Faculty News
January 4, 2012
Michael Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and department chair, has come out with a new book, Why Don't American Cities Burn? (Penn Press).
December 2, 2011
Barbara Savage, a professor of history and American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, has been awarded the 2012 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for the ideas set forth in her book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion, published in 2008 by Harvard University Press.
The book introduces important new perspectives on the study of black religion and the political role of African American churches, said award director Susan Garrett. "Besides explaining why it is misleading to speak of 'the black church' given the enormous diversity among African American congregations, Savage challenges the popular belief that black churches have been prophetic and politically active throughout history," Garrett said. Savage also shows how black women excluded from religious leadership and the formal study of black religion became leaders outside their churches, including Nannie Helen Burroughs, who founded one of the nation's first vocational schools for women.
The University of Louisville presents four Grawemeyer Awards each year for outstanding works in music composition, world order, psychology and education. The university and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give a fifth award in religion. This year's awards are $100,000 each.
October 19, 2011
Stephanie McCurry, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected as the winner of the 2011 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for her book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press).
The Douglass Prize is awarded annually by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition. The $25,000 prize will be presented to McCurry at a dinner sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City in February 2012.
Graduate Student News
Adam Goodman has been selected to receive the George E. Pozzetta Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. The award will provide research funding for his dissertation, "Mexican Migrants and the Rise of the Deportation Regime, 1942-2010," and will be presented at the upcoming annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Milwaukee.
Claire Kaiser has been awarded an Advanced Research Fellowship, funded by the U.S. Department of State, Title VIII Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Independent States of the Former Soviet Union) for the 2012-2013 academic year for research and language study in Tbilisi, Georgia. Claire is working on a dissertation titled, "Socialist in Form, National in Content: Politics, Nationality, and Identity in Soviet Georgia, 1938-1978."
Karen Tani, a 2011 PhD, has been awarded the 2012 John A. Heinz Dissertation Award by The National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI), for her dissertation "Securing a Right to Welfare: Public Assistance Administration and the Rule of Law, 1938-1960." The committee was extremely impressed by her use of primary sources encompassing local variations in the administration of public assistance between 1935 and 1965 to provide an elegant and revealing analysis with far-reaching implications. Karen Tani is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California-Berkeley.
Adam Goodman, in recognition of his superlative academic performance, has been chosen to receive a Hopkinson Fellowship for the upcoming academic year (2011-12). This is the inaugural year of the Hopkinson Fellowships, which SAS has been able to establish with a generous endowment to the SAS Graduate Division from the Mellon Foundation in 2008. This endowment specifically targets support of graduate programs in the Humanities and Humanistic social sciences. This year the endowment has allowed SAS to award two Hopkinson Fellowships to SAS best graduate students who will enter their third or fourth years, and they hope to offer more in subsequent years.
Jennifer Rodgers has been awarded the Ben and Zelda Cohen Fellowship by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. Jennifer is working on a dissertation entitled "From the 'Archive of Horrors' to the 'Shop Window of Democracy:' The International Tracing Service and the Transnational Politics of the Past."
Jacob Eder has been awarded a "Mellon pre-doctoral fellowship in post-1945/cold war international history" by George Washington University for the next academic year. Jacob is working on a dissertation entitled "Holocaust Angst: The Federal Republic of Germany and Holocaust Memory in the United States, 1977 - 1990."
