SHAFR Recognizes Outstanding Scholarship and Service at the 2025 Annual Meeting

The Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize Committee–Nicole Anslover (chair), Samantha Payne, and Nicole Phelps—has awarded the 2025 prize to Daniel Chardell for his dissertation "The Gulf War: An International History, 1989-1991."  It was completed at Harvard University under the direction of Erez Manela.  In this examination of the 1991 Gulf War, Chardell argues for new interpretations of the end of the Cold War.  He analyzes Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait through the lens of new understandings of the global balance of power amidst the collapse of a Communist superpower.  Through multinational archival work, Chardell explains how differing U.S. and Arab visions of sovereignty helped shape foreign relations in the post-Cold War world. This dissertation will spark new conversations about the Gulf War and greater international relations at the end of the 20th century.
 
The committee also awarded Honorable Mention to David Helps for his dissertation, “Securing the World City: Policing, Migration, and the Struggle for Global Los Angeles, 1973-1994,” which was completed at the University of Michigan with advisor Matthew D. Lassiter.  In it, Helps crafts a transnational urban history that examines the transformation of Los Angeles during the twenty years Tom Bradley served as mayor, a period of dramatic growth in the city’s population and its economic role as a port city.  In examining contests over downtown redevelopment, security at the 1984 Olympics, and the Rodney King verdict, Helps brings together an impressive range of scholarship and archival research to illustrate how action at multiple scales came together in a specific place. 
 
Congratulations also go to Kaitlin Simpson for receiving Honorable Mention for her dissertation, "The Flowers of El Dorado: Gender, Production, and the Cut Flower Industry in the United States and Colombia, 1908-Present.”  Completed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, under the supervision of Tore Olsson, it is a creative and beautifully written history of the cut flower industry in the United States and Colombia during the twentieth century.  Simpson draws the reader in through a gendered analysis of the ascent of the cut flower industry, moving seamlessly between the U.S. and Latin America and drawing on a wide range of methodologies to explain how and why cut flowers were produced and consumed.  The committee especially appreciated the way she captures the experiences and perspectives of women workers in Colombian flower fields by reading corporate archives against the grain.  
 
The winner of the 2025 Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship is Margie Tang-Whitworth, a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Minnesota.  Her dissertation--“‘The Oriental Julia Child’: Chinese American Cuisine, Gendered Orientalism, and the Cold War”—is an exciting and thought-provoking study that examines how four Chinese American female celebrity chefs influenced popular U.S. perceptions of foreign relations, Chinese migration, and the Cold War both at home and in the world.  Tang-Whitmore’s project argues that “authentic” Chinese food on U.S. plates, hand in hand with the crafted performances, delivered an intersectional formation of the “model minority myth” in the United States.  Utilizing an approach that skillfully combines interdisciplinarity with both public and private primary sources, it unearths a key means by which Chinese American anticommunism increased during a key period in U.S., international, and global history.  The award committee (Kate Burlingham—chair, Aaron Coy Moulton, and Marc Selverstone) was greatly impressed with Tang-Whitmore’s original approach and conceptual framework.  Her dissertation, once completed, will make an outstanding addition to the breadth of work at SHAFR.
 
Dante LaRiccia of Yale University received Honorable Mention for the Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship.  His dissertation--“Carbon Colonization: U.S. Empire in the Age of Oil”—explores the origins and evolution of the global oil economy and charts its role in advancing America’s interests and mission abroad.  It reveals how the processing, shipment, and consumption of oil—in addition to its extraction—facilitated the imperial ambitions of the United States.  He then traces the impact of those ambitions and their ensuing frictions—between and among American oil companies, U.S. policymakers, and local peoples, at both the elite and grassroots levels—framing those contestations against the backdrop of the Cold War.  Incorporating documents from over two dozen archives, LaRiccia’s work sits at the intersection of environmental, international, and energy history and offers a wide-ranging and creative account of the climate crisis and its imperial roots.  Its insights into both colonization and decolonization, realized through the lens of the global petroleum economy, provides a deeper understanding of both our geo-climatic era and the projection of U.S. power abroad.
 
Taylor Prescott of the University of Pennsylvania also received Honorable Mention for the Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship.  His dissertation—Sovereigns and Exiles, Recaptives and Revolutionaries: A History of Black Interethnic Exchange in Sierra Leone, 1775-1848—is a political, intellectual, and global history that links the American Revolution with the movement for independence in Sierra Leone.  By connecting the history of the United States with the global history of Sierra Leone, he argues that the importance of the American Revolution extends beyond its influence in the Euro-American world and reaches to those colonized in Africa.  His project is part of a growing literature that seeks to shed light on the important links between U.S. and African history during this early period.   Further, by calling for a “global history of Sierra Leone,” his project addresses the need to see Africans as global actors long before the anti-colonial movements of the late twentieth century.  The committee was impressed by Prescott’s project and excited about the much needed geographic and temporal diversity it brings to SHAFR.
 
The Stuart L. Bernath Scholarly Article Prize Committee—Mattias Fibiger (chair), Oli Charbonneau, and Kaete O’Connell—is pleased to announce that Ben Zdencanovic is this year’s winner.  “‘A Strange Paradox’: U.S. Global Economic Power and the British Welfare State, 1944–1951” in Diplomatic History is a pathbreaking contribution to U.S. foreign relations history.  With exceptional archival depth and analytic precision, Zdencanovic reinterprets the trans-Atlantic ecumene in the immediate postwar years.  He skillfully nuances the dominant “embedded liberalism” thesis, revealing profound tensions between American marketism and British statism in the elaboration of the postwar economic order.  Yet he also exposes, through a detailed study of tobacco duties, the deep interdependencies between the two projects.  For example, U.S. dollar aid financed British imports of American tobacco, and taxes on the consumption of this tobacco financed much of the incremental increase in government spending necessary to realize the Beveridge Plan. Elegantly written, empirically rich, and theoretically incisive, this is scholarship of the highest caliber.

The committee also recognized Garrett McKinnon’s article “The 1960 U-2 Crisis Reconsidered: Technology, Masculinity, and U.S. Airpower’s ‘Unmanning’” in Diplomatic History.  It offers a bold and original reinterpretation of a pivotal Cold War episode. With intellectual verve and archival rigor, McKinnon frames the U-2 incident not merely as a diplomatic failure or intelligence blunder, but as a transformative moment in the cultural politics of American national security.  By situating pilot Francis Gary Powers’s capture within broader discourses of technology and masculinity in the Cold War, the article uncovers how perceptions of gender inflected the move from man to machine in U.S. military policy. Methodologically innovative and brilliantly argued, this is scholarship deserving of recognition.

This year’s Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, for the best first book in the field, was awarded by Colleen Woods (chair), Tessa Winkelmann, and Benjamin Coates to Christina Cecelia Davidson.  Centered on the life of H. C. C. Astwood—the first Black U.S. consul to the Dominican Republic—Dominican Crossroads: H. C. C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race Making in the Age of Emancipation is a wide-ranging history of late 19^th-century Black internationalism, transimperial Caribbean politics, and American race-making.  Astwood’s critics condemned him as a self-interested huckster (he once participated in a scheme to take Columbus’s skeleton on tour in the United States), but Davidson offers a nuanced portrait of a man who sought to exploit loopholes in the otherwise suffocating racial and international hierarchies that characterized the period.  Rooted in an impressively deep excavation of documents from U.S. and Dominican archives, Dominican Crossroads is a penetrating study that makes a persuasive case for the significance of a nation often overlooked by scholars of U.S. foreign relations.

The committee also recognized Allison Powers with Honorable Mention for her book, Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law.  In this brilliant social and multinational history of international law, Powers illustrates how ordinary people used arbitration to challenge U.S. power.  Between 1870 and 1930, the United States used claims commissions to legitimize, facilitate, and secure U.S. “territory, wealth, and political power across the globe.”  Charting how claimants from sites across the Americas, Caribbean, and Pacific appealed to international law through claims commissions to challenge and expose U.S. imperial violence, Powers reveals how ordinary people shaped the emergence of modern international law.  Through deep research and an engaging narrative, Arbitrating Empire makes a major contribution to our understanding of how the law of state responsibility has been constructed and deployed across the 20th century. 

The Myrna F. Bernath Fellowship recognizes excellence by women, non-binary, and/or trans scholars in U.S. foreign relations history.  This year’s committee—Carol Chin (chair), Megan Black, and Ryan Irwin—selected Sonya Schoenberger as the winner.  The committee was very impressed with the scope and design of her dissertation—“Oceanic Sovereignties: Decolonization and the Rise of Large Ocean States.”  It is poised to chart key legal, political, and environmental currents of the postwar era, as Pacific Islands in the Francophone and Anglophone sphere moved from territories to free associations and trade partners in decolonization.  Through the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, emerging Pacific Island States sought to affirm sovereignty in part by negotiating terms of marine governance: Who could control the valuable skipjack tuna fishing grounds?  How did the interests of Pacific Island States conflict with U.S. strategic interests in seabed minerals?  Sonya has already spent several months in New Caledonia, Fiji, and French Polynesia, and she will use the award to consult archives and conduct interviews in the Solomon Islands and Hawai’i.

The Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History goes to the best first book that on international or global history since the mid-nineteenth century that makes substantial use of historical records in more than one language.  This year’s prize committee of Jeremy Rich, Nathan Citino, and Pierre Asselin found Mateo Jarquin’s The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History to be a fascinating exploration of the Nicaraguan government’s diplomatic engagement with other countries in Central and South America as it struggled against U.S. state efforts to undermine it.  Drawing on the multinational approach to diplomatic history that has been a hallmark of SHAFR, Jarquin highlights the role of varied Latin American governments in their bid to assert their autonomy vis-a-vis the U.S. government and to prevent a recurrence of heavy-handed U.S. interventions such as in the Dominican Republic.  Jarquin deftly navigates interplay between internal Nicaraguan conflicts, U.S. Cold War relations, and especially the role of other Central and South American governments.  Well-written and convincingly argued, The Sandinista Revolution deserves attention from a wide range of diplomatic historians inside and outside of Latin American history.

The Robert H. Ferrell Prize rewards distinguished scholarship in the history of American foreign relations, broadly defined, for a book beyond the author’s first monograph.  This year’s prize committee—Marc Gallicchio (chair), Amanda McVety, and Kristin Ahlberg--is pleased to announce that this year’s winner is Katherine Epstein.  In Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State, she has shown how an inquiry into a technical and seemingly narrow topic—naval fire control—can produce a new understanding of the relationship between the law, technological development, political economy, and Anglo-American relations in the first half of the twentieth century.  This compelling trans-Atlantic drama of great power competition and intellectual piracy is a story about ingenuity and invention as well as the conflict between private property and national security.  Working with a wide range of legal, naval, and business sources, Epstein reveals how the U.S. and Royal navies pirated a privately developed system and then wrote the history of that technology in a way that made the theft disappear.  It took Epstein's admirable skills as a historian to discover what had been hidden.  In the process of doing so, she explains how the transnational efforts to override intellectual property rights laid the legal foundation for the current national security state well before the creation of Manhattan Project’s all-encompassing secrecy regime.
 
The Peter L. Hahn SHAFR Distinguished Service Award recognizes a senior historian who, over a career, has shown a deep commitment to the growth and development of our organization.  This year’s selection committee–Kristin Hoganson (chair), Andrew Preston, and Thomas Schwartz—are delighted to confer this honor on Andrew Johns.
 
SHAFR has been the fortunate beneficiary of Andy’s considerable talents and energy over the course of decades.  Andy has made new members feel welcome at SHAFR conferences since he was a new member, back in his grad student years in the 1990s.  His commitment to mentoring prompted Andy to co-direct the 2015 Summer Institute, and to this day, he continues to offer guidance to that cohort of Institute participants.
 
Andy brought this commitment to community building to his position as editor of Passport, which he expertly stewarded for fourteen years.  The selection committee received testimonials on his creativity, exacting editorial standards, talent for layout and design, and ability to lighten serious content with humor.  His nominators also commended his ability to identify emerging historiographical trends, envision fora of contemporary relevance, conceive of features such “Seven Questions,” and tirelessly solicit articles, oversee budgets, shepherd contributors, meet deadlines, and secure resources from his own institution (Brigham Young University).  In addition to advancing scholarship, teaching, and public advocacy, Andy has fostered awareness of developments at the National Archives and Presidential Libraries, the work of the Historical Advisory Committee on diplomatic documentation, SHAFR business, and member news.
 
Though substantial in themselves, Andy’s roles as a mentor and editor are only part of a larger record of conscientious service to SHAFR that also includes ample committee work.  Andy has served on the Gelfand-Rappaport Dissertation Fellowship committee, the Bernath Dissertation Grant committee, the local arrangements committee for the 2016 conference, the oversight and editorial board committees for the SHAFR website, and the search committee for the first Electronic Communications Editor.  He has also served SHAFR faithfully as a Council member.
 
Additionally, Andy played a role in establishing the Hahn Service Award, along with SHAFR’s LaFeber-Wood Teaching Prize and a book prize in our field offered by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.  His role in these endeavors is a testament to his commitment to lifting up and recognizing others.  It is a great pleasure to, in turn, recognize Andy, for his record of service to SHAFR is matched by few in the history of our Society.
 
The Anna K. Nelson Prize for Archival Excellence is awarded by SHAFR’s Historical Documentation Committee, consisting of Robert J. McMahon (chair), Katherine Sibley, and Thomas Zeiler, who unanimously recommended William Burr with great enthusiasm.  During his 35 years at the National Security Archive, Bill has displayed exemplary expertise with government documents pertaining to U.S. foreign relations and international affairs, along with outstanding and dedicated service to the scholarly community.  As one of the several distinguished scholars who nominated him notes, Bill Burr “has expanded the role of archivist to include not only the preservation and care of archival material but also to making archival material more accessible to scholars in innovative ways.”  He has excelled in using the Freedom of Information Act to locate, declassify, and preserve thousands of documents on U.S. foreign policy and international history.  Bill has helped collate, edit, and publish many of those in over 231 Electronic Briefing Books and nine Digital National Security documentary sets, totaling close to 200,000 pages of material that has been extraordinarily helpful to scholars.
 
His “tireless commitment to the release and dissemination of archival material,” writes another of his distinguished nominators, “particularly records related to the U.S. nuclear history, has made it possible for scholars to delve into a variety of topics and supported a generation of researchers working in the field.”  “Burr is the quiet, helpful, unassuming, invaluable archivist that Anna Nelson would have enormously admired,” adds another of his nominators.  How fitting, then, that he be awarded this prize established in her honor.
 
The inaugural Walter LaFeber-Molly Wood Prize for Distinguished Teaching was awarded by a subcommittee of the Teaching Committee comprised of Justin Hart (chair), Addison Jensen, Zachary Tayler, and Laila Ballout.  Their unanimous choice was Kyle Longley.  
 
For three decades, first at Arizona State and now at Chapman, Longley has mentored countless undergraduate and graduate students, from first-year college students to PhD candidates, with equal enthusiasm.  Dr. Longley begins his teaching statement with the aphorism “love what you teach, but also love who you teach,” and this has clearly been a guiding principle for him, according to the seven former students who took the time to write on his behalf for this award.  As one of his most distinguished PhD graduates writes of him, “At every point throughout my graduate career, I doubted myself.  Yet, Dr. Longley always believed in me. . . . Throughout each step, I knew that I had an advocate and a mentor who always considered what was in my best interest, and who believed in me.”  One of his undergraduates, who met Dr. Longley in a freshman seminar, was equally effusive, noting the way that Longley “engaged with students each day before the start of class and in smaller break-out sessions.  This allowed me to interact with him in ways that many freshmen don’t have the opportunity to.”  Dr. Longley is that rare instructor who excels in teaching students at all levels, and we believe that he is a most deserving recipient of the inaugural LaFeber-Wood Prize.