Faculty News
April 19, 2011
Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South has been named a Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in History.
April 1, 2011
Tom Sugrue's article "Labor Unions: American Tradition or Outmoded System?" was featured in SAS Frontiers, which discusses recent legislation to strip collective bargaining and other rights from union workers.
March 28, 2011
Jonathan Steinberg's Bismark: A Life has been published by Oxford University Press and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Henry Kissinger.
February 18, 2011
Eve Troutt-Powell was featured in a Penn Current article entitled "Ask the Expert: uprising in Egypt".
February 4, 2011
Michael Katz, along with co-authors Daniel Amsterdam, Merlin Chowkwanyu , and Mathew Creighton, have been selected to receive the 2010 Best Paper Published in the Journal of Urban Affairs Award for their article "Immigration and the New Metropolitan Geography," given by the Urban Affairs Association. Dan Amsterdam received his PhD in History in 2009 and Merlin Chowkwanyun is ABD in the graduate program.
January 19, 2011
Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South has won the Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians, for the best book in American social and/or intellectual history in 2010.
Peter Holquist has received the award of "Distinguished Editor" for 2010 from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, along with his colleague Michael David-Fox, for their work as founders and editors of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.
January 13, 2011
Tom Safley has been awarded an NEH Fellowship for 2011-12, to write a book on failure in the early modern economy.
Rick Beeman has been named the John Welsh Centennial Professor of History.
David Ruderman has won the 2010 National Jewish Book Award in History for his latest work, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton University Press), the second time he has received this honor.
Tom Sugrue has been named the President-Elect of the Urban History Association.
December 22, 2010
Kathy Brown received the annual Society for the History of the Early American Republic's (SHEAR) book prize and the Lawrence W. Levine Prize from the Organization of American Historians for her book, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness and the Making of the Modern Body
Rick Beeman’s Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, won the prestigious George Washington Book Prize and the Philadelphia Athenaeum Literary Award
Siyen Fei received an ACLS Fellowship for American Research in the Humanities in China for 2011.
Graduate Student News
Adrian O'Connor has accepted a tenure track position as assistant professor at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. Adrian graduated in December 2009, with a thesis entitled "Reading, Writing, and Representation: Politics and Education in France, 1762-1794."
Brian J. Rouleau was named a finalist for the Allan Nevins Prize, for "With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Commercial Expansion, Maritime Empire, and the American Seafaring Community Abroad, 1780-1870" (dissertation director: Michael Zuckerman). The Allan Nevins Prize, named for the historian and journalist who in 1939 founded the Society of American Historians to promote literary distinction in the writing of history and biography, is awarded annually for the best-written doctoral dissertation on an American subject.
Matthew Kruer has received the First Prize for the Colonial Essay Award, an annual contest by the Colonial Society of Pennsylvania, for a paper entitled " 'Away with These Distinctions': Native Americans and Racial Formation During Bacon's Rebellion."
Ethan Schrum has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, completed in 2009, was "Administering American Modernity: The Instrumental University in the Postwar United States."
Merlin Chowkwanyun has received a Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism Graduate Fellowship for 2011-2012, and more important, a IES [Institute of Education Sciences] Predoctoral Training fellowship, 2011-12, at the Graduate School of Education, UPENN. Merlin is working on a dissertation entitled "The Dilemmas of Community Health: The Political Economy of Medical Care and Environmental Health in Postwar America."
Catherine Styer has accepted an 'Introduction to the Humanities' postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University for 2011-2012. Cate will defend her dissertation - "Barbary Pirates, British Slaves, and the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1570-1800," - early in the summer.
Jessica Lautin has received the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellowship at the Museum of the City of New York. This two-year position will allow Jessica immerse in all areas of museum life while also providing her the opportunity to work on her own exhibit, publication or symposium. Jessica will defend her dissertation - "Culture, Class and the Remaking of Black Philadelphia" - early in the summer.
Andrew Berns has accepted a position as Viterbi Visiting Professor of Mediterranean Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Andrew defended his dissertation - "The Natural Philosophy of the Biblical World: Jewish and Christian Physicians in Late Renaissance Italy" - in April.
Anton Matytsin has received the Chateaubriand fellowship to do research in France next academic year on a dissertation provisionally entitled: "The Specter of Skepticism and the Sources of Certainty in the Early Enlightenment."
Sarah Manekin, a 2009 PhD, has been has been awarded a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2011-12. The National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program supports early career scholars working in critical areas of education research. This nonresidential postdoctoral fellowship funds proposals that make significant scholarly contributions to the field of education. The program also develops the careers of its recipients through professional development activities involving National Academy of Education members. Sarah graduated in 2009, with a thesis entitled "Spreading the Empire of Free Education, 1865-1905."
James Hoyt has been selected as one of this year's recipients of the "Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students."
Ceyda Karamursel has been awarded a SSRC-ACLS International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to work on a thesis provisionally entitled "The Worlds of Slave Women in the Ottoman Empire, 1789-1922."
Konstanze Kunst has been awarded a Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, from The Council on Library and Information Resources, to work on a thesis provisionally entitled "To the Prague Printshops! From the Prague Printshops! The Making and Mobility of Jewish Books within in the Ashkenazi Landscape of Jewish Printing in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century."
Wendy Doyon has been awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Ben Fisher has just accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History in the Department of History and the Graduate Program in Judaic Studies at Towson University, MD. Fisher will defend his dissertation, "The Centering of the Bible in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Jewish Religion, Culture, and Scholarship" in early July.
Noor Zaidi has been selected to receive a School of Arts and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students for the 2010-2011 academic year. A faculty committee has selected her along with nine other recipients. These awards are presented annually to graduate students in the arts and sciences to recognize their contributions to teaching at the undergraduate level. The awards seek to recognize teaching that is intellectually rigorous, exceptionally coherent, and has had considerable impact on students.
Leander Seah has just accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Asian History at Stetson University, Fl. Leander just defended his dissertation, entitled "Conceptualizing the Chinese World: Jinan University, Nanyang Migrants, and Trans-Regionalism, 1900-1941."
Thuy Linh Nguyen, a 2009 PhD, has accepted a tenure track position as assistant professor of history at Mount Saint Mary College. She is currently working as postdoc fellow at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include modern Southeast Asia, modern Vietnam and comparative empires.
Marie Brown's article "Fashioning a Nation" was featured in SAS Frontiers, which explores how women participated in constructing Sudan's national identity during the country's independence movement.
Karen Tani has just been hired as Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing her dissertation under the supervision of Tom Sugrue, Sally Gordon, and Michael Katz.
Lorrin Thomas, a 2004 History PhD (Prof. Michael Katz,adviser) has won the 2010 Theodore Saloutos Book Award for Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (University of Chicago Press). The prize is awarded for an outstanding book in the history of immigration and ethnic history. Prof. Thomas is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden.
Alan Allport, a 2007 PhD, has just accepted a tenure track position at Syracuse University. His dissertation was turned into a book, published by Yale University Press in 2010, entitled: "Demobbed: Coming Home After World War II."
Kyle Roberts, a 2007 PhD, has accepted a tenure-track position in US History and Public History at Loyola University in Chicago. The title of his dissertation was "Urban Evangelicals: Popular Religious Belief in New York City, 1783-1845."
Alan Allport, a 2007 PhD, has received one of the top prizes in history, the 2010 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award, for his book Demobbed:Coming Home After the Second World War.
Erik Mathisen has accepted an appointment as Lecturer- Assistant Professor in American Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Erik Mathisen graduated in 2009, with a dissertation entitled "Pledges of Allegiance: State Formation in Mississippi between Slavery and Redemption."
