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In 2003-2004, Associate Professor Jordanna Bailkin spent the year on a resident fellowship at the National Humanities Center, working on two projects in the culture of British colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Associate Professor Lynn Thomas enjoyed a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for her project on modern womanhood in Africa; and Assistant Professor Joel Walker spent six months as a Fulbright Scholar in Macedonia. In 2004-2005 Professor Ray Jonas and Associate Professor Sarah Stein held year-long funding awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both colleagues are European historians who are exploring the colonization of Africa: Jonas focuses on the 1896 battle of Adwa, in which Ethiopians began to throw off Italian colonizers, and Stein addresses Jewish commercial networks in sub-Saharan Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also in 2004-2005, Assistant Professor Linda Nash held a year-long fellowship from the National Library of Medicine in support of her project on the environmental history of California’s Central Valley. For 2005-2006, Associate Professor Lynn Thomas holds a year-long NEH fellowship in support of her research on the “modern girl” in twentieth-century Africa; Associate Professor Sarah Stein will continue her research on Jewish communities in sub-Saharan Africa with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies; and Professor Patricia Ebrey will receive a Distinguished Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, in support of her research on the arts and antiquities collections of China’s twelfth-century Emperor Huizong. Professors Tani Barlow and Madeleine Dong have been serving as co-directors of the four-year Critical Asian Studies Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 2003 and 2005 members of the History faculty received as well dozens of additional awards—many from UW organizations—to support research, symposia, and other scholarly projects.

While receiving increasing funding support for scholarship, History faculty members have also won recognition for their publications in the form of prizes from professional organizations. In 2004-2005 alone, two members of the faculty won recognition for scholarly articles. The American Society for Environmental History presented Assistant Professor Linda Nash with the 2005 Alice Hamilton Prize for her article “The Fruits of Ill Health,” on pesticides in modern California, published in Osiris in 2004; and the North American Association for Victorian Studies awarded the 2004 Donald Gray Prize to Professor George Behlmer for his article “Grave Doubts,” published in the Journal of British Studies in 2003. Equally impressively, books published by members of the History faculty received recognition from professional colleagues recently. In 2005 Associate Professor Nikhil Singh’s Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2004) won prizes from both the Organization of American Historians (the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book on Civil Rights history) and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (the Norris and Carol Hundley Book Award recognizing the best book published by a historian residing in western North America). Singh’s Black Is a Country and Associate Professor Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004) were both also finalists for the 2005 Washington State Book Award. Camp’s book was awarded the 2005 Lillian Smith Book Award for New Voices in Non-Fiction.

The recognition given to Singh’s and Camp’s 2004 publications ought to raise the profile of the Department’s strength in the field of African American history. Singh, Camp, and Professor Quintard Taylor (the Dorothy and Scott Bullitt Endowed Chair in American History) all focus on African American history, giving the UW one of the strongest concentrations of faculty in the country in this subject. Other members of the Department explore dimensions of African American history as well: Professor James Gregory’s forthcoming book The Southern Diaspora (due out in Autumn 2005), treats the impact of black and white migrations away from the American South during the 20th century; Associate Professor Uta Poiger’s Jazz, Rock, and Rebels (2000) considers race relations in the context of Cold War politics in West and East Germany; and Professor Ray Jonas’s research project on the battle of Adwa surveys reaction among African Americans to the Ethiopians’ stunning victory. A strong research focus on race and ethnicity has become a hallmark of the History Department.