2019 SHAFR Awards Luncheon at the American Historical Association
The Norman and Laura Graebner Prize was established through the generosity of Norman’s students to recognize the lifetime achievement of a senior historian of foreign relations who has significantly contributed to the development of the field, through scholarship, teaching, and/or service. The Graebner Prize Committee (Edward Miller, Kristin Hoganson, and Lien-Hang Nguyen) announced that Emily Rosenberg is the 2018 recipient of the Graebner Prize. In addition to her award-studded years of teaching at both Macalester College and the University of California-Irvine, she reached and taught countless others through her textbooks, Teaching American History workshops, and scholarship. That scholarship includes more than a dozen books and some seventy articles, essays, and scholarly introductions and has had a profound impact on the field; it anticipated the cultural turn in the field and practically introduced the history of globalization. Yet Emily also found time to serve the profession in countless ways; to focus simply upon her contributions to SHAFR, she served as its President in 1997 and has headed countless committees, councils, boards, conference panels, and roundtables on behalf of our organization and its work. For all of these reasons, she is a very worthy recipient of the 2018 Graebner Award. Emily will receive her award at the upcoming SHAFR Conference.
The Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize is awarded annually to recognize excellence in teaching and research in the field of foreign relations by younger scholars. It is a testament to the vitality of SHAFR that every year the selection committee is faced with a difficult decision among so many outstanding nominees. After careful deliberation, this year’s Bernath Lecture committee (Carol Chin, Mark Bradley, and Hugh Wilford) have selected Professor Kelly Shannon to deliver the Bernath Lecture in 2020. Kelly Shannon received her Ph.D. from Temple University under the direction of Richard Immerman. She taught for three years at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, before taking up her current position at Florida Atlantic University. Her book, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights, draws together key themes of transnational feminism, global human rights, and Western discourse on Islamic societies. She carefully delineates the tensions, as well as points of agreement, between Western feminists, with their universalist and often Orientalist assumptions, and the Muslim women themselves. In addition, Shannon makes an important intervention by bringing the history of human rights politics right up to the end of the twentieth century. Many of her nominators also attested to her superb abilities as a teacher. For these reasons, the committee is delighted to award the Bernath Lecture Prize to Prof. Kelly Shannon. She is pictured above with committee chair Carol Chin.
The William Appleman Williams Junior Faculty Grants were established by SHAFR’s Council to promote scholarly research by untenured college and university faculty and others who are within six years of the Ph.D., who are working as professional historians, and who are working on the first research monograph. This year’s committee (Keisha Blain, Scott Laderman, and Heather Stur) recognizes two outstanding projects for 2019:
Amira Rose Davis's book manuscript, “‘Can’t Eat a Medal’: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow,” is an original and innovative study that sheds new light on an understudied topic in US and global history—the experiences of black women athletes. By positioning black women athletes as Cold War diplomats, the author challenges conventional images of both athletes and of diplomats in fascinating ways. The project draws on over a dozen oral histories and extensive print sources in the U.S. and abroad to expand our understanding of sports, labor, and diplomacy through the lens of gender. Dr. Davis completed her Ph.D. in History in 2016 from Johns Hopkins University. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of History and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Amira is pictured above with Williams Junior Faculty Grant Committee Chair Keisha Blain.
Joan Flores-Villalobos's book manuscript, “The Silver Women: Intimacy, Race, and Empire at the Panama Canal, 1904-1914,” makes a significant contribution to the history of international relations by centering the experiences of West Indian women during the building of the Panama Canal. The study draws on original, underused sources and situates itself in multiple histories, such as those of gender, labor, race, empire, the Caribbean, and Central America. It will make important contributions to both U.S.-Latin America and U.S.-Caribbean historiography. Dr. Flores-Villalobos completed her Ph.D. in History in 2018 at New York University and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of History at Ohio State University.
SHAFR's Michael J. Hogan Foreign Language Fellowship honors the long-time editor of Diplomatic History and is intended to promote research in foreign-language sources by graduate students. Chaired by Arissa Oh, this year’s award committee (Karine Walther and James Stocker) was pleased to make this award to Samantha Clarke, a doctoral candidate at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, studying with Pamela Swett. Clarke’s dissertation, entitled “Poliotics: International Medical Collaboration, Cold War Competition, and Polio in Germany, 1947-1965,” brings together Cold War history with the history of medicine to examine how Cold War politics influenced the fight against polio in East and West Germany—specifically, in divided Berlin. The Hogan Fellowship will allow Samantha to enroll in an intensive eight-week foreign-language course through the Goethe Institut in Berlin.
The Graduate Student Grants & Fellowships Committee—chaired by Geoffrey Stewart and including Sarah Miller-Davenport, Gregg Brazinsky, Sam Lebovic, and Kate Burlingham—gave out the lion’s share of awards at the luncheon:
Yi Lu has been awarded the W. Stull Holt Fellowship to defray the costs of travel necessary to conduct research on his dissertation, “Sinological Garbology: How America Came to Know China,” which examines the role of “knowledge objects” or the data used by scholars in the establishment and development of China studies. Not only does it look at the intellectual genealogy of China studies, but it also examines the complex web of relationships between intellectuals, the state, and non-governmental organizations. Mr. Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University under the supervision of William Kirby.
Vivien Chang received the Stuart L. Bernath Dissertation Research Grant. Her dissertation, “Creating the Third World: Anticolonial Diplomacy and the Search for a New International Economic Order, 1960-1975,” examines the New International Economic Order (NIEO) from the vantage points of postcolonial elites in Ghana, Tanzania, and Algeria along with black power activists in the West as a lens to understand the rise and fall of Third World solidarity in a global context. Moving beyond the Cold War, these newly emerging nations promoted anticolonialism, development, transnational racial solidarities, and nonalignment to establish the NIEO, and its commitment to economic self-determination over territorial sovereignty as an alternative form of decolonization. Ms. Chang is a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia under the supervision of William Hitchcock. Vivien is pictured to the left with committee representative Sarah Miller-Davenport.
The Lawrence Gelfand-Armin Rappaport-Walter LaFeber Fellowship was established to honor Lawrence Gelfand, founding member and former SHAFR president; Armin Rappaport, founding editor of Diplomatic History; and Walter LaFeber, former president of SHAFR. This year’s recipient was Daniel Chardell, for his dissertation “Shifting Sands: The Gulf War as Middle Eastern and International History, 1988-1993.” Taking advantage of the growing number of declassified documents at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Iraqi Ba’th Party archives at the Hoover Institute along with records from the Middle East, this work situates the 1991 Gulf War amidst the larger turmoil of the Middle East state system at the end of the 1980s and the global currents related to the end of the Cold War to reconceptualize our understanding of this conflict as international history. Mr. Chardell is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University, working under the supervision of Erez Manela.
Ten doctoral students received Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grants to further their doctoral research projects:
Marino Auffant for his dissertation “The Global Origins and Impact of the 1970s Energy Crisis,” which examines the oil crisis from a global perspective. His preliminary research shows that Nixon’s liberalization of oil imports was contingent upon a multiplicity of political and economic factors that connected all corners of the globe. Auffant is particularly interested in reflecting on the Cold War in the Global South as well as bridging the “academic compartmentalization” that divides Latin America from the Middle East. Mr. Auffant is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, and his project is under the direction Dr. Erez Manela.
Robert Bell for his dissertation “American Influence in Iran, 1911-1963: From Financial Missionaries and Colonial Administrators to Shirt-Sleeve Diplomats and New Deal Developers.” The dissertation explores the relationships between Iranian officials and American advisors in the decades prior to the Cold War and the infamous 1953 coup. Paying particular attention to the history of economic management and based on research into the records of state and non-state actors from both nations, the dissertation will provide new perspectives on the longer history of U.S.-Iranian relations. Bell is a Ph.D. student at New York University, working under the supervision of Arang Keshavarzian.
Augusta Lynn Dell’Omo for her dissertation “‘A Dark Nation Born in a Day’: American Political Extremism in South Africa, 1980-1994.” Her project reconsiders U.S.-South Africa relations in the final years of apartheid from the new perspective of an organized and devoted American pro-apartheid lobby. In doing so, she expands our understanding of the final years of the apartheid government while shedding new light on the global origins of contemporary conservative anti-democratic movements. Ms. Dell’Omo is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Texas at Austin, and her project is under the direction of Dr. Jeremi Suri.
Amanda Joyce Hall for her dissertation, “TRIUMPH: Grassroots Activism against South African Apartheid and the Global Challenge to Anti-Black Racism.” The committee saw it as an innovative, multi-sited study exploring how the international anti-apartheid movement intersected with various local movements opposing racial and economic inequality. With the decline of New Left activism in the early 1970s, a new generation of university students across the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Australia channeled their dissent into the anti-apartheid cause as a way to fight back against the South African state—and against domestic racism and the rise of conservative politics. Ms. Hall is a Ph.D. student at Yale University under the supervision of Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore.
Brendan A. Collins Jordan for his dissertation “States of Emergency: Disaster and Displacement in Nicaragua’s Twentieth Century,” which considers “the political implications” of disasters, both environmental and man-made. These disasters moved large portions of local populations from the countryside to the city, in the process transforming social and environmental relations. He looks at all these relations in Nicaragua, where disaster and displacement have been frequent aspects of that nation’s twentieth century. Mr. Jordan is a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, and his project is under the direction of Greg Grandin.
Harrouna Malgouri for his dissertation “Francophone West African Internationalism and U.S. Cold War Politics, 1946-1987.” This dissertation explores the international activism of French-speaking West Africans between 1946 and 1987, particularly their impact on the thinking of U.S. foreign policymakers. Mr. Malgouri is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, working under the supervision of Jeannette Eileen Jones. He is pictured to the left receiving his award from committee member Sarah Miller-Davenport.
An Thuy Nguyen for her dissertation “Third Force: Urban Opposition to American Imperialism during the Vietnam War,1963-1975.” She explores the significance of the Third Force, an urban coalition of nonviolent South Vietnamese antiwar activists, on the Vietnam War. Though the Third Force never achieved its aim of a nonviolent solution to the fighting, she contends that it emerged as a potential source for reconciliation with the 1973 National Council of Reconciliation and Concord. Ms. Nguyen is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maine working with Ngo Vinh Long. An is pictured to the right, receiving her award from committee member Sarah Miller-Davenport.
Minami Nishioka for her dissertation “‘Civilizing’ Okinawa: Intimacies between the American and Japanese Empires, 1846-1919.” This dissertation examines how U.S. imperialists colluded with the Japanese to facilitate the spread of American culture to Okinawa. Ms. Mishioka is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She is working under the supervision of Luke Harlow. Minami is pictured to the left receiving her award from committee member Sarah Miller-Davenport.
Kent Weber for his dissertation “Expanding America’s Gate: Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawaii and Cuba, 1874-1943.” By comparing the enforcement of Chinese exclusion in two islands within the U.S. overseas empire, Weber’s study explores the entangled histories of immigration and empire. Drawing on research in a number of institutional repositories throughout the U.S. as well as Spanish-language research with Cuban sources, the study will provide new perspectives on the histories of racialization, immigration law, and imperial power. Weber is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, working under the supervision of David Chang.
Ida Yalzadeh for her dissertation “Solidarities and Solitude: Tracing the Iranian Diaspora.” It is a study of the lived experiences of Iranians in the U.S. from the Cold War through the War on Terror. Located at the intersection of diplomatic history, Arab and Muslim-American studies, and immigration history, the study draws on institutional records, cultural texts, and oral histories to analyze how Iranian Americans created communities in a nation that often portrayed them as enemies. Yalzadeh is a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, working under the supervision of Naoko Shibusawa.