Undergraduate Student Awards

The Department of History has four awards that are given to graduating seniors each year, two each for the College and the School of Foreign Service.

College:

The Morris Medal is awarded for the best History thesis written by a graduating senior major, as chosen by a departmental committee. Recent winners were:

2024: Dami Kim, Harriet Hayden: 19th-Century Black Womanhood, Respectability Politics, and Material Culture
2023: Caroline Coopersmith, One Nation Under God, Divisible: The Public Relations Trial of Dorothy Sheridan and Christian Science
2022: Tommy Batterman, The Plague That Didn’t Happen: Yersinia Pestis and the Lombard Conquest of Italy, 565-572
2021: Rachel Singer, “Scandal” in Poitiers? Three Perspectives on a Sixth-Century Nuns’ Rebellion
and Angelica Rossi-Hawkins, Raimondo Tulli: Continuity and Collusion from Fascist to Democratic Italy
2020: Nicholas Peang-Meth, “The property-holders shall rule this town!” The Danville Massacre and the White Reactionary Campaign Against Biracial City Government, 1882-84
2019: Marcus Lustig, Blacking up the Ivory Tower: Blackface Minstrelsy in College Life at Georgetown University
2018: Xinlan Hu, Danger and Opportunity: The Sino-U.S. Rapprochement as a Domestic Political Crisis in Both Countries, 1971-1972
2017: Andrew Meshnick, A Morbid Disconnect: The Battle Over Slave Health in the Early American Tobacco Industry
2016: Michael Donnay, Under One Management: The Jesuit Colleges in the Maryland-New York Province, 1879-1926
2015: Julia Cuddihy Butz (AMST): Brought Up in the Big House: American Slave Children in the Plantation Household
2014: Eric Nemarich (MVST): ‘The Bitterness of Compunction’: Clerical Attitudes tp Polyphony in Medieval Paris, c. 1230-1330
2013: Samuel Gerstle: “Pawns in the Cold War: The Indoctrination and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Siberia, 1945-1949”
2012: Benjamin Kirschenbaum, “The High Priest of Nature (Isaac Newton)”
2011: Caitlin Shea, “John Bull’s Other Island” and British Identity in an Era of Imperialism: The Reactions of the Anglo-Irish Literary Elite to the Execution of the Leaders of the Easter Rising and the Trial and Hanging of Sir Roger Casement (1916)
2010: Jonathan Cohn, Who Is Out of Line in the March of Progress? Perspectives on Religion and Industry Around the Great Exhibition of 1851
2009: J. Patrick Brown, Migrants, Miners, and Mayors: A History of Scranton, Pennsylvania, from 1865-1902;
and Daniel Rendleman, From Revolution to Rebellion: George Washington as Seen by the Literary Societies of the Greater Chesapeake, 1813-1868
2008: Stephen Kenny, Rex Anglorum: The Transformative Reign of Alfred the Great and the Unification of England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries
2007: Kara Flook, The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Power: Examining the Mutual Influence of the Independent Russian Press and the First Chechen War
2006: Laura Dziorny, Party Politics in the Congressional Elections of 1930
2005: Philip Marcelo, The Relationship between European Settlers and Native Americans in Turn of the Century Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia (Southern Chile and Argentina, 1890-1920)

The Foley Award is awarded by the College to a graduating senior who combines academic excellence with a commitment to social justice and community service, as chosen from applicants by a departmental committee. Recent winners were:

2024: Angela Nguyen
2023: Kiely Johnson
2022: Frances Trousdale
2021: Sarah Laird and Maya Moretta
2020: David Kilbridge
2019: Roberto Cabrera and Sarah Metz
2018: Simon Mairson
2017: Casey Nolan
2016: Daniel Aherne
2015: Thérèse Kilbane Myers
2014: no award
2013: Kathleen Bush-Joseph
2012: Elizabeth Cerabino
2011: Victoria Stulgis
2010: Maya Brodziak and Jonathan Cohn
2009: Christopher Miller
2008: Nathanael Van Duzer
2007: Ruben Loyo
2006: John Sutherland
2005: Kristina Gupta

SFS:

The Davids Award goes to the best History thesis written by a graduating senior, as chosen by a departmental committee. Recent winners were:

2024: Austin Nellessen, Resisting a Melting Pot: Mongols and Ethnic Minority Policy in Inner Mongolia
2023: Irmak Sensoz, Settling the Countryside: Pastoralists, Migrants, and the Tanzimat Era in Central Anatolia
2022: No recipient
2021: Isabella van der Meulen, Through the Lens of Biafra: Continuity and Change in Postcolonial Humanitarianism
2020: Gabriel Mielke, Orientalist Legacies, State Security, and Urban Planning in Amman, Jordan (1850-1968)
2019: Harrison Goohs, A Funeral Pyre or a Comforting Shimmer of Peace? The World of the Congress of Rastatt (1797-1799) and the End of the First Reich
2018: Camden Elliott, “Through Death’s Wilderness”: Environment and Warfare in the American South, 1835-1865
2017: Patrick Gage, Georgetown at Nuremberg: Edmund Walsh and the Curious Case of Karl Haushofer
2016: Caleb Morell, Radically [In]tolerant: How English Baptists Changed the Early Modern Toleration Debate
2015: Cody Williams, Popular Rhymes of Resistance and the Rhythm of Agrarian Reform: Brazil, Cordels, and the National Plan for Agrarian Reform from 1986 to 1988
2014: Kathleen Kokensparger, Les Mécontentes: Gender and Profession in Third Estate Women’s Cahiers de Doléances on the Eve of the French Revolution
2013: Peter Stanton, Língit ka Waashdan Kwaan, the Tlingit and the Americans: Interactions and Transformations, 1856-1896″
2012: Taylor Lescallette, “Vietnam is the Auschwitz of Our Generation”: National Socialism, the Holocaust, and the Cold War in the Writings of the Red Army Faction, 1968-1977
2011: no award
2010: Matthew Giffin, The Britain of the East: Liberalism, Darwinism, and British Perceptions of Japan, 1851-1914
2009: Anthony Piccirillo, “A Vile, Infamous, Diabolical Treaty”: The Franco-Ottoman Alliance of Francis I and the Eclipse of the Christendom Ideal
2008: no award
2007: Emily Curran, Félix Ireta Viveros and la Danza de los Cerdos: Corruption, Politics, and Foot-and-Mouth Disease in 1940s Mexico
2006: Kelsey Ruppel, Values of Work in Volga German Culture(s), 1850-1917
2005: Jordan White, Young Europe: Mazzini’s Role in the Development of European Nationalisms

The Nevils Award goes to the best student in the field of US Diplomatic History as chosen by the faculty in that field. Recent winners were:

2023: Brennan Young and Edward Donilon
2022: Molly Murphy
2021: No award
2020: No award
2019: Aliyah Quereshi
2018: Camden Elliott
2017: Matthew Raab
2016: Samuel Pence
2015: Trevor Tezel
2014: Steven Keithley
2013: no award
2012: Patrick Curran
2011: Andrea Michelsen
2010: John Maurer
2009: Meghan O’Neill
2008: Andrew Clayton
2007: no award
2006: Patrick Scruggs and Charles Smith II
2005: Megan Kinsella