in the Spanish and Mexican Borderlands, 1750-1846”
2001
Katherine Benton, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“What About Women in the `White Man’s Camp’? Gender, Class, and the Re-invention of Race in Cochise County, Arizona, 1853-1940”
2000
Chiou-ling Yeh, University of California at Irvine
‘Taking it to the Streets’: Representations of Ethnicity and Gender in San Francisco’s Chinatown Chinese New Year Festivals, 1953-1993”
Honorable Mention
Katherine A. Benton, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“What About Women in the ‘White Man’s Camp’?: Gender, Class and the Reinvention of Race in Chochise County, AZ, 1853-1940”
1999
Lynn Sacco
“Not Talking About ‘It’: A History of Incest in the United States, 1900-1940”
1998
Bridget Ford
Van Nguyen-Marshall, University of British Columbia
“Issues of Poverty and Poor Relief in Colonial Northern Vietnam: The Interaction Between Colonial Modernism and Elite Vietnamese Thinking (1900-1945)”
1997
Marie Francois, University of Arizona
“When Pawnshops Talk: Material Culture and Petty Credit in Mexico City”
Honorable Mention
Regina Lark, University of California, Los Angeles
“Japanese War Brides: Marriage and Migration”
1996
Jennifer L. Green, UCLA
“Charity to the poor in medieval Spain: The Catalan diocese of Girona, 1180-1285”
1995
Rebecca Lynn Winer, UCLA
“Silent Partners? Women, Commerce and the Family in Perpignan, c.1250-1300”
1994
Martha Rampton, University of Virginia
“The Gender of Magic in the Early Middle Ages”
1993
Kathleen Gilmartin, Yale University
“‘Call Me an Amazon;” Sexual Identities and Gender Among Colorado Lesbians, 1940-1960.”
1992
Cecelia O’Leary, University of California, Berkeley
“Politics and Patriotism: The Making of an American Identity, 1870s to 1920s.”
1991
Anne Marie Poole, University of California, Los Angeles
“Madonnas or Magdalenes?: Saint-Simonian Women, Paris, 1832-1834.”
1990
Lois Huneycutt, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Margaret of Scotland, Edith-Matilda, and Formation of a Queenly Ideal in Medieval England”
Honorable Mentions
Kathryn A. Edwards, UCLA
“Families and Frontiers: Urban Reactions and Re-creations on the Burgundian Border, 1477 – c. 1530”
Joan Waugh, UCLA
“Unsentimental Reformer: The life of Josephine Shaw Lowell”
1989
Lori Liowski, University of Southern California
“From Rhetoric to Reality: Unionism and the Shaping of Winneshiek County, Iowa, 1840-1880”
1988
Mary Murphy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Class, Gender, and Leisure in the Urban West, 1917-1940”
1987
Nina Silber, UC Berkeley
Sherry Katz, UCLA
“Dual Commitments: Feminism, Socialism, and Women’s Political Activism in California, 1890-1920”
Mary Ellen Odem, UC Berkeley
1986
Margaret Rose, University of California, Los Angeles
“Women in the United Farm Workers: A Study of Chicana and Mexicana Participation in a Labor Union, 1950-1980”
Graduate Student Paper Prize
1986
Judy Kutulas, UCLA
“Anna Louisa Strong and Eleanor Roosevelt: A Political Friendship”
