Stone / Davis Prize

To encourage sophisticated training and experience in historical research among history undergraduates, The Davis Center for Historical Studies awards a limited number of Lawrence Stone and Shelby Cullom Davis prize fellowships to rising seniors for their senior thesis projects. Award recipients will receive a cash grant of up to $6,000 for use over summer break. To be considered, a student must have compiled an excellent record in departmental work, and must be recommended by a member of the department. The recommendation letter should be accompanied by a detailed research plan and budget written by the student.

Per University regulations, we will be covering allowable domestic and international travel and accommodation, as well as expenses designated by the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) for students to conduct research in University archives and libraries. Awards will be approved for remote research in accordance with the list of allowable expenses approved by the OUR; please refer to the OUR site for details and clarification on what is and is not covered.

Details of the spring application cycle for thesis funding will be announced to juniors early in the spring semester via email from the Undergraduate Office of the Department of History.

Application Information for Summer 2023:
The last date to submit an application to SAFE with all supporting materials is Friday, March 24, 2023 at 11:59 pm. Awards will be announced on Friday, April 21.

Please contact Jackie Wasneski, Administrative Coordinator for the Undergraduate Program, with any questions you may have about Thesis Prize fellowships.

2022-23

Fizzah Arshad
Vera Brittain and Medicine On the Front Lines of WWI

Sam Bisno
Slavery, Capitalism, and the Evolution of the Cotton Gin

William Goldberg
Empire, Revolution, and Religion in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Mauritius

Sam Harshbarger
Perpetual Outsider? A History of Turkey's Relations with International Organizations, 1927-1955

Lena Hoplamazian
India's Capitalists: The Rise and Reign of Bombay Millowners from 1861-1918

Alice McGuiness
Pregnancy and Motherhood in the Female Jails of Colonial Bengal

Mahalia Norton
The Spanish Silent Film Industry

Katie Rohrbaugh
The Story of a Forest: An Exploration of Curation and Environmental Colonialism in Three Singaporean Cultural Institutions

Michael Salama
Water, Mining, and Environmental Policy in Chile

Past Stone / Davis Prize Winners

2021-22

Rene Cruz
Departamento 15: How Salvadoran Immigrants Transformed Brentwood, New York, 1979-2022

Austin Davis
Ramona Days: Four Perspectives on the Ramona Indian School of New Mexico, 1880-1900

Sarah Drapkin
In Search and Service of “Man”: Israel Drapkin and the International Evolution of Twentieth Century Criminology

Chaya Holch
The Drowning and Draining of the English Fens

Enjolique Hughes
A God for the Sunny Days: The Christianization of Scandinavia and a Changing Conceptualization of the Higher Powers

Johanne Kjaersgaard
Pioneering Borderless Production in Asia: Globalizing Hong Kong Garment Production, 1970-1987

Robin Park
The Struggle for Belonging in Medieval China: Refugees in the Tang Dynasty

Claire Schmeller
A Reign of Terror: The Struggle of Eastern Kentucky Coal Miners; 1890-1950

Isaac Wills
Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition: Protest, Petition, and Prison in British South Africa, 1875 to 1906

Julia Wojtenko
Heroes of Russia’s Musical Past: The Myth of Mikhail Glinka, Nationalism, and Russo-Centrism in the Soviet Union

2020-21

Diego Ayala-McCormick
The Franco Regime and the Spanish Road: Agrarian Origins of the “Spanish Miracle,” 1930-1970

Jacquelyn Davila
Acequias, New Mexicans, and the Clash of American Economic Identities

Bradley Phelps
Pawns of Empire: New Ireland, Maine Loyalists, & The Northern Frontier of the American Revolution

Shaffin Siddiqui
Towards Self-Health: Healing Black Neurosis, Drug Addiction, and AIDS in the Nation of Islam

2019-20

Nicholas Wooldridge
Proposed thesis title: The Politics of U.S. Naval Expansion, 1981-1989

Kyla Sears
Proposed thesis title: Barbary Corsairs and their Impact on European Foreign Policy

Elizabeth D. Bailey
Proposed thesis title: Cultural Exchange Along Frontiers between Christian and Muslim States in the 9th-12th Centuries

Stephanie B. Schrange
Proposed thesis title: The History of Fire in Australia

Caroline A. Buck
Proposed thesis title: A Siege of Truth: The Skewed History of Crusading Curriculum in Great Britain

Christian C. Maines
Proposed thesis title: From Constantinople to the Cyclades: Examining Middle-Byzantine Projections of Power in the South Aegean

Peter A. Foster
Proposed thesis title: Vive l'Argent: The Fortune and Ascent of the House of Orléans, 1680-1830

Nathaniel A. Hull
Proposed thesis title: The Historical Memory of Genocide for California Native Americans

Adam A. McClain
Proposed thesis title: Resistance Opposition in Trentino-Alto Adige

Alec D. Israeli
Proposed thesis title: The Labor Ideology of Cotton Planters in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1845-1861

Roberto Hasbun
Proposed thesis title: From Slavery to Freedom: The Garifuna's Struggle for Visibility in Honduras, 1797-1900

2018-19

Will H. Brown
Proposed thesis title: Impact and Reaction: Winston Churchill's Most Famous Speeches from the Summer of 1940

Bhadrajee S. Hewage
Proprosed thesis title: From Revival to Independence: Buddhism and the Ceylonese Nationalist Movement, 1880-1948

An Lanh Le
Proposed thesis title: White Gold, Red Earth: Labor Relations on Rubber Plantations in French Indochina During the Interwar Period

Rafi Y. Lehmann
Proposed thesis title: Geographies of Loss in Holocaust and Nakba Memorial Books

Abbie B. Minard
Proposed thesis title: The Vermont Marble Company: Restructuring Rural Society and Culture in Late-Nineteenth-Century Vermont

Ben Press
Proposed thesis title: Sir John Port, Tudor Legal Upheavals and the Emergence of Due Process

Audrey Spensley
Proposed thesis title: Edmund Du Cane and English Prison Reform, 1869-1895

2017-18

Jordan B. Antebi
Proposed thesis title: Post-World War II Housing, Urban Renewal, ACTION, Inc.

Rohana L. Chase
Proposed thesis title: Water-Related Grassroots Environmental Activism in the Kathmandu River Valley

Kate H. Reed
Proposed thesis title: International Progressivism, Domestic Dirty War: Examining Luis Echeverría's Presidency, 1970-1976

Samuel E. Schultz
Proposed thesis title: Future of the Machine: Isaac Asimov and the Historical Origins of AI

Sam S. Valle
Proposed thesis title: Anglo-American Diplomacy and the American Civil War

2016-17

David Crane
Proposed thesis title: Foundation of the United Arab Emirates

Sarah M. Dinovelli
Proposed thesis title: Covering the Los Angeles Riots: A Look into the Role of Mass Media in the Public's Reaction to Domestic Crises

Jennifer El-Fakir
Proposed thesis title: Legal Piracy? Depends on Who’s Asking: Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean

Jonathan Lebeau
Proposed thesis title: Christian Zionism

Connor Pfeiffer
Proposed thesis title: "The German Revolution": Disraeli, Gladstone, and British Foreign Policy During the Wars of German Unification

Miranda Rosen
Proposed thesis title: Examining Women's Suffrage Movements in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada

2015-16

Cason Crane
Proposed thesis title: Shadow Puppets: CIA Involvement in the Iran-Iraq War

Ararat Gocmen
Proposed thesis title: In Opposition and "In Power": The Political Opportunism of France's Right-Wing Mass Parties in Nazi-Occupied and Vichy France

Grant Golub
Proposed thesis title: America's Most Trusted Briton? Harold Macmillan, John F. Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Sergio Leos
Proposed thesis title: Twentieth-Century Political Transition in Cuba

Therese M. Perales
Proposed thesis title: Peronist Influence in Argentina from the 1940s-1960s

2014-15

Farah Amjad
Proposed thesis title: The Impact of Gentrification on Brixton's Racial Memory

Sophia Andreassi
Proposed thesis title: Ballet and Fascism: The Paris Opera Ballet During World War II

Marlis Hinckley
Proposed thesis title: Alchemical Poetry Attributed to Raymond Lull and Arnald of Villanova

Sven Henningson
Proposed thesis title: Syndicates, Statesmen, and Spies: The American Institute for Free Labor Development's Involvement in Latin America in the 1960s and '70s

Kar Min Lim
Proposed thesis title: "As White As Us": The Chinese in the Philippines During the First Century of Spanish Rule (1571-1686)

Kamini Persaud
Proposed thesis title: Sexualizing the Indian Woman: Examining the legal status of Indian indentured women in British Guiana, 1887-1891

Maya Wahrman
Proposed thesis title: Mandates and Nationalism: The Creation of the Border of Iraq after World War One

2013-14

Brett Diehl
Proposed thesis title: Controlling Politics in the Periphery: The Growth of Rio de Janeiro Special Police, 1902-1930

Lekha Kanchinadam
Proposed thesis title: Monuments and Memorials: The Public History of Moby-Dick's Legacy

Nicholas Williams
Proposed thesis title: The New England Kitchen and the Intersections of Women, Science, Food, Social Reform, and Working Class Families, 1890-1894

2012-13

Blaire Bloxom
Proposed thesis title: The Biblical Roots of the International Justice Movement

Max Botstein
Proposed thesis title: The Thirty Year War in German Memory in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Ashley Chiang
Proposed thesis title: Evolution of the British Wartime Mail from the 1850's to the Outbreak of the First World War

Lorenzo McClellan
Proposed thesis title: Modernity in the Thought of Ranke, Burckhardt, and Gregorovius

Maryam Patton
Proposed thesis title: Intellectual Exchange between the Ottoman World and Early Modern Europe

Steven Server
Proposed thesis title: Mirrors in the Sand: Politics, Culture, and the US/Mexican Border

2011-12

Nicholas Bellinson
Proposed thesis title: The World on Display: Athanasius Kirchner's Museum and the Creation of a Seventeenth-Century Weltbild

Madeline McMahon
Proposed thesis title: Historical Scholarship and Protestant Confessional Identity in Sixteenth-Century England

2010-11

Ting-Fung Chan
Proposed thesis title: The Prussian World of Dreams: German Imperialism, Nationalism and the Orientalist Scholarship of Theodor Noldeke

Lucy Reeder
Proposed thesis title: A Study of African American Soldiers Stationed in Great Britain during World War II

Emily Rutherford
Proposed thesis title: John Addington Symonds and the Making of Male Homosexual Culture, 1870-1900

Sariswathi Shukla
Proposed thesis title: Harpsichord Arrangements of French Opera, 1760-1775

2009-10

Justine Drennan
Proposed thesis title: Strangers who Built an American Dream: Chinese and Irish Workers on the Transcontinental Railroad

Alissa Escarce
Proposed thesis title: Indigenous and Indigenist: The Politics of Mexican and American Anthropology in Chiapas, Mexico, 1951-1976

Miranda Sachs
Proposed thesis title: Les Enfants de la Guerre: Childhood in France during World War I

Janice Tiao
Proposed thesis title: From Midwives to Male Practitioners: The Gender Dynamics in Eighteenth-Century British Childbirth

Anna Toledano
Proposed thesis title: Sleeping Giants: The Megatherium and el Real Gabinete de Historia Natural in 18th- and 19th-Century Madrid

2008-09

Jesse George-Nichol
Proposed thesis title: When Carnage Has Sat Down to His Feasts: the Hidden Struggle of the North Carolina Secession Convention

John Thomas Nelson
Proposed thesis title: Healthy Bodies, Healthy Cadres: Soviet Medicine in a Time of Reform

Sucharita Ray
Proposed thesis title: Plague, Insurrection and the Popolo Minuto in Fourteenth-Century Siena

Caitlin Tully
Proposed thesis title: The Implementation of Virtue in the Pursuit of Prosperity: Disestablishment and Election Rhetoric in Early Nineteenth Century Connecticut

2007-08

Thomas Haine
Proposed thesis title: From Idea to Necessity: The Foundation of Hong Kong

Elizabeth Schwall
Proposed thesis title: Ballet and the Cuban Revolution: Dialogue between Art and Politics in Castro's Revolutionary Society

Jay Thornton
Proposed thesis title: Antonio Maceo's Development as a Cuban National Leader

Jolee VanLeuven
Proposed thesis title: A Study of the American Preservation and Outdoor Recreation Movement

Martha Vega-Gonzalez
Proposed thesis title: A Study of the Spanish Civil War

2006-07

Brendan Brady
Proposed thesis title: The Role of Language and the Press During the Dirty War in Argentina (1976-1983)

Laura Hurd
Proposed thesis title: French History and Colonization

Aiala Levy
Proposed thesis title: Political Radicalization of Argentina during the Belle Epoque

Asheesh Siddique
Proposed thesis title: British and American Suffragists

Charles M. Stone
Proposed thesis title: Washington Conference of May 1943

Jeffrey Wayno
Proposed thesis title: Henry III and the Royal Jewels of England

2005-06

Erin Blake
Proposed thesis title: An examination of the role of US WWII and post-WWII atomic policies on the development of nuclear energy, for both peaceful and military purposes, in Argentina

Julia Friedlander
Proposed thesis title: An investigation of the Pan-Europeanist movements that existed before the outbreak of the First World War

Iva Kleinova
Proposed thesis title: A study of the lived experience of the Nazi occupation oby analyzing the creative production of Group 42, a group that resists normative classification

Caroline Lau
Proposed thesis title: The Woman as Patient, Body, and Practitioner: The New Medical Culture of Late 19th Century America

Phillip Lehmann
Proposed thesis title: The Colonial Idea and Nation-building in Early Wilhelmine Germany: Scientific Expeditions, Ethnographical Museums, and Colonial Associations

Erik Linstrum
Proposed thesis title: An investigation of Italy and the English Imagination

Fernando Montero
Proposed thesis title: Evacuation From, Of, and Towards: The Camp, The Colony, The Suburb

Duncan Sahner
Proposed thesis title: To explore via artwork, memoirs, and official state documents the ways in which the French court of the ancient regime perceived the Habsburg dynasty of Austria

Kyle Weza
Proposed thesis title: A study of the creation and importance of the Socialist parade ground in East Germany during the postwar period

Elizabeth Yates
Proposed thesis title: History of Environmental Racism in the Southeast (1945-1985)

2004-05

Jennifer Albinson
Proposed thesis title: An investigation of the interconnections between Cuba and the U.S. black power movement in the 1960's and 1970's

Sherene Awad
Proposed thesis title: A study of the development of Egyptian foreign policy towards the United States from February 1954 to February 1955

Julia Ioffe
Proposed thesis title: A study of the Soviet connection to the Spanish speaking world

Shahrzad Joharifard
Proposed thesis title: A study of the history of the Marxist-Leninist regime in Benin

Diana Lemberg
Proposed thesis title: Diets of the Raj: The Formation of Dietary Identities in Late-Nineteenth Century Colonial India

Sara Mayeaux
Proposed thesis title: A study of the representations of Italian Fascism and the Mussolini regime in postwar children's Media

Jose Melendez
Proposed thesis title: Maroon Cartographies: the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico, 1762-1873

Raphael Moreen
Proposed thesis title: A study of how the patriot leaders of Ireland were influenced during the period of the American Revolution

Steffen Simon
Proposed thesis title: To study U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy's role in the decision-making process to end the dismantling of the German Industry

2002-03

Rachel Bernard
Proposed thesis title: A study of the history of Los Angeles Unified School District and how it has responded to the changing demographics of the city of Los Angeles

Katherine Linder
Proposed thesis title: A study of the Democratization of Travel in the 19th to early 20th centuries

Johan Mathew
Proposed thesis title: A study on the relationship between the Pan-Islam movements and the efforts of the Anglo-Indian colonial administration to expand its power in the Middle East around World War I

John Matsui
Proposed thesis title: A study of the Northern shift toward the radical Republican position on the South and slavery in 1862, during the second year of the American Civil War

Jose Perez Melendez (unable to accept)
Proposed thesis title: Representing Urban Expansion. San Juan and La Habana at the End of the Spanish Empire

Bruno Mikanowaski
Proposed thesis title: A study of the transformations in the Polish avant-garde centered in Krakow and the nearby village of Zakopane in the decade preceding WWI

Elisa Minoff
Proposed thesis title: A study of European and American New Towns in the 1950s and 1960s

Marisa Rauchway
Proposed thesis title: The Changing Common Sense of Evolutionary Science in American Common Law and Education

Hannah Tappis
Proposed thesis title: A study of to what extent did the history and conditions of communities along the Mozambique-Malawi border affect the settlement and repartriation of Mozambican refugees during the 1980s and 1990s

Charlotte Whalen
Proposed thesis title: Presence and Past: Jacob Spon, Seventeenth-Century Antiquarian

2001-02

Hannah Foster
Proposed thesis title: A study comparing the legal aspects and racialized language of the native land reserves in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century and South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century.

David Gail
Proposed thesis title: John F. Kennedy vice-presidential operations at the 1956 Democratic Convention

John Kimble
Proposed thesis title: A study of the history of mortgage discrimination in the United States after 1945

William Pollak
Proposed thesis title: Sex, Science, and Sterilization: the Influence of International Racism on the Development and Implementation of the Nazi's Racial Ideology

Kimberly Ruthsatz
Proposed thesis title: A study on the impact of Anthony Eden's role in the formation of the Special Relationship between Great Britain and the United States during World War II

Charlotte Walker
Proposed thesis title: How Women Make History: Mozambican Women and the Struggle for Voice in African History