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Department of History

Department of History

Announcements

  • Sarah Igo has won the American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (2018), given annually to a distinguished work in American or European cultural history.
  • Congratulations to our colleagues for their success in the annual Research Scholar Grant competition. Kim Welch received a Research Scholar Fellowship; Ari Bryen a Summer Stipend, and Tasha Rijke-Epstein a Faculty Development Grant.
  • Kim Welch's book, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South, has been selected as a co-winner of the 2019 J. Willard Hurst Prize for the best work in socio-legal history. The prize will be awarded during the 2019 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, to be held May 30 – June 2 in Washington, DC. Black Litigants has also won the 2018 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History from the Langum Charitable Trust , and the 2018 SHEAR's Broussard Best First Book Prize.  Kimberly Welch  is a 2019 ACLS Fellow! She is the ACLS Oscar Handlin Fellow in American History, working on the project "Lending and Borrowing Across the Color Line in the Antebellum American South." The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) selected 81 fellows from over 1,100 applicants in a review process with multiple stages. Awards range from $40,000 to $70,000, depending on the scholar's career stage, and support six to twelve months of full-time research and writing.  Kimberly Welch  has received a Mellon Digital Humanities Faculty Fellowship for 2018-19.
  • Gilder Lehrman Center Book Talk: Professor Richard Blackett (Andrew Jackson Professor of History, Vanderbilt University) discusses his new book, The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Cambridge Press, 2018) with GLC Director David W. Blight.  Richard Blackett  received the College of Arts and Science Graduate Mentoring Award. Please link here to see all awards. Also, his book, The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery, is a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. 
  • Jane Landers has received this year's Alumni Education Award "given each year to a faculty member who has contributed substantially to developing or participating in those programs of the Vanderbilt Alumni Association that further the education of alumni". Jane Landers was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award for "Outstanding Scholarship, Teaching and Service in African Diaspora Studies," after giving the keynote talk at Tennessee State University's 7th Annual African Conference. The title of her talk was, "The Wolofs who Led the First Slave Revolt in the Americas: Espanola,1521."  Jane Lander’s  application Delia Zapata Olivella Collection has been selected as an awardee for Library Collections Initiative , a Vanderbilt University Library 2018 grant.
  • Lauren Benton has been named a Guggenheim Fellow and she will be spending the academic year 2019-2020 as a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.  Lauren Benton, Nelson O. Tyrone, Jr. Professor of History and professor of law, has been named winner of the Toynbee Prize for 2019 . The Toynbee Prize is awarded biennially for work that makes a significant contribution to the study of global history. Link to article.  Lauren Benton, has been elected to serve as the next president of the American Society for Legal History. Her two-year term begins in fall 2019.
  • Rhonda Williams has received an award to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she will be a visiting professor for the academic year 2019-2020.
  • At the April 2019 OAH meeting, Sarah Igo won the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award for her book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2018). The Known Citizen was also named Washington Post's "50 notable works of non-fiction books in 2018."
  • William Caferro , Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2018) has won the book prize of the American Association of Italian Studies. (web page not up to date yet)
  • Three of our colleagues have been awarded Mellon Partners in Humanities Education Faculty Collaboration Funds (focusing on the digital humanities in the College of Arts & Science). Brandon Byrd , Pataj/Partage: Shared Visions Between Fisk and Haiti; Jane Landers for her project, Haiti: The Need to Know and Preserve the Past; Ole Molvig for his project, Historic Black Nashville in Augmented Reality. Molvig has also received an Immersion Scholar Grant from the College of Arts & Science for 2019-2021.
  • NEW BOOK! Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland (Basic Books, 2019)
  • Frank Wcislo has just received the Richard Stites Senior Scholar Award awarded by the Southern Conference in Slavic Studies, the largest and oldest regional Slavic Studies organization in the country:  http://www.sewanee.edu/scss/awards/
  • Celso Castilho's book, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), has won a third award. In March 2018 this book was chosen as co-winner of the Roberto Reis Best Book Award for books published in Brazilian studies in 2016 and 2017.This work has previously been awarded the Bolton-Johnson and Warren Dean prizes from the Conference on Latin American History. 

 

updated July 22, 2019. 

See many more announcements about Professors and Graduate Students here.