2020 Winners 

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

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

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

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

 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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)
Given by the College for a sophomore, junior, or senior who has demonstrated excellence in modern history.

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
The prize is awarded to the Columbia College student who writes the best seminar paper on a contemporary American political problem.

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

 

A list of past years Prizes & Honors winners can be found here.