Past Recipients

2008-09

Melinda Maynor Lowery, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dissertation: "Indians, Southerners, And Americans."  Formerly an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, Lowery will join the history faculty at Carolina during the fall 2009 semester. A Lumbee Indian, her work challenges common assumptions that the South's racial cleavages involved only blacks and whites. Lowery examines Indian identity and federal policy during the Jim Crow era, showing how American and southern identities acquire new layers of meaning when confronted with the Lumbees. The profound ambiguities of race, citizenship and colonialism find essential expression in the intersection of Indian, southern and American identities.

Ben Wise, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History, University of Florida
Dissertation: "Cosmopolitan Southerner: The Life and World of William Alexander Percy."  William Alexander Percy is well known to students of the American South as author of Lanterns on the Levee, plantation owner, and adoptive father of the novelist Walker Percy. Wise's project considers the lesser-known aspects of Percy's historical experience: namely, his participation in and contribution to the emergence of a modern gay identity in America.

2007-08

Stephen Inrig, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Clinical Sciences (History of Medicine), UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas
Dissertation: "In a Place So Ordinary: North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS."  Taking its title from a line in Albert Camus's The Plague, Stephen Inrig's manuscript was a historical analysis of the AIDS epidemic in North Carolina. He explores the ways HIV/AIDS affected people in North Carolina and how people in the state shaped the epidemic in the United States and around the world. Key to Inrig's analysis was the role southern communities played transitioning AIDS policies away from their exceptionalist origins toward more traditional public health strategies.

Danielle McGuire, Ph.D., Assistant Professor History, Wayne State University
Dissertation: "At the Dark End of the Street: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle."  Set between 1940 and 1975, Danielle McGuire examined how sexual violence and the defense of black womanhood served as catalysts for the modern Civil Rights Movement. In viewing civil rights history through the lens of sexual assault, McGuire's work shed light on issues of sexual violence and power that plague communities throughout the world.

2006-07

Katherine Charron, Ph.D., Assistant Professor History, North Carolina State University
Dissertation: "Teaching Citizenship: Septima Poinsett Clark and the Transformation of the African American Freedom Struggle."  While a fellow, Kat Charron turned her dissertation on African American civil rights activist and educator Septima Poinsette Clark into a book.

Amy Wood, Ph.D., Assistant Professor History, Illinois State University
Dissertation: "Spectacles of Suffering: Witnessing Lynching in the New South."  During her postdoctoral year, Amy Wood revised her dissertation lynching, white supremacy, and spectacle in the New South.