Senior Theses Prizes & Honors Winners: 2012-2022

Prize Descriptions

Albert Marion Elsberg Prize :  Given by the College for a sophomore, junior, or senior who has demonstrated excellence in modern history.

Allen J Willen Memorial Prize:  The prize is awarded to the Columbia College student who writes the best seminar paper on a contemporary American political problem.

Chanler Historical Prize:  Given by the College for the best essay submitted by a senior on a topic dealing with the history of the American civil government.

Charles A. Beard Prize:  Given by the Department for a senior thesis of distinction in any historical field or period.

Garrett Mattingly Prize:  Given by the Department for a senior thesis of distinction in any historical field or period.

Herbert H. Lehman Prize:  Given to a General Studies student with an outstanding record of accomplishment in history courses at Columbia. Preference given to those with substantial coursework in U.S. History.

 Lily Prize:  Given by the Department for the best senior thesis in history on a non-U.S. topic. Established by James P. Shenton in memory of his mother.

Undergraduate Education Committee Prize:  The Undergraduate Education Committee Prize is given to a thesis of excellence written in any field of history.

 

2022 Winners 

Charles A. Beard Prize

Isaac Daly – A National Response: Widening Conceptions of Conservatism in Great Britain during the 1790s

Garrett Mattingly Prize

Rose Aydin – Water and Wellness: Cholera in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

 Lily Prize

Tunshore Longe – No Justice, No Peace, No Education: An Exploration of the Nigerian Student Leader Contribution to the April 1978 Crisis

Herbert H. Lehman Prize

Claudia Wolff – ‘A Black Man in a White World’: The Duality of Jackie Robinson

Chanler Historical Prize (prize split)

Marco Balestri – The Fight to Read, Write, and Vote: The New York State Literacy Test, 1922-1965

Matthew Chagares – Offensive Capability and Potential Usage: The American Biological Warfare Program During World War II

Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)

Francesca Barasch – The Privilege of Freedom: Disparities in Arrest and Sentencing Practices in Edgefield, South Carolina, 1865-1867

Noah Percy – The Age of Consent and Its Discontents: French Intellectuals and the Reform of Sexual Violence Law, 1968–1982 

Allen J Willen Memorial Prize

Samuel Needleman – Consolidating the Carceral City: The Planning of Rikers Island, 1884–1925

Undergraduate Education Committee Prize (Prize split)

Madeline Zakheim – ‘The Sights I Would Have Preferred to Have Left Behind in Dunkirk’: A Comparative Study of Wartime British Memorialization of Operation Dynamo

Departmental Honors 2022

Rose Aydin – Water and Wellness: Cholera in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Francesca Barasch – The Privilege of Freedom: Disparities in Arrest and Sentencing Practices in Edgefield, South Carolina, 1865-1867

Isaac Daly – A National Response: Widening Conceptions of Conservatism in Great Britain during the 1790s

Beatrix Geaghan-Breiner – A New World Order Imagined: the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment’s Invention of “Rogue States.

Tunshore Longe – No Justice, No Peace, No Education: An Exploration of the Nigerian Student Leader Contribution to the April 1978 Crisis

Elizabeth Love – Nothing but Necessity: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the Epistolary Form during the Second World War.

Kathryn Mokrynski – Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” – A “Disneyfied” Representation of President Lincoln at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Samuel Needleman – Consolidating the Carceral City: The Planning of Rikers Island, 1884–1925

Noah Percy – The Age of Consent and Its Discontents: French Intellectuals and the Reform of Sexual Violence Law, 1968–1982 

Sami Raza – Reporting the Battle for Peace: The Press at the Washington Naval Conference, 1921-1922.

Beatrice Shlansky – ‘An Exercise of True Christian Stewardship’: Presbyterian Missionary Sheldon Jackson in Alaska (1877 – 1909).

Timmy Stabler – The Media Allies of the San Francisco Hippies, 1965-67.

Claudia Wolff – ‘A Black Man in a White World’: The Duality of Jackie Robinson.

 

2021 Winners 

Charles A. Beard Prize

Nicholas Loud – “Death of a Trolley Conductor”: Urban Landscape, Social Mobility, and Cross-Class Coalition in the Brooklyn Trolley Strike of 1895

Garrett Mattingly Prize

Coleman Sherry – Corporate Heads: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Character of Big Business, 1895-1914

 Lily Prize

Isabel von Stauffenberg – “Verraten und Verkauft”: The Contested Politics of Germany’s Treuhandanstalt

Herbert H. Lehman Prize

Yasemin Buharali – Re-imagining Education in the Early Turkish Republic: İsmail Hakkı Tonguç and His Transformative Educational Vision

Chanler Historical Prize (prize split)

Alex Hempel – Trichloroethylene Contamination of American Military Bases: An Alternative Toxic Waste History

Mary Marsh – Setting the Scene in Japanese America: Post–World War II Visions of Transnational Politics and Culture

Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)

Ramsay Eyre – Land Hunger in the Abolitionist Imagination, 1865-1872

Christopher Mingo – Hidden in Plain Sight: Italian Concentration Camps in Cyrenaica: 1930-1933

Allen J Willen Memorial Prize

Emile Warot – Dodging Antitrust: Nostalgia, Big Business, and the Baseball Monopoly

Undergraduate Education Committee Prize (Prize split)

Aisha Akoshile – An Age-Old Tug of War: Understanding the Intergenerational Conflicts of southern African Nationalist Groups

Peter Gaber – Aestheticizing the political, politicizing the aesthetic: Reactions to the disappearance of representation in the French avant-garde, 1951-1962

Departmental Honors 2021

Kayla Abrams – For the People?: The Role of Prosecutorial Misconduct in the Rise of Progressive Prosecution in Brooklyn, 1964-2019

Yasemin Buharali – Re-imagining Education in the Early Turkish Republic: İsmail Hakkı Tonguç and His Transformative Educational Vision

Jasleen Chaggar – Contesting Imperial Citizenship: The election of Dadabhai Naoroji as an MP in 1892

Emma Kateman – Capturing a Lifestyle: The Relationship Between the American Government and the American Film Industry 1945-1954

Zachary Kimmel – No Person Shall Be Deprived: Antislavery Due Process in New York State Courts, 1840-1860

Grace MacNeill – Reviving the Dead Letter: Attempts to Enforce Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment after the 1920 Presidential Election

Willem Morris – Copper Democracy: An International Labor History of The Anaconda Company: 1945-1960

Ari Papahronis – En Solidaridad: Nicaraguan Solidarity and Reagan-Era Radical HIV/AIDS Activism

Max Watson – Brokers of Conflict: On Subsidies, East Indian Trade, and the Electorate of Hanover in the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756

Vinzent Wesselmann – Imported Deviance: Conformity, Halbstarke, and American Youth Culture in Postwar Germany

 

2020 Winners

Charles A. Beard Prize

Emmaline Bennett – Cities of Defeat: Spanish Civil War Refugees and the French Concentration Camps of 1939

Garrett Mattingly Prize

Emilia Flack – “A Man Has Disappeared”: Gender, Social Frameworks, and Narrative Construction in the Audin Affair and its Memorial Afterlives, 1957 – 2018

 Lily Prize

Neil Hemani – Azad Hind: Radical Indian nationalism in Nazi Germany during World War Two

Herbert H. Lehman Prize

Mark Gyourko – “A Somewhat Awful Procedure”: Otmar Emminger, the West German Bundesbank, and the Final Days of Bretton Woods (1968-1973)

Chanler Historical Prize

Isabelle Harris – To Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: An Institutional History of Congress’s 1871 Investigation of Post-Civil War Violence

Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)

Jay Castro – ‘Rising Visions / Fragmentary Glimpses’:  Framing Modernity in Madison Square, 1890-1920.

Paola Ripoll – “Looming A Little Larger Than Its Mere Geographical Size:” Puerto Rico in John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress

Allen J Willen Memorial Prize

Eitan Meisels – The Shah’s “Fatherly Eye” Iranian Espionage in the United States and the Anti-SAVAK Campaign (1970-1979)

Departmental Honors 2020

Keziah Anderson – “On the Forty Acres that the Government Give Me”:  Independent Freedpeople of the Five Slaveholding Tribes as Landholders, Indigenous Land Allotment Policy, and the Disruption of Racial, Gender, and Class Hierarchies in Jim Crow Oklahoma

Emmaline Bennett – Cities of Defeat: Spanish Civil War Refugees and the French Concentration Camps of 1939

Eva Blake – Castle Pox:  The Battle over Public Health in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1773-74

Sunny Chen – “To Make World Culture Our Own:”The Russian Institute and the Development of Area Studies in Postwar U.S. (1940-1955)

Edgar Esparza – “[A] system which we wish to last for ages.”: An analysis of early American external and internal sovereignty, 1774-1790

Emilia Flack – “A Man Has Disappeared”: Gender, Social Frameworks, and Narrative Construction in the Audin Affair and its Memorial Afterlives, 1957 – 2018

Charlotte Force – Medicine and Religion in Irish Penitentials, 550-1215

Benjamin Goldstein – “A Legend Somewhat Larger Than Life:” Karl H. von Wiegand and the Fall of Hearstian Sensationalist Journalism

Mark Gyourko – “A Somewhat Awful Procedure”: Otmar Emminger, the West German Bundesbank, and the Final Days of Bretton Woods (1968-1973)

Isabelle Harris – To Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: An Institutional History of Congress’s 1871 Investigation of Post-Civil War Violence

Johanne Karizamimba – The Poetry of Revolution: Phillis Wheatley and the Transformation of Black Religious Thought

Alice McCrum – “The war, no, not that again”: Samuel Beckett, the French Resistance, and the Narratives of History

Sanjay Paul – Smallholders No More: The Populist Movement in Gillespie County, Texas, 1846-1896

John Russell – Abandoning the Crown: U.S.-Vatican Relations During the Vietnam War, 1963-1968

Manoela Saldanha – Smith, Snake, and the Struggle for Indigenous Religious Rights: Protecting Peyotism in Employment Div. v. Smith

Daniel Shao – Beethoven as “Paradigmatic Socialist Warrior”: The Reception and Performance of Classical Music in the GDR

Tommy Song – Scholars on the Margin Global Intellectual History of Anthropologists and Educationists of Color Trained at Columbia University, 1897-1937

Michelle Yan – “ Conciudadanas ”: The Book of Gold, Women, and Politics in Paraguay, 1864-1870

Perry Young – Immortal through Labor: The Stakhanovite Movement in Soviet Ideology

 

2019 Winners

Charles A. Beard Prize

Emma Kolchin –  Reimagining Hayden White: The Politics of Writing History

Garrett Mattingly Prize

Yen Ba Vu – Dividing the Delta: Khmer-Vietnamese Relations from 1930 to 1954 in the Mekong Delta

Chanler Historical Prize (split)

Andrea Charlotte Floersheimer – Kitchen Courthouses and Flying Judges: Bush Justice in Alaska, 1959 – 1980

Emily Anne Gruber – ‘Knowledge, for what?’ Seth Low and the Governance of Brooklyn, Columbia University, and New York City (1881-1903)

Albert Marion Elsberg Prize (prize split)

Mahir Riaz – Sovereignty Ltd: Sir George Goldie and the Rise of the Royal Niger Company

Sylvia Davidovicz – ’A Prize for Warlike Ambition’: The 1885 Panama Crisis and the Rise of an American Power Complex

Herbert H. Lehman Prize

Yen Ba Vu – Dividing the Delta: Khmer-Vietnamese Relations from 1930 to 1954 in the Mekong Delta

Lily Prize

Sias Merkling – Olga’s Occult: Bézobrazow’s Formation of Spiritualist Feminism in the Revue des femmes russes during France’s Fin de Siècle

Departmental Honors 2019

Cregan, Luke DeCourcey

Cunliffe, Margaret

Davidovicz Smith, Sylvia Michael

Floersheimer, Andrea Charlotte

Gruber, Emily Anne

Magid, Rebecca Ona

Makarov, Erich

Merkling, Sias

Pedersen, Saskia Jane

Riaz, Mahir

Saha, Upasna