Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize
This year’s Bernath Lecture committee (Paul Chamberlin, Thomas Field, and Kelly Shannon) has selected Professor Amanda Demmer of Virginia Tech University to receive the 2025 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize. An award-winning scholar and teacher, Professor Demmer’s two major research projects highlight some of the most exciting new developments in foreign relations history. Her 2022 book, After Saigon's Fall, has been widely acclaimed as one of the best recent examples of how to cross analyze histories diplomacy and migration. Meanwhile, her current project on Ginetta Sagan demonstrates Demmer's sustained interest in the diplomatic agency of nonstate actors while further historicizing our understanding of the contested realm of international human rights. Her work promises to shed a clarifying light on how developments in the 1970s came to define our times. Furthermore, she is a rising star who is sure to point the way for the next generation of foreign relations historians.
Michael J. Hogan Foreign Language Fellowship
The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) has awarded this year’s Michael J. Hogan Foreign Language Fellowship to Zachary Tayler, a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Ohio University. He will use the $4,000.00 fellowship to study Vietnamese at the University of Wisconsin, building on the Vietnamese language courses that he has already taken in the last two years. Additional language training will let Tayler incorporate Vietnamese-language sources into his dissertation on U.S.-Vietnamese relations from 1975 to 1995. The fellowship committee was impressed with this ambitious project, which promises to shed new light on the diplomatic engagement between Hanoi and Washington following the end of the Vietnam War. Congratulations to Zachary Tayler on becoming the 2025 recipient of the Hogan Fellows Hogan Foreign Language Fellowship
William Appleman Williams Emerging Scholar Grants
Addison Jensen is the recipient of a $2000 William Appleman Williams Emerging Scholar Grant. Professor Jensen received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2024. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Twentieth Century United States History at Montana State University. In her project, “Blowing in the Wind: Media, Counterculture, and the American Military in Vietnam,” Jensen situates the experiences of American servicemembers during the Vietnam War against the backdrop of the stateside countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Her nuanced approach connects the experience of U.S. troops in Vietnam with the history of contemporary domestic social movements. Antiwar and countercultural impulses that arose in the domestic socio-political environment ultimately permeated the armed forces and undermined the government’s ability to continue to wage war. Jensen makes excellent use of both archival records as well as an array of oral history interviews. This well-developed project has the potential to become an important monograph.
Ian Seavey, recipient of a $1000 William Appleman Williams Emerging Scholar Grant, received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2024. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Programs and Community Engagement at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. In his project, “Huracán del Norte: Disasters and U.S. Colonialism in Twentieth Century Puerto Rico,” Seavey embraces recent calls to put environmental history broadly, and disaster history specifically, into direct conversation with the study of U.S. empire. Based on multilingual archival sources, Seavey analyzes U.S. responses to disasters in Puerto Rico, finding that the policies implemented had the effect of increasing Puerto Rican dependence while simultaneously leaving the island more vulnerable to future disasters. The promising project spans the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries.
The Stuart L. Bernath Dissertation Research Grant ($4,000)
David Kerry, a student working at Yale University under the direction of Ned Blackhawk, submitted for his dissertation, “American Imperium: Wardship and the Making of American Empire.” It examines how, from the late-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, US officials “utilized various conceptions of wardship to structure and govern colonized territories” that included those in the American West as well as the Philippines and Puerto Rico (and three others). He argues the work will prove there was “no singular conception or category of ‘wardship’ that was universally operable throughout American territories.” Kerry will use the Bernath Grant to fund trips to the National Archives in San Francisco and College Park for materials on American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and the Philippines.
The W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship ($4,000)
Shelby Jones is a PhD candidate at Purdue University working with Stacy Holden, where she is researching US foreign relations with the late Ottoman Empire, focusing particularly on the role of the diplomat, Lew Wallace. She not only traces the career of Wallace and his impacts on political relations with Istanbul, but also the ways in which Ottoman officials and local American missionaries engaged with him, developing various cross-cultural exchanges. She reveals the ways in which such early US state and non-state actors had long-term impacts on US relations with Turkey and other formal parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Holt funds will be used to support several months of archival research in Türkiye.
The Lawrence Gelfand – Armin Rappaport – Walter LaFeber Dissertation Fellowship ($4,000)
Brittany Gittus is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford. Her dissertation title is: ‘Some Definite Organisation apart from the League’: Geopolitical Challenges and Multilateral Alternatives to the League of Nations, 1935-1939. The thesis argues that the effort to move multilateralism beyond the League of Nations was not the first of the interwar period and would not be its last. The research further questions whether the competition or collaboration that existed between such bodies strengthened or weakened the League and interrogates how they did so. At a time of turbulence in the global order, with ongoing debates as to whether new bodies, such as the G20, undermine the UNO, these questions have contemporary relevance as well as historical importance. The comparative and transnational methodology of this thesis allows for a critical intervention in the historiography and the broader literature on the League of Nations. Gittus plans to use her award to conduct further research at the National Archives in College Park, Columbia University, [Franklin] Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Poughkeepsie, NY, and Harvard University Archives.
Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grants (varying amounts indicated below)
Alexandra Southgate is a PhD candidate at Temple University mentored by Petra Goedde. Her dissertation, “Speak Truth to Power: Transnational Quaker Activism, 1945-1975” analyzes the work of US, British, and Canadian Quakers as they engaged in international religious activism during the Cold War. The committee found her discussion of their humanitarian and anti-war organizing insightful, in particular her analysis of their shift from apolitical humanitarian aid to political advocacy, plus the multi-archival research, and deep understanding of the intertwined histories of religion, diplomacy, and pacifism. Southgate will use the SHAFR grant to study the work of Quaker internationalists at the Library of the Society of Friends in London. ($2,800)
Nicolas Allen is a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University mentored by Eric Zolov. His dissertation – “The Masters’ Voice: the U.S. Recording Industry in Vargas-Era Brazil (1930-1950)” – promises to be a masterful political and cultural history of the US recording industry in Brazil during the populist regime of Getúlio Vargas. In writing this history of cultural exchange, Allen seeks to move beyond the narrative of cultural imperialism to better understand how US companies brought Brazilian “music culture” to domestic audiences. He will use the SHAFR grant to analyze popular magazines and government memos found in the archives of the Instituto Moreira Salles and Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paolo. Allen will use his Bemis award to do further research in US record company archives in Brazil. ($3,500)
Rashida Shafiq is a PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University, under the direction of Jeffrey Engel. Her dissertation, “From Toledo to Tamil Nadu: Gloria Steinem, India, and the Cold War, 1957-1963,” examines the ways in which Steinem’s experiences in India challenge notions of Western feminist exceptionalism. Steinem’s thought and practice were informed by interactions with a range of Indian activists, revealing a bidirectional flow of ideas that ultimately rooted her feminist thought in transnational dialogues, even as Steinem also inadvertently benefited from covert US funding. The SHAFR Bemis grant will help defray research travel expenses to the Arthur Schlesinger Library and Columbia University as well as for hiring a local researcher in India to avoid being a Muslim woman traveling there alone. ($3,700)
Emma Herman is a Ph.D. student in history at Harvard University. Her dissertation is “Indian Country is a Place: Sovereignty, Law, and the Making and Unmaking of Oklahoma,1871-1934.” Her thesis excavates the social, legal, and spatial relationships of US and Native citizens in Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory from the US-imposed “end” of treaty making in 1871, through the creation of the state of Oklahoma in 1907, to the formal reconstitution of tribal governments with the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. She positions Indian Territory as a late 19th and early 20th century borderland, extending the work that scholars of early America and historians of the American West have done to recenter the importance of Native nations in shaping the course of European and American settlement in North America. US/Native relations are international relations, despite the efforts of US politicians and federal officials in the last decades of the nineteenth century—through boarding schools, blood quantum laws, and the forced privatization of tribal lands through the General Allotment (Dawes) Act—to extinguish Native identities and polities. Herman use of the Bemis Grant will be focused on research travel expenses for work at the Oklahoma Historical Society. ($2,000)
Issay Matsumoto, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California working under the guidance of Lon Kurashige, is working on a dissertation, “Aloha, Incorporated: Trans-Pacific Capitalism and the Rise of Tourism in Hawai’i.” It “tells the story of the rise of the service economy in Hawai’i through the eyes of a multiracial cast of local actors whose labor wove the island on the edge of the American empire into the broader trans-Pacific world.” Through looking at laborers that included everyone from hotel housekeepers to lei vendors, Matsumoto seeks to show how “residents at the center of this transformation reconstituted grassroots politics across the Pacific, building complex solidarities that challenged, yet just as often sustained official efforts to incorporate life, labor, and ecology into the tourism industry.” The SHAFR Bemis funds will be used for travel and research expenses to the Hawai’i State Archives and the Library of Congress. ($2,000)
Michael McGalliard is a PhD candidate at UC-San Diego mentored by Mark Hendrickson. His dissertation – “A Farewell to Arms? US Debates over War and Militarism in the 1920s and 1930s” – analyzes largely forgotten grassroots student, women’s, and religious anti-war activism and the government response to it, including bipartisan support from a sympathetic Congress. Connecting issues from disarmament to U.S. occupations in the Caribbean and Central America to the League of Nations, the debates over militarism offer a window into the wide spectrum of political beliefs and sharp divides that inform the US peace movement in the interwar period. McGalliard will use the SHAFR grant to visit the archives found at Swarthmore College’s Peace Collection. ($2,000)
Jack Werner, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland-College Park working under the guidance of Julie Greene, takes a different focus than many historians of US foreign relations with the dissertation, “Ableist Empire: US Colonialism, Disability, and Labor in the United States and the Philippines, 1898-1916.” He plans to show “how racial ideas were mobilized between the United States and the Philippines,” particularly related to disability beyond the rhetoric of what constituted ability to examine the healthcare provided to those sick in the colony including Filipinos, whites, and African Americans. The goal is to show it moved beyond race to show “disability as a category of analysis that broadens our understanding of the social, political, and cultural transformations wrought by US colonial rule.” Werner intends to use the SHAFR Bemis Grant to support further research in multiple Philippine archives. ($2,000)
Yuan Yan is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge working with Andrew Preston, where she is completing her dissertation, “Between Knowledge and Power: Sinologists and the United States’ China Policy (1949-79).” In her work, she explores how Sinologists served as intermediaries between the government and the public, informing both foreign policy and popular conceptions. These “middlemen” had unique opportunities to undertake “intellectual diplomacy,” with ramifications for both academia and government. This Bemis Grant will be used to defray research expenses to the University of Madison.