Emilie Connolly

In Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States (Princeton University Press) Emilie Connolly masterfully shows how it was not just Native American land that Americans used to build their continental empire; it was also Native wealth - in particular, money held in trust by the United States government. Beginning with the Senecas in the late 1790s, the burgeoning United States used Native trust capital to finance banks, canals, and other infrastructures of continental expansion. Drawn into this system of “fiduciary colonialism” to provide for their people across time, Connolly skillfully highlights how Native leaders envisioned what trusts could be, and how they used their annuities as long term investments in the public good. Innovative, exhaustive, and revelatory, Vested Interests reshapes how we must think of U.S. foreign relations and economic imperialism.

Fritz Bartel

Fritz Bartel, a scholar at Texas A&M University’s Bush School, is a strikingly original historian of foreign relations whose research centers international political economy and significantly reshapes our understanding of the late 20th century. His first monograph, the award-winning The Triumph of Broken Promises, offered a pathbreaking reinterpretation of the last half of the Cold War. With remarkable analytical clarity, the book demonstrated how the conflict’s outcome was ultimately decided by global economic transformations of the 1970s, the neoliberal turn, and mounting financial constraints (and dependencies) among the members of the Socialist Camp.

Bartel’s current project, focused on the 1990s and the post-Cold War era, is arguably even more ambitious and promising. Distinguished by empirical rigor and methodological sophistication, it combines multi-archival research with a keen sensitivity to the consequences of broader structural dynamics. Sure to set a new standard for U.S. foreign relations history, Bartel’s emerging body of work is poised to make a major contribution to historiographical debates on the political, economic, and legal transformations just prior to the dawn of the 21st century.

Jethro A. E. A. Calacday

Jethro A. E. A. Calacday’s article “The Politics of Recognition in U.S.-Philippine-Vatican Relations, 1898–1899” is a major contribution to U.S. foreign relations history. Working across Tagalog, Spanish, Italian, French, and English sources, Calacday reconstructs a triangular diplomatic struggle between the Philippine Republic, the United States, and the Holy See. Breaking with historiographical orthodoxy, his article demonstrates that the Vatican was not a peripheral or passive religious actor in the history of U.S. empire in the Philippines, but a consequential diplomatic power whose refusal to recognize the First Philippine Republic helped facilitate the consolidation of American colonial rule. The committee was especially impressed by the article’s use of the “politics of recognition” to trace how sovereignty, civilization, religion, and race were negotiated through language: in Filipino nationalist appeals, Vatican diplomacy, Spanish ecclesiastical arguments, and American imperial statecraft. Calacday combines the evidentiary depth and precision of classic diplomatic history with the polyvocal, multilingual, and transimperial approaches of global history. The result is an elegant, original, and important work of scholarship.

Elizabeth O'Brien Ingleson

Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson’s Made in China, When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press) is the winner of the Myrna Bernath Prize. The committee was deeply impressed by Ingleson’s novel approach to a crucially important topic: how China moved from being an imagined market for U.S. goods to the unrivaled factory of the world. To the usual story of top-level decision-makers, Nixon and Deng, Ingleson adds a network of businessmen, fashion moguls, textiles workers, and longshoremen, who navigated America’s deindustrialization and China’s Cultural Revolution and forged connections that would reshape the global supply chain. Drawing upon Chinese- and English-language sources, this book is a careful, multidirectional study of the decade that ensured the ubiquity of the label “Made in China” in modern life.

Gretchen Heefner

Gretchen Heefner’s Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (University of Chicago Press) is a compelling, deeply-researched history of the engineering ingenuity that went into the U.S. effort to become a planetary power in the post-World War II period. Taking readers on a lively journey from deserts to ice sheets to the moon, Heefner shows how the dramatic expansion of the U.S. military’s presence relied upon the rapid acquisition of environmental intelligence and bold experimental engineering. In the process, she transforms our understanding of the intersection of science and military might in the middle of the 20th century.

Robert J. McMahon

The Norman and Laura Graebner Award recognizes lifetime achievement in scholarship, teaching, and service to the profession. This year’s recipient embodies all three in exceptional measure.

The SHAFR committee for the Norman & Laura Graebner Award unanimously supports the selection of Robert J. McMahon, Professor Emeritus of the History Department at the Ohio State University. He began his academic career at the University of Florida, where he held an appointment from 1982–2005 and chaired the History Department for four years. Professor McMahon also served for four years as an historian at the U.S. Department of State and eleven years at OSU, where he held the Ralph D. Mershon Distinguished Professorship of History until his retirement in 2016. He also has taught and lectured across five continents, held visiting appointments from Dublin to Berlin, and given some fifty international lectures.

Trained by Thomas Paterson at the University of Connecticut, he early demonstrated a gift for situating American power within global and postcolonial frameworks. Professor McMahon has published five monographs, specializing in particular on the history of South and Southeast Asia and the Cold War. He also has edited or co-edited four works on American foreign relations and published in flagship journals, such as the Journal of American History, Diplomatic History, and International History Review. In addition, he edited seven volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States series.

In the words of one of his letters of nomination, Professor McMahon “has written brilliantly about US relations with the ‘third world.’...His very short history of the Cold War with Oxford University Press is a succinct masterpiece. His article on ‘credibility’ is a lasting contribution to the field of international relations. His edited volume on the Vietnam War has been used again and again in courses across the country.” Another letter praises not only Professor McMahon’s intellectual contributions but also his mentorship, describing him “as one of the most collegial and supportive senior scholars willing to mentor junior scholars.” Finally, a third highlights Professor McMahon’s service to SHAFR, previously serving as President in 2001 and his “regular and visible presence at annual meetings, bringing wisdom and insight” as well as “his extensive networks to foster productive discussions among colleagues across fields on a range of academic and professional matters.”

It is particularly fitting that this year’s SHAFR conference, hosted by The Ohio State University, will be the occasion to honor Professor Robert J. McMahon as the recipient of the Norman & Laura Graebner Lifetime Achievement Award. He is, by every account, a scholar who has mentored junior colleagues with uncommon generosity and care. The field is richer for all of it.

Nathan Grau

The Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History committee has awarded the 2026 prize to Nathan Grau for his dissertation “Brazzaville’s Diaspora: Colonial Development, Counterinsurgent Violence, and the Struggle for Self-Determination, 1941–1958,” completed at Harvard University under the direction of Mary Lewis. Grau’s dissertation, offers a fresh and provocative reinterpretation of the reconstruction of the international order after World War II. Drawing on a huge range of archival sources and employing a multi-scalar methodology, he challenges a longstanding interpretation of the 1944 Brazzaville Conference as a moment of lost possibility for progressive reform in the French Empire. Grau demonstrates convincingly that one key element of the liberal vision articulated at Brazzaville—federated governance based on racial divisions—survived the conference and reshaped colonial rule on a global scale. Rather than promoting any kind of progressive transformation, these policies unleashed tremendous violence in Madagascar, Indochina, and Algeria by generating new local conflicts, some of which endure to this day. The extreme brutality of the postwar French Empire therefore cannot be explained by the defeat of the liberal reformers, but rather by their painful and costly success.

William Burr Dissertation Prize in Nuclear History

2026 Co-Recipients

Kathryn Statler

This year’s recipient of the Peter L. Hahn Distinguished Service Award is Kathryn Statler of the University of San Diego. Statler’s dedication to the Society is both laudatory and exemplary. In addition to being a longtime member and regular conference attendee, she has won election to the Nominating Committee (2007–2010) and to Council (2017–2020). She has served SHAFR in many other capacities as well, including as a member of the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2016 conference; a member of the SHAFR Executive Director Task Force in 2020; a member of the Diplomatic History Editorial Board; co-chair of the SHAFR/Miller Center Public History Workshop in 2017; a member of the Ways and Means Committee; and a member of the selection committees for the Myrna F. Bernath Book Award and William A. Williams Junior Faculty Research Grants. She also served on the task force to update SHAFR’s election procedures and by-laws, an important and rigorous process that resulted in major beneficial reforms to how the Society is governed by its members. Beyond all this extensive volunteer service in official capacities, Statler has been a supportive mentor and friend to scores of SHAFR members, everyone from graduate students and early-career scholars to fellow veterans of the organization. Kathryn Statler has been a familiar, friendly presence for decades. She gave her first presentation at an annual meeting thirty years ago, so it is entirely fitting that SHAFR members repay our collective debt of gratitude by bestowing upon her the 2026 Peter L. Hahn Distinguished Service Award.

R. Joseph Parrott

The recipient of the 2026 Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History is R. Joseph Parrott for his book Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press). The prize committee, consisting of Pierre Asselin, Amy Offner, and Nathan Citino, congratulates Parrott for his compelling study of how leaders of the anticolonial struggle against Portuguese rule in Africa established transnational ties with New Left activists in the United States. Parrott brings the neglected story of Lusophone Africa’s decolonization to life through his focus on leaders such as Amílcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, as well as organizations such as the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC). Through their liberation struggles and visions of egalitarian, antiracist societies, these actors inspired support among groups in the United States, including the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and the Congressional Black Caucus. These ties resulted in the celebration of African Liberation Day, a boycott of Gulf Oil, and the moratorium on U.S. intervention in Angola. They also set the stage for future congressional challenges to executive power and the Cold War consensus in the post-Vietnam era, notably the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The African anticolonial campaign and tricontinental politics of liberation thus shaped New Left ideals in the Global North. Parrott offers an important historiographical contribution that complements existing studies of how anticolonial movements appropriated the ideologies of the rival superpowers in the Global Cold War. His book also provides an important example of “bottom-up” international history that combines grassroots activism with high politics and diplomacy.

Matthew Masur

The subcommittee of SHAFR’s Teaching Committee tasked with selecting the 2026 recipient of SHAFR’s LaFeber-Wood Prize for Distinguished Teaching is delighted to announce that this year’s recipient is Dr. Matthew Masur. The members of the subcommittee found the selection process very difficult due to the high caliber of the candidates. In the end, however, the subcommittee was impressed by the breadth of Matt’s documented impact on teaching at several levels over more than two decades in the profession. At the personal level, several of his students wrote letters that attest to Matt’s impact on them both in college and in their careers afterward. It was evident to the subcommittee that Matt built enduring relationships with his students and remains in close contact with many of them, demonstrating a lasting impact beyond the physical classroom. His teaching philosophy laid out a flexible and engaging pedagogy for his classroom that is student-centered and willing to engage in “analog” teaching methods when necessary, which is indicative of a reflective teaching practice. More broadly, at his institution Matt has co-directed his college’s teaching and learning center and developed and carried out many study-abroad opportunities in Cuba and Vietnam. In his community and the broader region, Matt has been involved in high school teacher professional development through many different initiatives, which exemplifies a key emphasis of the LaFeber-Wood Prize for Distinguished Teaching on “teaching at all levels.” Finally, in service to the profession, Matt has participated in teaching panels at the SHAFR annual meeting (and other important venues), written about teaching initiatives in the pages of Passport, and most importantly served as co-editor of a book series on teaching history for more than a decade, including volumes on teaching the Cold War and the Vietnam War, both of which he edited. These valuable contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning encapsulate Matt’s distinguished achievements.

Srishti Dutta Chowdhury

The winner of the 2026 Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship is Srishti Dutta Chowdhury, a doctoral candidate in history at Purdue University. Her dissertation, titled “From Sweatshop to Assembly Line: Asian Migrant Labor and the U.S. Empire, 1945–1990,” is a remarkable and deeply ambitious study of how five Asian national-origin communities (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Vietnamese) were incorporated into American labor markets between 1945 and 1990. Chowdhury argues, with great originality, that the racialized labor hierarchies forged in U.S. colonial possessions and Cold War client states across the Pacific were carried into garment factories, canneries, hotel corridors, and domestic workplaces across the United States. In so doing, she also recovers the organizing traditions these Asian migrant workers built through union caucuses, worker centers, ethnic labor associations, and cross-racial coalitions. The award committee was especially impressed by how the project puts U.S. foreign relations history in conversation with both transnational labor history, and Asian American studies, demonstrating how the U.S. empire did not end at the water’s edge, but reappeared in the everyday worlds of workers whose lives were shaped by imperial expansion. Chowdhury's dissertation promises to make a truly outstanding contribution to SHAFR’s work.