Update from the Director of Undergraduate Studies

Katie Turk

Update from Director of Undergraduate Studies, Katherine Turk

Our undergraduate program has thrived this year, and we are delighted to support and applaud our students’ achievements.

Our department celebrates our undergraduates’ scholarship. The 2023 Joshua Meador Prize, which recognizes the best History 389 paper written in 2022, was awarded to Christiana Wayne. She wrote her prize-winning paper, “Billy Graham on the Cold War: Politics and Salvation,” in a seminar taught by Molly Worthen. Wayne also won the Frank Ryan Prize for the year’s best thesis, awarded by the History Department’s Prize Committee, for “A Music of Survival: The Prague Jazz Scene and Dissent in Communist Czechoslovakia,” which was advised by Chad Bryant. Thanks to him and to all of the advisors and second readers for guiding our students’ impressive projects.

Beyond the History Department, History major Emily Orland was twice honored at the 2023 Chancellor’s Awards Ceremony, where she won both the Cazel Prize for Excellence in History and the Mary Turner Lane Award for Excellence in Research in Women’s and Gender Studies. Also honored at the ceremony was Seth Thomas Moore, who won the North Caroliniana Society’s William S. Powell Award for his paper written in Antwain Hunter’s History 398 seminar. Our department has also won two William C. Friday Arts and Humanities Research Awards from UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. The first will support History major Ila Chilberg’s work with John Wood Sweet, and the second will support History major Sloan Duvall’s work with Katherine Turk.

Four History majors won departmental awards in 2023 to offset the cost of research related to their honors theses: Calvin Mueller won a Summer 2023 Boyatt Award to research the life and career of Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. Stephanie Pierson won the 2023 David Anthony Kusa Award for Research in History and a Fall 2023 Boyatt Award, which will fund research in Santiago, Chile for a project on “Queer Resistance in Pinochet’s Chile”. Also winning Fall 2023 Boyatt awards were Celeste Covington, who will conduct primary source research at various institutions in London toward her thesis project, “Pharaoh of Knightsbridge: Mohamed Al Fayed and Harrods”; and Andrew Gary, who will bolster his honors thesis project, “An Examination of Federal Interventions in the Former Insurrectionary States,” with research at the National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

Our majors develop all kinds of useful skills in History courses. In summer of 2023, the department underwrote three History majors who pursued unpaid internships in related areas. The winners of 2023 History Department Internship Awards were Jingqi Su, who will work with oral history interviews at the Local History Office of Songhai County in China; Sophia Labys, who will intern with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C.; and Christopher Westcott, who will serve as a research assistant at UNC Law School.

In Fall 2023, many of our majors studied abroad and traveled for research with History Department funding. Five students received Fall 2023 Boyatt Awards: Charisma Stevens, for the Freie Universitaet Berlin (European Studies); Whitney Knotts, for Oxford University (St Edmund Hall); Ann Alexander, for the University of Edinburgh; Joshua Dolgoff for IES Abroad: Barcelona (Journalism & Communications); and Jordan Mundy, for a student-initiated program in Italy. History major Micah Morton-James will participate in the UNC Phillips Summer in Taiwan program with Boyatt Award support.

Finally, our undergraduates and faculty have found opportunities to support and learn from each other. UNC’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society, sponsored a lecture by Chad Bryant, titled “Blogging and Belonging: Prague’s Czech-Vietnamese Community and What Social Media Might Have Been,” as part of our department’s celebration of University Research Week.

Katie Turk
Director of Undergraduate Studies