2024 Award Winners

Announced earlier today at our annual meeting, the NACBS is thrilled to congratulate our 2024 grant, fellowship, and prize winners. Congratulations to the following awardees!!!

Undergraduate Essay Prize

Izzy Kaufman-Site (Vassar College)

Izzy Kaufman-Site (Vassar College) has won the 2024 NACBS undergraduate essay prize for her essay titled, “Local Disturbance or Revolutionary Movement: The British Response to the 1915 Singapore Mutiny in a Time of War.” Izzy’s paper was nominated by Professor Lydia Murdoch at Vassar. The selection committee found Izzy’s essay deeply researched, well argued, and easy to read. Izzy’s ability to connect different geographical and historical strands across the British Empire was impressive, as was her engagement with primary and secondary sources within both the Anglophone and non-Anglophone worlds. Especially impressive was Izzy’s choice to work on the Singapore Mutiny, a subject that sheds light on the broader subject of revolts against the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia.  

Aidan Murphy (UC Santa Barbara)

Aidan Murphy has also won the 2024 NACBS undergraduate essay prize for his paper, “Palestine & The Police: The British Mandate’s Colonial Police and their Changes during Periods of Civil Unrest” nominated by Professor Jarett Henderson (UC Santa Barbara) analyzes the 1921 Jafa Riots, the 1929 Buraq Uprising, and the Great Revolt of 1936-39 in Palestine during the British Mandate period. His close reading of the Palestine Police Force as a tool of settler colonialism, was enriched by comparisons with similar colonial police institutions in Canada, Australia, and Sri Lanka and by tracing colonial networks of police officials across the British empire. Both local and global in its scope, Murphy’s essay is deeply researched and written with a deft touch.

NACBS-Folger Institute Fellowship

Sara Pennell (University of Greenwich)

Sara Pennell’s monograph will centre Hannah Wolley in four key working environments: domestic service in/for elite households; schooling and tuition; commodity retailing, especially of domestic and medical products and services; and metropolitan writing and publishing. The final chapter of the monograph, and the focus of her fellowship, ‘Afterlives’, will establish the significance of Wolley’s work in the decades and centuries after her death. It will explore the ways in which Wolley’s works influenced those who came after her in writing and publishing domestic manuals; the subsequent circulation of Wolley’s text in second-hand and antiquarian markets; and how and why Wolley’s life was packaged to present her as ‘just’ a cookery book author in modern biographical accounts.

Pre-Dissertation Travel Awards

Zoe Neubauer (McGill University)

Zoe Neubauer’s work focuses on the development of trans identity in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. By extending scholarship on gender nonconformity from earlier eras, Neubauer’s dissertation is poised to build vital new understandings of transgendered history over the last seven decades.

Nell Kilinger (University of Chicago)

Nell Williamson Shaffer investigates petitioning in the British Empire from the Glorious Revolution to the American War for Independence. Through a close examination of individual and corporate petitions sent to Westminster, Shaffer’s dissertation reimagines the traditional view of Britain’s imperial government structure and the active role that subjects took across the Empire.

Dissertation Travel Awards

Julia Burke (Columbia University)

In assessing the legal and economic dimensions of abortion in nineteenth-century Britain, Julia Burke’s dissertation brings new insights into the history of reproductive care. Burke assesses not just the growth of abortifacient options for nineteenth-century women, but also the legal dimensions of their use, particularly when sued by intimate partners alleging infidelity. Altogether, Burke’s dissertation uncovers the complex social, economic, and legal dimensions of abortion in Victorian Britain.

Priyanka Zylstra (University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign)

Priyanka Zylstra traces the activism of South Asian women in Britain in the 1970s and 80s. Facing institutional violence from the state, discrimination from businesses, and interpersonal prejudice in general, South Asian women joined together with other minoritized communities to push back. Using postcolonial and intersectional analysis, Zylstra’s dissertation enriches our understanding of the wider and deeper community structures that enabled migrant and non-White groups to build their lives in modern Britain.

Dissertation Fellowship

Rimilya Tariq Telkenaroglu (McGill University)

Rimilya Tariq Telkenaroglu’s dissertation assesses seventeenth-century Quakerism to explore the links between religious fervor and beliefs in demonic possession in British spiritual debates. Because of the group’s promotion of revelation, particularly among women, Quakers were attacked by conforming congregants as embracing demonism. Telkenaroglu’s dissertation stands to dramatically reinterpret early Quaker history by examining how the group both embraced and warded off those assumptions of supernatural occurrences within a fraught period of British religious history.

NACBS Diversity & Inclusion Fellowships

Honorable Mention

Frankie Chapell (University College, London)

Frankie Chappell is a PhD researcher at Institute of the Americas at University College London, and previously completed a MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation at the London School of Economics. Chappell participated in the “African Women and the British Health Service” project of the Young Historians Project, and has contributed to History Matters and the blogs of the Women’s History Network, Royal Society, History Workshop, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Chappell has also made significant contributions to the collection, preservation, and accessibility of historical materials related to marginalized communities in Britain. They have delivered workshops for young people of color on squatting movements in Britain, volunteered as transcriber of oral history interviews with individuals from the Black Women’s Movement for the Black Cultural Archives, and currently are a volunteer researcher on the “This is Black Britain project” to produce a publicly-accessible, interactive map of Black British historical figures and groups.

Chappell will use the award to support the completion of their PhD thesis. Moving beyond the usual focus on Black and Asian women’s activities in racially-defined spaces and antiracist movements, Chappell’s research centers on contributions by women of colour to peace and environmental movements in Britain, and promises to make an important contribution to the historiography.

Honorable Mention

Jamey Jesperson (University of Victoria)

Jamey Jesperson is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Victoria and currently holds a visiting fellowship at the Queer History Centre at Goldsmiths College. Jesperson has received a number of accolades for their groundbreaking research. In 2022, Jesperson received the Royal Historical Society’s Rees Davies Prize for the “best Master’s thesis in the UK,” and subsequently revised the thesis into a journal article on colonial trans misogyny in New Spain that won both the 2023 Gender & History Graduate Student Essay Prize and the 2024 CLGBTH Gregory Sprague Prize for an outstanding article on LGBTQ+ history by a graduate student. Jesperson also coauthored an article (“‘Waking to Dream’: The Life Stories of Saylesh Wesley, Trans Stó:lō Elder-to-Be”) with the scholar and Stó:lō trans woman Saylesh Wesley that was published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2023. Jesperson’s PhD thesis build on this previous work and historicizes trans Indigenous lives in the Pacific Northwest during the early contact period. The dissertation “re-narrates ‘contact’” from the perspectives of five trans Indigenous people who lived during the late 18th and 19th centuries. This research, as Jesperson writes, is “grounded by a commitment to articulate ongoing violence against trans women.”

NACBS Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship Winner

Olivia Wyatt (Queen Mary University of London)

Wyatt is a PhD researcher in History at Queen Mary University of London. Wyatt completed a MA with Distinction in Race and Resistance at the University of Leeds before moving on to Queen Mary for the PhD. Wyatt has a remarkable record of contributions to diversity within the field of British Studies and service to the communities with whom she works. That record stretches back to Wyatt’s participation in Young Historians Project and role in co-founding From Margins to Centre, the first nationwide undergraduate conference on marginalized histories, at the University of York. While at Leeds, Wyatt conducted an oral history project on Caribbean women’s community activism in the city and, with Historic England, organized a 50th-anniversary event for the Leeds Caribbean and African Centre. Wyatt already has produced important scholarship based on these interviews and community archives. Wyatt’s MA dissertation won the Women’s History Network’s prize in 2022, and Wyatt contributed a chapter on Caribbean women’s community activism in Leeds to Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain, edited by Hakim Adi. Wyatt has also contributed to History Today and History Matters as well as a number of public-facing events and BBC Radio broadcasts, and co-organized a recent conference on Black British history at the Institute of Historical Research.

Wyatt’s PhD research centers on the politics of complexion and the survival of colorism among Black Britons across the twentieth century. Wyatt has expanded the scope of their previous research in Leeds and is conducting oral history interviews in Britain’s neglected second cities—Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff—for the project. With the support of the NACBS DI Fellowship, Wyatt will complete these interviews and will spend part of 2025 as a fellow of the St Augustine Department of History at the University of the West Indies in order to conduct research and share their work with local scholars and community members. Wyatt is producing scholarship that deepens and nuances our understanding the history of Black Britain and its diasporic connections, and exemplifies what it means to be a community-engaged historian in their research practice and dissemination of their research.

Judith R. Walkoowitz Prize

Lynneth Miller Renberg (Anderson University)

Lynneth Miller Renberg's article "Sacrilegious bodies" provides a connected history of Christian anxieties around dance in late medieval England and in British colonial Jamaica. Renberg argues that medieval British theological and evangelical construction of dance as sacrilege and sexually transgressive shaped Baptist missionary efforts to regulate African dancing bodies in Jamaica. "Medieval models of the stillness of the saints helped reinforce the gendered and racial hierarchies of the British empire" and anti-dance rhetoric became crucial to colonial Christian morality. Renberg's survey of the long history of religious efforts to discipline dancing bodies amplifies our understanding of gender, religion, race, dance, and much more. Renberg shows that pursuing these themes in widely disparate time periods can teach us a great deal, and that pre-imperial history can help unlock important new insights about modern history, enslavement, empire, and missionary efforts. The Walkowitz prize committee particularly appreciated Renberg's bold trans-temporal methodological approach and the fruitful focus on the body history of (un)regulated movement and efforts to impose stillness. 

Walter D. Love Prize

Sarah Balakrishnan for "Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957" Comparative Studies in Society and History (2023) 65: 2, 296–320

The committee took to heart the mission to award the Love Prize to an article that offered a “humane and compassionate understanding of the subject.” By centering the experiences and traumas of incarcerated West African women in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast, Sarah Balakrishnan’s “Prison of the Womb” accomplishes this task with great sensitivity and grace. Her wide-ranging and creative use of sources makes contributions to numerous subfields in an expansive understanding of British Studies, including intersecting histories of imperialism, gender, carceral studies, capitalism, and West Africa. Balakrishnan’s clear prose and persuasive arguments impressed all of us greatly.

Honorable Mention

Asheesh Kapur Siddique for "The Ideological Origins of 'Written' Constitutionalism” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 21, Issue 4, Fall 2023, pp. 557-599

Asheesh Kapur Siddique makes a huge historiographic claim about the very nature of constitutionalism and provides a rich and imaginative reading of his sources to back up his argument that America did not “invent” the written constitution. His article requires a rethinking of America’s constitutional history and reaches into a wide range of sources to show his findings’ relevance for not only Britain and the nascent United States, but also to the revolutions in France and Latin America.

John Ben Snow Prize

Eleanor Johnson's Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and ecosystemic thought in medieval England, (University of Chicago Press)

The winner of the John Ben Snow Prize for the best book in British Studies published in 2023 is Eleanor Johnson's Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and ecosystemic thought in medieval England, published by the University of Chicago Press. In Waste and the Wasters, Eleanor Johnson inspires readers to rethink what they know of the medieval world by using an eco-critical approach to explore concepts of waste and wastefulness in medieval English poetry, religious sources, and legal texts, connecting the very real concerns of our world to what is often perceived as a far-distant past with little relevance to the present day. What emerges is a fascinating examination of how closely medieval concerns about a changing climate and damage to the medieval English ecosystem can be seen to parallel our own similar anxieties. Grounded in solid historical scholarship, the book offers sensitive and compelling new readings of important Middle English texts, including Winner and Waster, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Chaucer's tale of the Canon's Yeoman. Eleanor Johnson's book is rich in ideas, clear and concise in its arguments, and highly accessible in its writing style. Waste and the Wasters is both a beautifully crafted piece of scholarship and a beautifully written book, which simultaneously addresses matters of urgent concern to our modern world and serves as a reminder of the enduring value of studying the history and culture of medieval Britain.

Stansky Book Prize

Philip Stern, Empire, Incorporated (Harvard University Press)

Philip Stern’s Empire, Incorporated places joint-stock corporations at the center of a deeply researched and sweeping reinterpretation of the British Empire since the sixteenth century. Charters promising exclusive rights to territories from Ulster to India, Hudson’s Bay to New Zealand, established dynamic forms of corporate or venture colonialism. This bold intellectual and institutional biography of colonial corporations—legal fictions that exercised real power—resists imposing a singular model and insists on their continuous lineage and coherent legacy. Stern’s incorporated empire, built through the mergers and acquisitions of companies, provided “limited moral liability” for colonial violence and will prompt reflection on continuing debates over the role of private enterprise in public governance.