Past Recipients

2010-11

Tammy Ingram, Ph.D.
Tammy received her Ph.D. from Yale University and has spent the past three years as the James T. and Ella Rather Kirk Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Agnes Scott College.

Scott Matthews, Ph.D.
Blake received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia and worked last year as a lecturer in the history department at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

2009-10

Blake Gilpin, Ph.D., Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney
Dissertation:“Monster and Martyr: America’s Long Reckoning with Race, Violence, and John Brown."  After completing a combined B.A./M.A. in history from Yale on hobos and the American West, Blake Gilpin was the Paul Mellon Fellow at Clare College in Cambridge. At Cambridge, he earned an M.Phil in British history and published diaries of his experience jumping freight trains across the western United States in The American Scholar. Gilpin received his Ph.D. at Yale in 2009. His dissertation, “Monster and Martyr: America’s Long Reckoning with Race, Violence, and John Brown,” examines the complex circumstances which have allowed Brown to remain relevant and controversial 150 years after his death. Gilpin is currently gathering and editing The Collected Letters of William Styron with Styron’s widow Rose, due to be published by Random House in 2011.  Beginning the summer of 2010, Blake was awarded a Fellowship at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. The Centre is primarily a creation of the Australian government, founded during the second Bush administration to foster scholarship and understanding about American culture, politics, and foreign policy in the past, present, and future.

Zoe Trodd, Ph.D., Junior faculty member in English and African American Studies, Columbia University.
Zoe Trodd is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill. She has a PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and a BA and MA from the University of Cambridge in the UK. Her books include Meteor of War: The John Brown Story (2004), American Protest Literature (2006), To Plead Our Own Cause (2008) and Modern Slavery (2009).  Zoe Trodd is junior faculty member in English and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she will teach undergraduate and graduate courses on African American Protest Literature, Historical Memory, and Photographic Culture this coming year.

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.