Our undergraduate program has thrived this Spring, and we are delighted to support our students’ endeavors and honor their achievements.
In the coming months, many of our majors will study abroad and travel 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. Two History majors won awards to offset the cost of research related to their honors theses: Stephanie Pierson won the 2023 David Anthony Kusa Award for Research in History, which will fund research in Santiago, Chile for a project on “Queer Resistance in Pinochet’s Chile”; and Calvin Mueller won a Summer 2023 Boyatt Award to research the life and career of Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai.
Our majors develop all kinds of useful skills in History courses. This summer, the department will underwrite three History majors as they pursue unpaid internships in related areas. The winners of 2023 History Department Internship Awards are 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.
As we head into graduation season, 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. Last month, History major Riley Richardson presented the research he completed last fall for Don Reid’s History 398 on Ukrainian resistance to collectivization at the Undergraduate Conference on Slavic & East/Central European Studies, hosted by UCLA.
Beyond the History Department, History major Emily Orland was twice honored at the annual 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.
Our undergraduates build scholarly community on our campus and beyond. Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa this Spring were History majors William M. Dubose, Omar Ahmed Farrag, Grace Elizabeth Godfrey, John Bradley Lafave III, Jordan Elizabeth Mundy, Dante Frederick Oliva, Stephanie Pauletta Pierson, Maxwell Nathan Sutker, Lauren Tiffany Taylor, and Daughtry Reid Williams. UNC’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society, held its initiation ceremony on March 30th, where we thanked Emma Powell for her tremendous service as chapter president and selected a new president, Samantha Flores. Vice president Nicole Belcher will be coming aboard as well. Thanks also to History Undergraduate Association co-presidents Grace Godfrey and Cody Constantine. Cameron Neale will join Constantine as co-president next year.
Congratulations to the History majors who will graduate with departmental honors for completing senior theses this year: Abigail Akins, Jared Danaher, Graham Hill, Alex Kendrick, Emily Orland (highest honors), Grace Taylor, Liam Torres, and Christiana Wayne (highest honors). 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. Thanks, too, to Sam Louie-Meadors and the rest of the History Department staff for supporting the honors thesis program all year round.
We are always eager to hear from our alums. This semester, we received welcome updates from two: Jennifer Lao will be attending the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health for a Master’s in Public Health concentrating on health and social behavior; and Brittany Broome was admitted to the George Washington University School of Law with a full tuition scholarship as a Presidential Merit Scholar.
On the topic of alums, we would like to congratulate the Class of 2023—especially those with newly-minted History degrees. We know you will continue to make us proud as you leave Carolina. Please don’t hesitate to drop us a line, and come back and visit!
– Katherine Turk, Director of Undergraduate Studies