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.