2025 Award Winners

Thanks to everyone who joined us at our virtual awards ceremony last week! The NACBS is thrilled to congratulate our 2025 grant, fellowship, and prize winners. Congratulations to the following awardees!

Undergraduate Essay Prize

Kevin Rogoza, Vassar College for “‘I refuse to Obey’: British Conscientious Objectors’ Resistance to Propaganda and Persecution During the First World War” (nominated by Lydia Murdoch)

Kevin Rogoza’s “I refuse to Obey” is an original and elegantly written analysis of conscientious objectors during the First World War. Making excellent use of newspapers, private letters, oral interviews, and other primary sources, the paper de-universalizes the experience of conscientious objection and recovers a diverse range of individual stories and motivations, while shining light on the political conflicts surrounding anti-war sentiment, refusal, and punishment.

Jennifer Schretter, Wake Forest University for “Fashioning Freedom: The Belly Pad and the Politics of Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England" (nominated by Stephanie Koscak)

Jennifer Schretter’s “Fashioning Freedom” recovers the history of a fascinating and little studied fashion trend from the 1790s: the use of “belly pads” to signal and in some cases hide pregnancy. Challenging an easy reading of the topic, Schretter shows that belly pads reinforced dominant ideals of maternity while also, perhaps surprisingly, allowing some women to assert themselves in public and negotiate patriarchal expectations.

Honorable Mention: Ryan Estrin, Reed College for “Better to Reign in Hell than Serve in Heaven: Soldier of Fortune and the Transnational Right’s Defense of Rhodesia" (nominated by Radhika Natarajan)

Ryan Estrin’s “Better to Reign in Hell than Serve in Heaven,” offers a compelling and transnational account of Rhodesia in the 1970s as both a site of and an inspiration for global ideologies of white supremacy. Estrin’s paper suggests pathways not only for his own future research but also for the broader study of linkages between notions of white supremacy in Britain’s empire of settlement and the modern and contemporary United States.

MA Essay Prize

Marlisha Katie Cordell, UNC-Charlotte/UNLV

In excerpts from her finely-researched thesis, “The Falling Empire and the Rising Sun: The End of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1914-1921” Marlisha “Katie” Cordell (UNC-Charlotte/UNLV) utilizes an impressive range of printed and archival primary sources which she analyzes to offer a multifaceted and nuanced explanation for the collapse of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in the period around World War I. Attentive to shifts in global power, and particularly to the rise of the United States, Cordell’s thesis offers an engaging and well-written story of British diplomatic decision-making in an era of strategic realignments.

Honorable Mention: Raena Tindle

Raena Tindle’s impressive research paper, “Physical and Ideological Position of Birds in Nineteenth Century Britain” presents a powerful case for why the “more than human” approach is gaining significant methodological traction in the discipline. Examining the role of birds and field practices in ornithology, Tindle demonstrates how birds were central to broader ideological debates about the status of the empire and gender.

NACBS-Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship

Jenny Smith, University of California, Berkeley

NACBS-Huntington Library Fellowship

Amelia Rosch, Queen’s University

Her project proposes to explore, more deeply than ever before, Queen Mary II's status as a powerful co-regnant monarch in her own right. Until recently, Mary has been seen largely as a dutiful and submissive spouse to her husband, King William III — as a junior partner whose life was indeed cut short after only five years on the throne. Rosch will deploy several collections unique to the Huntington in order to demonstrate that, during her life as Queen, Mary was an active partner, able and willing to act independently of her frequently absent husband.

NACBS Pre-Dissertation Travel Grants

Sarah Ahmed, McGill University, for “Madness and Methodism: Religion, Medicine and Consumerism in the Age of Enlightenment.”

Ahmed seeks to understand the relationship between evangelical Protestantism and attitudes towards mental health in the long eighteenth century. Her focus will be primarily on ‘Methodism’, that new form of Protestant piety that emerged in the eighteenth-century as a result of the work of evangelical clerics such as John Wesley and George Whitefield.

Niveditha Senthivel, Boston University, for “Silence Speaks: Investigating Tribal Settlements and Reform Schools in South India 1871-1947.”

“Silence Speaks” examines the definition and delineation of tribes in South Asia under British colonization, and analyzes the complex processes through which “tribal” people were criminalized and resettled, both conceptually and institutionally. Her project promises to expand our understanding of the colonial resettlement of people beyond the Western hemisphere and bring Asia firmly into the crucial conversation about the global history of the British empire.

NACBS Dissertation Travel Grants

Julia Barr, Northwestern University, for her project, “Island of Migrants: Overseas and Intra-Island Migration Across Twentieth-Century Britain.”

In “Island of Migrants” Barr asks how our understandings of mobility, transience and race in twentieth-century Britain change when we put overseas migration within the context of the “intra-island” movements of many hundreds of thousands of people during these same years and often within the same places. Her study offers a fresh perspective on a number of key issues in the historiography, including “native” and “newcomer” dynamics, the legacies of mid-twentieth-century social science, policing, and urban social relations outside of London.

Fisayo Akinlude, Yale University, for “All Our Laws become English’: Imperial Reform and Colonial Response in Mauritius, 1790-1840.”

In "All Our Laws Become English," Akinlude presents careful analysis of legal records from Mauritius to expose the complex process through which British legal reforms transformed the island from a French to a British sugar colony. The dissertation will place Mauritius in the broader context of imperial constitutional change, particularly in crown colonies across the British Empire.

NACBS Dissertation Fellowship

Sreya Mukherjee, Washington State University, for “Discourses of Drunkenness: Decoding the Dynamics of Liquor and Narratives in Colonial Bengal.”

In "Discourses of Drunkenness," Mukherjee analyzes social attitudes toward liquor consumption in British-ruled Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a reader and speaker of Hindi and Bengali, she has been able to uncover indigenous attitudes towards alcohol consumption that are not easily summarized in terms of nationalist ideology, and that address the distinctions in Indian conversations about alcohol consumption across caste, class, gender, religion and region in India.

NACBS Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship

Rolake Osabia

Rolake Osabia, an independent artist-scholar whose research and artistic output centers on Black British literature and Black feminist theory. Osabia’s illustrated thesis combines painting practice with archival research methodologies to explore representations of isolation and kinship in contemporary Black British women’s literature (1987-2019). She plans to use the thesis as a model for a multidisciplinary illustrated book and other future research outputs. The committee were impressed not only by the beauty of Osabia’s illustrations but also by the experimentation with genre and form and by Osabia’s commitment to engage a wider public audience.

Honorable mention: Breanna Moore, University of Pennsylvania

Moore’s dissertation examines the abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth century through the connections between the United States, the British Caribbean, and the Sierra Leone colony. It will be the first comparative analysis of the disparities in indemnities distributed by Britain for compliance with abolition—a facet of the end of the slave trade that has not been covered by major research initiatives such as the Legacies of British Slavery project.

IAHI-NACBS Visiting Research Fellowship

2025 is the inaugural year for the new IAHI-NACBS Visiting Research Fellowship program. Congratulations to the first cohort of fellows!

Tobah Aukland-Peck, CUNY Graduate Center

Miguel Chavez, Cumberland University

Amy Coombs, Indiana University-Kokomo

Menglu Gao, University of Denver

Toby Harper, Arizona State University

Patrick Klinger, Virginia Military Institute

Taylor Soja, Illinois State University

Matthew Woodbury, Office of Treaty Settlements and Takutai Moana

Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize

Samuel Fullerton, "The 'Holy Sister' Anatomized: Religious Polemic and Erotic Writing in England, 1640-1660" published in The Journal of Modern History

Fullerton’s article is a meticulously researched, beautifully written, and carefully argued piece that makes an innovative and original contribution both to the history of early modern religion and to the history of gender and sexuality. The article is a clear demonstration of the ways that attention to gender and sexuality can transform our understanding of political and cultural history more broadly, and will be of interest to scholars across many different fields.

Walter D. Love Article Prize

William Deringer, for “Mr. Aecroid’s Tables: Economic Calculations and Social Customs in the Early Modern Countryside,” published in the March 2024 issue of the Journal of Modern History

Deringer’s article accomplishes a remarkable feat: making seventeenth-century discounting tables riveting. The article uses discounting tables as an entry point into a wide array of topics: the Church of England’s business arrangements, the agrarian side of the Financial Revolution, and how inflation challenged traditional customary relationships. In a year with many outstanding nominations, the committee appreciated Deringer’s deep archival research, his creative thinking, and most importantly, his ability to make a seemingly obscure topic extremely relevant to the here and now.

John Ben Snow Book Prize

Melissa Reynolds, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

Melissa Reynolds's Reading Practice is a remarkable exploration of the complex interaction between manuscript and print publications about 'natural knowledge'—medical recipes, almanacs, herbals, and pictorial prognostications. Drawing upon a large database of late medieval manuscript texts, Reynolds traces the recycling and repackaging of such works over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She combines technical mastery of her subject matter with well-grounded speculation and carefully chosen examples to create a book that engages with, and makes fresh contributions to, a whole range of academic sub-fields within early modern British history: book and reading history, manuscript studies, gender history, business history, and human engagement with nature and the environment.

Stansky Book Prize

Jonathan Connolly, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press)

In this book, Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of “freedom” in a post-abolition world.

Honorable Mention: Stephen Brooke, London, 1984: Change and Conflict in the Radical City (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Using a wide array of sources, many of which have never been used before, London, 1984 explores the radical history of the capital in this tumultuous era. This is a story of struggles within the corridors of power, but it is also one of those on the ground, waged through popular culture and activism, and in daily life. In so doing, London, 1984 offers a panoramic, timely, and revealing portrait of the city in a pivotal decade in its modern history.