Congratulations to our 2021-2022 prize-winning graduate students!

June 9, 2022
Many of our outstanding, graduating History graduate students were awarded Yale and department prizes this academic year. See below for a list of prizes, awards, and acknowledgments. Congratulations to all of our exceptional students! 
 
This listings below were featured in the GSAS Convocation Program.

Department Awards
Naomi Sussman
Frederick W. Beinecke Prize [The Frederick W. Beinecke Prize is awarded upon the recommendation of the History Department for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of Western American History.]
 
“Between the River and the Sea: The the History of California’s Native Heartland, 1781-1931”
Advisers: Stuart Schwartz and Ned Blackhawk
This is a distinguished and ambitious thesis that combines four distinct historical fields and historiographies-Latin American, Borderlands, Native American and U.S. history—and spans an extensive period and large-scale political changes. Among its many strengths, the dissertation highlights the under-recognized power of Indigenous peoples across the Colorado River watershed. Impressively researched, provocatively conceived, and sensitively written, this is an extremely mature piece of intellectual work. The dissertation will be the basis of a must-read book that demonstrates that the long history of Indigenous migrations and contestations is a fundamental aspect of North American history.

Amanda Joyce Hall
Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize [The Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize is awarded annually in memory of Sylvia Boone, a noted scholar of African art, who was the first tenured African–American woman on the Yale faculty. In her memory, Vera Wells, Yale ’71, has established a prize to honor Sylvia Boone’s life and work.]
 
“Struggle for Another World: Movements Against South African Apartheid and the Global Challenge to Anti-Black Racism, 1971-1991”
Advisers: Glenda Gilmore and Beverly Gage
Hall’s dissertation is astonishing in its scope - a sweeping multi-language, multi-archival account of the global anti-apartheid movement. An ambitious, magisterial, and beautifully executed study. A truly extraordinary effort and achievement. For now, it remains only to celebrate what her dissertation has achieved.

Beans Velocci
George Washington Egleston Historical Prize [The George Washington Egleston Historical Prize, established in 1901, is awarded annually to a research student who discovers new facts of importance for American history or gathers information or reaches conclusions which are useful from a historical, literary, and critical point of view.]
 
“Binary Logic: Race, Expertise, and the Persistence of Uncertainty in American Sex Research”
Adviser: Joanne Meyerowitz

Velocci’s project represents some of the best work currently coming out of the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. Beans has linked two important intellectual domains - sexuality and science - which they do with rigor and style. Beans’ approach is distinguished by their attention to questions of ambiguity in modern sex research across human and non-human domains. The dissertation is distinguished, original, and prize-worthy scholarship.


Tiraana Bains
Hans Gatzke Prize [The Hans Gatzke Prize is awarded upon the recommendation of the History Department for the outstanding dissertation or dissertations in a field of European history.]
 
“Making and Debating Empires in South Asia and the Global British Empire, 1756-1799”
Advisers: Abbas Amanat and Steven Pincus
Bains’ dissertation is based on an extraordinary research base in Indian and British archives. Her scholarship is grounded both in the political and economic thought of the 18th century, and draws deeply on British and American writing ranging from pamphlets, popular doggerels, court cases and parliamentary debates. She has produced an outstanding work of scholarship.

Ellen Nye
Hans Gatzke Prize [The Hans Gatzke Prize is awarded upon the recommendation of the History Department for the outstanding dissertation or dissertations in a field of European history.]
 
“Empires of Obligation: Law, Money, and Debt Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1670-1720”
Adviser: Alan Mikhail
Guided by years of research in English and Ottoman archival materials, Ellen Nye shows how English and Ottoman merchants developed a mutually-intelligible legal system in which to trade while simultaneously provoking divergent financial revolutions in the British and Ottoman Empires. This very fine dissertation is clearly written and organized, and it provides the foundations for what will be an excellent book. The extent and amount of research is truly stunning.

Anna Duensing
Edwin W. Small Prize [The Edwin W. Small Prize was established in memory of Edwin W. Small (B.A. 1930, M.A. 1934) and is awarded in recognition and furtherance of outstanding work in the field of American history.]
 
“Fascists Without Labels: Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition, 1933-1977”
Advisers: Crystal Feimster and Matthew Jacobson

This is a wonderful dissertation, ambitious in its scope and intelligent in its execution. Drawing on material from over 20 archives between the U.S. and Germany, she narrates the intersection stories of activists, artists, and intellectuals who used fascism as a framework for characterizing the lived experience of “racialized rightlessness” in the United States. One of the conspicuous strengths of Anna’s work is her outstanding command of– and engagement with–historiography. The depth of research here is northing short of remarkable. Duensing’s engagement with scholarship is rich and deep and the research is outright dazzling.


Hannah Greenwald
Edwin W. Small Prize [The Edwin W. Small Prize was established in memory of Edwin W. Small (B.A. 1930, M.A. 1934) and is awarded in recognition and furtherance of outstanding work in the field of American history.]
 
“Now I Walk on Foreign Soil: Settler Colonialism in Argentina’s Southern Borderlands, 1867-1899”
Adviser: Gilbert Joseph
Greenwald’s elegant, pioneering, and critical dissertation combines ethnohistory with social, political, and military history further placing indigenous people in the Argentina-Chile border at the center of the case study, with consequences for rethinking the history of the hemisphere. This is a first-class academic thesis that will have an impact in her field. By any measure, Hannah’s was an ambitious agenda and her execution of it reveals a real empathy with her historical and present-day Indigenous subjects.

Joanna Linzer
Arthur and Mary Wright Prize [The Arthur and Mary Wright Prize is awarded upon the recommendation of the History Department for the outstanding dissertation or dissertations in the field of history outside the United States or Europe.]
 
“Iron Archipelago: Environment and Industry in Early Modern and Modern Japan”
Adviser: Daniel Botsman
This is an impressive piece of scholarship which makes substantial contributions in multiple subfields of Japanese history. In addition to the massive empirical contributions of this work, Linzer’s dissertation offers us a different picture of the place of Japan in global environmental history. It is based on deep research into a vast array of often very difficult sources, and is elegantly organized, written and argued. Deeply research and gracefully written, “Iron Archipelago” tells a story that is both novel and compelling. In short, this dissertation is a thing of beauty.

Samuel Severson
Arthur and Mary Wright Prize [The Arthur and Mary Wright Prize is awarded upon the recommendation of the History Department for the outstanding dissertation or dissertations in the field of history outside the United States or Europe.]
 
“Social Control and Incarceration in Lesotho: A History of Strategies, 1850-1970”
Adviser: Robert Harms
This dissertation makes a significant contribution to the history of prisons and incarceration in Africa. A major innovation of the dissertation is in analyzing the history of prisons and leprosariums in Lesotho along parallel tracks. Both were custodial institutions that had many features in common. He has read deeply and widely on the history of penal practices in Europe, the United States and across the colonized world. The dissertation is carefully written, masterfully researched, meticulously detailed and persuasively argued. The prose is extremely readable and lively.

University Awards
Ricardo Alvarez-Pimentel
Theron Rockwell Field Prize [The Theron Rockwell Field Prize was established in 1957 by Emilia R. Field in memory of her husband, Theron Rockwell Field, Ph.B. 1889. It is awarded for poetic, literary, or religious works by any students enrolled in the University for a degree. This prize is awarded by the Office of the Secretary of Yale University.]
 
“From Secret War to Cold War: Race, Catholicism, and the Un-Making of Counterrevolutionary Mexico, 1917-1946”
Adviser: Gilbert M. Joseph
For a chilling portrait of the suppression of indigenous voices through pietistic inaction and religious suppression of dissent. Judiciously argued, clearly written, and impressively researched— with fine-grained analysis of archival, press, photographic, and oral sources—this dissertation rewrites the history of the Mexican revolutionary state: foregrounding women, centering race and religion, showing us how institutional Catholicism became a site for white racial formation and authoritarian politics.

Anna Duensing
John Addison Porter Prize [The John Addison Porter Prize, named in honor of Professor John Addison Porter, B.A. 1842, is awarded for a work of scholarship in any field where it is possible, through original effort, to gather and relate facts or principles, or both, and to present the results in such a literary form as to make the project of general human interest. This prize is awarded by the Office of the Secretary of Yale University.]
 
“Fascists Without Labels: Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition, 1933-1977”
Advisers: Crystal Feimster and Matthew Jacobson
This is a wonderful dissertation, ambitious in its scope and intelligent in its execution. Drawing on material from over 20 archives between the U.S. and Germany, she narrates the intersection stories of activists, artists, and intellectuals who used fascism as a framework for characterizing the lived experience of “racialized rightlessness” in the United States. One of the conspicuous strengths of Anna’s work is her outstanding command of– and engagement with–historiography. The depth of research here is northing short of remarkable. Duensing’s engagement with scholarship is rich and deep and the research is outright dazzling.

Graduating Winners of Prize Teaching Fellowships
Anna Duensing
African American Studies; History
2021-2022