Faculty and Student Publications and Awards

The Department of History at UChicago is a vibrant intellectual community renowned for cutting-edge research and expansive scope of expertise. These qualities are reflected in the 2022 faculty and student publications, awards, and contributions to history. Although this list is not exhaustive, it reflects the many accomplishments of members of the department. We are proud of all their work and achievements and look forward to celebrating their continued success.

Guy Alito published 持续焦虑: 世界范围内的饭现代化思潮 Chixu jiaolü: shijiefanweinei fanxiandaihua sichao (The Enduring Anxiety: Anti-Modernization Thought Trends in World-Wide Perspective) 三联书店（SDX Joint Publishing Company).

Cliff Ando co-edited the first volume, A Cultural History of Ideas in Classical Antiquity, in the 6-volume series, A Cultural History of Ideas, published by Bloomsbury. 

Leora Auslander won a 2023 Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

John W. Boyer published Austria, 1867-1955 in the series Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press).

Mark Philip Bradley was awarded the George E. Bogaars Visiting Professorship in History at the National University of Singapore for 2024-25.  He gave the Harvey Goldberg Memorial Lecture at the University of Wisconsin in January 2023 titled “Southern Culture as Global Culture: The Rise of the Global South and the Transformation of the Global Cultural Order” and convened an international symposium titled “Art as Historical Method” at the National Gallery of Singapore in February 2023.  Bradley received an award from the American Association of University Presses for the redesign of the American Historical Review, which he edits. 

Paul Cheney’s book Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (2017) was published in French as Cul de Sac: Une Plantation à Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle, Arthème Fayard.

Elizabeth Chatterjee’s article “The Poor Women’s Energy: Low-Modernist Solar Technologies and International Development, 1878–1966” was published in the Journal of Global History (open access). She also published a short contemporary piece, “India’s Oligarchic State Capitalism,” in Current History (April 2023).

Jane Dailey was named the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American History.

Yuting Dong published "Flagstone Empire: Materiality and Technical Expertise in Japanese Road Construction in Northeast China (1905-1945)" in Modern Asian Studies 57, no. 3 (2023): 835-65 and was the co-editor of Adventure, Inquiry, Discovery: CLIR Mellon Fellows and the Archives, published online by the Council on Library and Information Resources. She also received the Hilary Conroy Prize from the Association for Asian Studies conference for her panel, "labor and Knowledge Production in Modern Northeast Asia."

Brodwyn Fischer was named the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for the 2022-2023 academic year. She also co-authored and co-edited with Keila Grinberg The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition, and the Making of Modern Brazil, published by Cambridge University Press. Additionally, she was featured in a profile on the BBS Brasil about how she teaches Brazilian history at UChicago through implicit comparison with the US. For a short while, it was the most read article on the site. 

Rachel Fulton Brown has an ongoing video series titled The Mosaic Ark. Her book, The Virgin Mary and the Song of Songs in the High Middle Ages, was translated into French by Jonathan de Jésus Marie Joseph, o.c.d. under the title La Vierge Marie et le “Cantique des cantiques” au Moyen Âge.

Ramón Gutiérrez published New Mexico’s Moses: Reies López Tijerina and the Religious Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, University of New Mexico Press.

Jonathan Hall, with Joseph F. Osborne, co-edited The Connected Iron Age: Interregional Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 900-600 BCE, University of Chicago Press. He also appeared on 75th episode of the podcast Byzantium and Friends.

Mary Hicks appeared in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts' Dutch and Flemish Art Gallerys as a featured speaker on "The Hidden Cost of Luxury" and will be appearing in the Netflix Series African Queens: Njinga, which premieres in mid-February.

Faith Hillis was awarded the 2022 Wayne S. Vucinich Prize for her book, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s.

Aaron Jakes’ article “Peaceful Wars and Unlikely Unions: The Azhar Strike of 1909 and the Politics of Comparison in Egypt,” was published online by Cambridge University Press (open-access) in Comparative Studies in Society and History. He is also a recipient of an NEH Public Scholars fellowship and a 2023-2024 CISSR Faculty Fellowship. He won the Political Economy Book Prize for his book, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2020).

Adrian Johns published “Piracy in the Book Trade, ” an essay review of Robert Darnton, Piracy and Publishing, in the American Historical Review 127:3 (September 2022), 1433–1435 and “Mischievous Magnanimity,” in The Mantis Shrimp: A Simon Schaffer Festschrift, edited by D. Margócsy and R. Staley (Cambridge: Cambridge HPS Collective, 2022), 365-69. Forthcoming in 2023 are a book and an edited volume: The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (University of Chicago Press) and Beyond Craft and Code: Human and Algorithmic Cultures, Past and Present edited with James Evans (Osiris 38, 2023. University of Chicago Press).

Rashauna Johnson has been elected Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora(ASWAD). She will serve a two-year term (2023-25). She has also been appointed to the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lectureship Program.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind published Scarcity: a History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2023).

Emily M. Kern, Alison Bashford, and Adam Bobbette's book, New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World will be available from the University of Chicago Press, in November 2023. The book's forward is by Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Matthew Kruer’s chapter, “Indigenous Subjecthood and White Populism in the British Empire” in Ideology and U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, edited by Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne was published by Columbia University Press. The book won the Joseph Fletcher Prize for Best Edited Book in Historical International Relations. His book, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America was chosen by the Seminary Co-op as a 2022 notable book. He is currently holding a CISSR Faculty Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Jonathan Levy's book Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States was published in 2022 by Penguin Random House.

Jonathan Lyon’s book Corruption, Protection and Justice in Medieval Europe: A Thousand-Year History was released in the UK in 2022 and in the United States in 2023 (Cambridge University Press) an he was named the inaugural Sorin and Imran Siddiqui Professor.

Kenneth Moss was interviewed on the podcast on the New Books Network about his new book An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland, which is the recipient of the 2022 honorable mention for the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies’ Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies. The book was also awarded the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History and the 2022 Oskar Halecki Award for Polish and East Central European History from the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America. A revised Hebrew translation of his book, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard, 2009) was published in January 2023 as Yemei ha-maasim: tehiyat ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-tkufat ha-mahapekhah ha-rusit (Merkaz Zalman Shazar). He also published an edited volume with his co-editor Israel Bartal,  The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, v. 7: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880-1918, (Yale, 2023).

Ada Palmer's historical science fiction novel series Terra Ignota (Tor Books, 2016-2021) won the 2023 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire award for Best Foreign Novel translated into French. She also co-organized the Reimagining Democracy Conference, with Bruce Schneir, Judith Donath, Henry Farrell, Beth Noveck, and Jamie Susskind, at Harvard University, December 6-8 2022, gave the opening keynote address at Italian Tech Week in September 2022, published the op-ed “Il Futuro si Vede dal Passato" in La Repubblica, was appointed an Essay Columnist for the journal Strange Horizons starting with my essay "Writing/Realizing Disability + Power," and had a profile in Wired magazine,  "Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress."

Richard Payne’s chapter, “Zoroastrian Materialism: Religion, Empire, and Their Critics in Graeber’s Late Axial Age,” was published in Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Middle East: Credit, Money, and Social Obligation, edited by John Weisweiler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022): 120-131. A second chapter in a collected volume is, “Taxation, Aristocratic Autonomy, and Theories of Reciprocity in the Iranian Empire,” in Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective, edited by Jonathan Valk and Irene Soto Marín (New York: New York University Press, 2022): 178-200.

Kenneth Pomeranz offered four significant lectures including the keynote address at the 4th International Conference on China Development Theory at Renmin University, Beijing, November 2022: “Convergence, Non-Convergence and Questions of Sustainability: China’s Development in Comparative Perspective.”   He also delivered the prestigious Fu Ssu-Nien Lectures, Institute for History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, December 2022. The title of the series is “Expansion and Crisis on China’s Inland frontiers: From High Qing to World War II.” The three lectures offered are “Migration, Frontier Policy, and the Expansion of China: Redefining the Qing Realm and its Subjects, ca. 1750-1850;” “Making ‘Southwestern China’ in the late Qing and Republic: Economic Change, Provincial State-Building, and Native Chieftains in Yunnan, ca. 1873-1937;” and “Consolidation Amidst Fragmentation: Frontiers as Political Bases in Republican China.” He also appeared in the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation NHK documentary, The Meiji Restoration and the World as an expert scholar and participated in the Presidential Panel on the “California School after 20 Years” in Paris in July 2022. Further, he published two extended review essays, one reviewing Debin Ma and Richard Von Glahn, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of China, Volume 2 to the Present in the Journal of Chinese History 7:1(forthcoming in January 2023) and one reviewing Hilde de Weerdt and Franz-Julius, Morche, “Political Communication in Chinese and European History 800-1600,” in Journal of Chinese Studies 75 (July 2022), pp. 300-308.

Johanna Ransmeier received the 2022 Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for her undergraduate teaching at UChicago. She also won a CISSR Faculty Fellowship for the upcoming academic year. Her book, Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in Republican China, was translated into Chinese as 清末民国人口贩卖与家庭生活 and published by Horizon Books, Shanghai in December 2022. She also contributed a chapter, “Consuming Slavery in China’s Epic Domestic Novels,” to The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery, Cambridge University Press, 2022 and wrote the afterward to Harvard Journal of Asian Studies “Special Issue on Slavery in Early Modern East, Inner, and Southeast Asia,” “Afterward: That Dynamic Spectrum” HJAS (Vol. 81, Nos. 1&2) 2022.

James Sparrow won a 2023 Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. 

Mauricio Tenorio published “De promiscuidades norteamericanas: métis, mestizo, miscegenated” in Historias conectadas de América del Norte, edited by Catherine Vézina and Maurice Demers, México, CIDE, 2022 and “De la útil inutilidad de la historia,” in Historia, ¿para qué? edited by Tomás Granados Salinas, Mexico City, Siglo XXI Editores, 2023. His books, Elogio de la impureza: Promiscuidad e historia en Norteamérica (In Praise of Impurity: Promiscuity and History in North America), Mexico City, Siglo XXI Editores and La historia en ruinas. El culto a los monumentos y a su destrucción, Alianza Editorial; N.º 1 edición, were both released in 2023.

Bernard Wasserstein published A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, The Place We Went Back To with Penguin Random House in Februrary 2023.

Gabriel Winant won the 2022 Frederick Jackson Turner award for his book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America.

Tara Zahra published Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars, W.W. Norton & Co. in 2023 and was named the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor.

Evelyn Atkinson won the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars Award at the 2022 meeting of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) for her paper, "Telegraph Torts: The Lost Lineage of the Public Service Corporation."

Zachary Barr’s article, “Ernst Mach's Popular Science," is forthcoming in Isis.

Iris Clever, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor in the Stevanovich Institute and affiliate member of the Department of History, published a special issue of Perspectives on Science, v. 30 no. 1, which includes her own co-written article, “People in Motion: Introduction to Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in the Anthropological and Genetic Study of Human Populations,” (open-access) and was awarded faculty research grants from both faculty research grants from the UChicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and the Quad Faculty Research Grant. She is also anticipating the publication of her article "Biometry against Facism: Geoffrey Morant, Race, and Antiracism in Twentieth-Century Physical Anthropology" in Isis no. 1, pp. 1-25.

Charles Fawell developed a teaching module for World History Commons titled Connecting the French Empire and has two forthcoming publications: “Regulating and Controlling Mobilities,” in A Cultural History of Transport and Mobility, Volume 4: The Age of Steam, ed. Frances Steel (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), ch. 7 and  “Les Messageries Maritimes ‘au-delà de Suez’ aux débuts du XXe siècle. Luttes syndicales et souveraineté dans les zones grises de l'empire.” Revue d'Histoire Maritime 33 (2023/1). 

Colin Jones co-edited (with Simon Macdonald and Alex Fairfax-Cholmeley), The Letters of the duchesse d’Elbeuf, 1788-94: hostile witness to the French Revolution (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool University Press, 2022). The letters, a recent chance discovery, were written by an octogenarian duchess who lived the last years of her life in Revolutionary Paris. His 2021 book The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, won the 2021 Franco-British Society Book Prize (awarded in 2022) and was runner up for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Literary Award. 

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington's book WITHOUT CHILDREN: The Long History of Not Being a Mother was published in April by Seal Press/Basic Books. It received a starred review in Booklist, as well as positive reviews in the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle, and was named a "most anticipated book" by the New York Times. Peggy also contributed guest essays to the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, and elsewhere, and was featured as a live guest on national NPR, WBEZ, and KERA.

Nicholas O’Neill received the Natalie Zemon Davis Award from the Society for French Historical Studies for his paper, “Accounting for Taste: Consumption, Value, and the Adoption of Double-Entry Bookkeeping.” 

Alina Shokareva translated the Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I by Patrick O'Meara into Russian. It was published this spring as О’Мара П. Русское дворянство времен Александра I / Патрик О’Мара. Перевод с английского Алина Шокарева. - Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2023. - 520 с. - (Серия: Historia Rossica).

James M. Vaughn published "The Revolution for Society: Rethinking Popular Sovereignty, American Independence and the Age of the Democratic Revolution," in People Power: Popular Sovereignty from Machiavelli to Modernity, eds. Robert G. Ingram and Christopher Barker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 98-124.

Michael Williams published “The Aporetic Humanism of Early Derrida” in Philosophy and Social Criticism, print version is forthcoming. 

Maniza Ahmed’s review of Kathryn Olivarius’s Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom was published in Black Perspectives by the African American Intellectual History Society.

Leila Blackbird’s article with Jessica Marie Johnson, “Kinship & (Be)Longing: Reimagining the Place of Black Life in the Louisiana Colonial Archive,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Scholarly Editing. She also has had two articles accepted for publication and a chapter in an edited volume. These are “‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769-1803.” The William & Mary Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Accepted for Publication, Spring 2023); “A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, no. 2 (Winter 2022): 205-212; and “Bulbancha is Still a Place: Decolonizing the History of the Present,” in Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community, Black-Indigenous Futures & Speculations Series, Rain Prud’homme-Cranford, Darryl Barthé, & Andrew Jolivétte, eds. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022). 

Xiaoyu Gao, a fourth-year PhD candidate, recived several grants to conduct archival resarch in the UK, Mainlain China, and Taiwan. Four grants are internal (two CEAS grants; Nicholson Center; and CISSR) and one is an external competative fellowship, the AAS-Gale Fellowship. 

Kit Ginzky won the Carel B. Germain Fellowship from Smith College Special Collections and the Clarke Chambers Fellowship from the University of Minnesota Social Welfare History Archive, both of which will fund her dissertation research. She also co-organized the 2023 Lauren Berlant Graduate Student Conference, "Power over Life and Death: Feminism, Abolition, and the State," at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and co-edited an annotated bibliography on "Red Scares, Political Repression, and Social Work," published by the Social Welfare History Group in January. 

Elizabeth Hines received four external fellowships: the American Trust for the British Library-New York Public Library Transatlantic Fellowship, a Charles W. Wendell Research Grant from the New Netherland Institute, a Bell Library Short-Term Fellowship from the University of Minnesota, and a Student Research Fellowship from the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies at Calvin University.

Syrus Jin was awarded the SHAFR Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grant and will be a recipient of a National Fellowship from the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. This fellowship provides a $30,000 stipend for two years. He also published “Interpreting Empire: English, U.S. Advisors, and Interpreters in the Korean War” in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. 

Nic Johnson is the 22-23 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar at Duke University. 

Emma Kitchen co-authored an article, "Revealing the Rise of a Living Fossil Menagerie," in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution wiht Scott Lidgard.

Yujie Li published “Birth of the Phoenix: Petty Capitalists in the Socialist Transformation of the Shanghai Bicycle Industry” in Twentieth-Century China n. 47 no. 3. 

Fiona Maxwell was awarded the Debra Mesch Doctoral Fellowship for Research on Women's Philanthropy. She recieves support for her dissertation research and is invited to present at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy's Philanthropy Research Workshop.

Julia Mead won a Fulbright IIE and a Fulbright-Hays award for her work in the Czech Republic in 21-22. She accepted the Fulbright IIE and wrote a blog post about her work and experience. She was also interviewed for the podcast Actually Existing Socialism about her co-authored article from 2018, “What Has Socialism Ever Done for Women?”

Yasser Ali Nasser published, “Making Friends and Making ‘Asia’: Sino-Indian Friendship, 1947-1957,” Past & Present, “Returning to ‘Asia’: Japanese Embraces of Sino-Indian Friendship, 1953-1962.” International Journal of Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (July 2022) and "'To Defend the Peace of Asia’: The Chinese Peace Committee and Visions of Asian History, 1949-60,” Cold War History. He also was a recipient of the Association of Asian Studies East. Inner Asia Council Research Travel Grant and the Council on Library and Information Resources Pocket Burgundy Award (accompanied by a publication entitled The Chinese Archive: A Pocket Manual), American Historical Association's Bernadotte Schmitt Grant, Philip A. Kuhn Dissertation Prize in Chinese Studies from the Center for East Asian Studies (UChicago), Center for International Social Science Research Dissertation Fellow (UChicago), Committee on South Asian Studies' Graduate Research Fellowship (UChicago). Finally, he has accepted an offer from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville to be an Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History beginning from Fall 2024.

Natalia Niedmann Alvarez was awarded a Schlesinger Library Dissertation Grant to conduct archival work at Harvard's Schlesinger Library and published "From the Rule of Law to a Rule of Rights: Political Theory – Public Law – Enlightenment – Rule of Law – Public Sphere" in the International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 26 no. 9, 1503-1521.

Stephanie Painter was awarded the 2022 Buchanan Prize for Best Graduate Essay, East Asia at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs for her paper titled, “What She Had: Property, Work, and the Imperative of Autonomy for Wives in the Qing." The Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs also selected her to present this paper again at the 2023 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Boston as part of the Council of Conferences Designated Panel.

Le Vi Pham won the 2022 Percy Buchanan Graduate Prize, Northeast Asia for her paper "Filial Daughters and Disreputable Women: Japanese Geisha, Prostitutes, and the Pleasure Quarter in Colonial Korea, 1880-1930" at the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs.

Kate Reed co-edited a volume with Marcia C. Schenck of the University of Potsdam titled The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Juan I. Wilson published two articles in 2022: “Legal History in the US and Latin America: Explaining a Methodological Divide,” Latin American Legal Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 7-60; and a piece co-written with Rodrigo del Río, “Constitución y violencia: historia mexicana para el presente chileno”, Nexos, August 2022. 

Chloe Brettmann won a Boren Scholarship to study French in Senegal.

Sophie Feng won a Boren Scholarship to study Mandarin in Taiwan. 

Elizabeth Zazycki won a Boren Scholarship to study Hindi in India and was a recipeint of the India, Fulbright-Nehru English Teaching Assistant Award.

In a course with Professor Fulton Brown, several history majors wrote poetry that has since been published as Writing Christian Poetry, edited by Rachel Fulton Brown.