Distinguished Dissertation Awards
Recipients in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Note: Previous to the 2008-09 academic year, the Humanities and Social Sciences dissertations were honored with separate awards.
2017-18
Alexandra Grace Martin, Anthropology“Mapping Ceremonial Stone Landscapes in the Narragansett Homelands: 'Teâno wonck nippée am, I will be here by and by again'"
2017-18
Honorable Mention
Casey Sylvia Schmitt, History
“Bound among Nations: Labor Coercion in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean”
2016-17
Laurel Richardson Daen, History
"The Constitution of Disability in the Early United States"
2015-16
Meghan Holder Bryant, American Studies
"Selling Race in America: Ideologies of Labor, Color, and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Advertising Imagery"
2014-15
Elizabeth Neidenbach, American Studies
"The Life and Legacy of Marie Couvent: Social Networks"
2013-14
Edward Paul Pompeian, History
“Spirited Enterprises: Venezuela, the United States, and the Independence of Spanish America, 1789-1823”
2012-13
Nancy A. Hillman, History
“Drawn together, drawn apart: Black and white Baptists in Tidewater Virginia, 1800-1875”
2011-12
Erin Krutko Devlin, American Studies
“’Justice is a Perpetual Struggle’: The Public Memory of the Little Rock School Desegregation Crisis”
2010-11
Edward Downing Maris-Wolf, History
“Liberty, Bondage, and the Pursuit of Happiness: The Free Black Expulsion Law and Self-Enslavement in Virginia, 1806-1864”
2009-10
Ella Maria Diaz, American Studies
“Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: The Ongoing Politics of Space and Ethnic Identity”
2008-09
Jennifer Bridges Oast, History
“Forgotten Masters: Institutional Slavery in Virginia, 1680-1860”
2007-08
Caroline Carpenter Nichols, American Studies
“Celebrity and the National Body: Encounters with the Exotic in Late-Nineteenth Century America”
2007-08
Daniel Owen Sayers, Anthropology
“The Diasporic World of the Great Dismal Swamp 1630-1860”
2006-07
Seth Charles Bruggeman, American Studies
“Objects, Memory, and the Creation of a National Monument”
2005-06
Susan A. Kern, History
“The Jeffersons at Shadwell: The Social and Material World of a Virginia Family”
2005-06
James Spady, American Studies
“’Like the Spider from the Rose’: Colonialism, Knowledge Competition, and the Cultural Politics of Education in the Lower South, ca.1700-ca.1820”
2004-05
Amanda L. Howard, American Studies
“’More than Shelter’: Community, Identity, and Spatial Politics in San Francisco Public Housing, 1938-2000”
