Recent Faculty and Student Awards
Faculty
Marcelo Bucheli was awarded the Harvard-Newcomen Award for the Best Article Published in the "Business History Review" in 2004 for the article "Enforcing Business Contracts in South America: The United Fruit Company and the Colombian Banana Planters in the 20th century", Business History Review 78 (Summer 2004): 181-212.
He also won a Research Grant from the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) at the University of Illinois to do field research in Argentina, Mexico, and Austin (Texas).
Ken Cuno won the following grants for the Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, of which he was director from 2003-2006.
- U.S. Dept. of Education Title VI grant for 2006-2010 to fund an Undergraduate National Resource Center in Middle Eastern Studies within PSAMES.
- this grant funds new faculty lines and TAs in language and non-language instruction; an extensive K-12 outreach program; curriculum development; library collection development; and program enrichment/public outreach activities ($175,055.00/yr. x 4)
- this will establish an NRC for Middle Eastern Studies at UI for the first time in its history; this is also the first time UI has had FLAS fellowships (below) for Middle Eastern languages. Illinois has the sole newly-funded Middle East Center in the nation.
- U.S. Dept. of Education Title VI grant for 2006-2010 to fund Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships
- this grant funds annually 10 academic year fellowships and 3-4 summer fellowships for graduate students studying Middle Eastern languages; in AY 06 four of the graduate student fellows are in History ($175,000/yr. x 4)
- Institute of Turkish Studies, Washington, DC. Seed grant in support of a Turkish language instructor (2006-07). ($20,000.00)
- Institute of Turkish Studies, Washington, DC. Third matching grant in support of a Turkish Studies Symposium (2007).
In 2006 Max Edelson received a summer research grant from the UIUC Environmental Council's Earth and Society program to study the impact of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 on commerce in the Atlantic world. This last spring, he was invited to give the keynote address at the History-HGSA conference on “Radical Environments, Contested Landscapes, and Mental Geographies” at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. With funds from a 2006 UIUC research board grant, he worked with cartographer Philip Schwartzberg to create a series of maps and images that illustrate landscape change in the early Carolina Lowcountry. These will be published in his forthcoming book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard, 2006). The book will be featured at a special book session of the Social Science History Association's annual meeting in Minneapolis in November.
Augusto Espiritu was awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellows Award for 2006-2007.
Lillian Hoddeson received a $50,000 grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, for her project on oral history and memory. She was also the recipient of a 2006-2007 Madden Fellowship in Technology, Arts, and Culture for her study of creativity in alternative energy technologies. Last but not least, she was awarded a Beckman Seed Grant (with Tom Anastasio) to support graduate students for two years to study use of analogies between social and neural systems.
Kristin Hoganson was awarded the Bernath Lecture Prize in 2005 by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. She gave the prize lecture to SHAFR in April, 2006.
Diane Koenker was awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship for or writing on her project, "Proletarian Tourism and Vacations." She also received a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) that will fund two months of research in Russia in September and October this year.
Clarence Lang was the primary author of a reading group grant proposal, "Communities of Blackness and Belief," awarded by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at U of I, 2005-06. He was also selected for fellowships from the Mellon Faculty Fellows Program, and the Center for Advanced Study (CAS.
Harry Liebersohn won a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin, Germany for the 2006-2007 academic year.
Jessica Millward was awarded Association of American University Women Post Doctoral Fellowship, 2006-2007. She was also the recipient of a University of Illinois, Mellon Faculty Fellows Release Time Grant, Fall 2005 and Lord Baltimore Fellowship, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD, for 2004–2006
Dana Rabin won a Humanities Released Time grant for Fall 2005 and a Research Board award for 2006-2007 ($7000). Both support her new project, "Imperial Disruptions: Serving-maids, Circumcision, Race, and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain."
Since her arrival at UIUC, Carol Symes has been the recipient of a Mellon Faculty Fellowship (Spring, 2004) and a William and Flora Hewlett International Research Travel Grant (Summer, 2006). She has also been a visiting scholar at the Katholieke
Universiteit, Leuven in Belgium (Summer, 2006). In 2004, her article on “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theatre” (Speculum 77 [2002]: 778-831) won the Elliot Prize of the Medieval Academy
of America, awarded to the best first essay published in any journal, language, or area of medieval studies in a given year, and judged to be of outstanding quality; it also received the Stevens Prize of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society.
Ronald Toby has been awarded grants from the Japan Foundation, Japan-US Friendship Commission, and Blakemore Foundation to produce "Raising Edo: The Shogun's City," a documentary on the city of Edo (today's Tokyo) in the 17th century. Ron also was one of only two UIUC faculty to receive the 2006 Campus Award for Outstanding Graduate Mentorship.
Graduate Students
Andy Bruno received the Rodkey prize for Russian history and the Swain prize for best seminar paper in 2005-2006.
Andrew Demshuk won an award for the Best Graduate Paper in Central Europe offered by the, Association for the Study of Nationalities Conference, Columbia University. He was also awarded a-Seven-Week Summer Fellowship with the Dubnow Institut in Leipzig
Jen Edwards was invited to participate in the German Historical Institute's IV Medieval Seminar in Venice, October 2005, where my paper was "Choosing Isabelle: A Thirteenth-Century Dispute in the Abbey of Sainte-Croix, Poitiers."
Matt Gambino received honorable mention for the American Association for the History of Medicine's Shryock Medal, an award given annually for the best graduate student essay in the history of medicine. His essay was entitled "'Voice of the Patients': Mental Illness, Institutional Newspapers, and Patient Life at St. Elizabeths Hospital (Washington, DC) in the Twentieth Century".
Lane Harris was awarded a Social Science Research Council (SSRC), International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, for 2006-2007. He was offered, but declined, a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange: Dissertation Fellowship, Fall 2006-Summer 2007.
He was also named a Junior Fellow at the Institute for International Research at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, Nanjing, People's Republic of China, Fall 2006.
Brian Hoffman received the 2006 Larry J. Hackman Research Residency from the New York State Archives.
Rebecca McNulty was awarded a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship for Research Related to Education for her dissertation project, "Education for Empire: Manual Labor, Civilization, and the Family in Nineteenth-Century American Missionary Education."
Stacy Pratt received two grants for dissertation research: King V. Hostick Award--Illinois Historic Preservation Agency ($3,000) and another research grant from the State Historical Society of Iowa ($1,000). The second grant will not only help with research expenses but also result in the publication of an article in the Annals of Iowa.
O% Faculty
Diane Harris was given the 2006 Iris Foundation Award for outstanding contributions to the history of art, decorative arts, and cultural history (given by the Bard Graduate Center, New York). She also won the 2006 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for distinguished scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design (awarded for my book, The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy)
Tobias Higbie was recently awarded a Research Grant from the State Historical Society of Iowa for research on my project about working class intellectuals and adult education in the US.
David Price was awarded the H.P. Kraus Fellowship for 2006-2007 at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, to support his current book project on “Christian-Jewish Relations in the Renaissance.”
Richard Ross was appointed by the College of Law as the Thomas M. Mengler Faculty Scholar (2006-2008). This position provides two semesters of research leave over the next two academic years.
Graduates
Michael Auslin, associate Professor of Japanese History at Yale University, had an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, “The China Card,” on July 7, 2006.