History Accolades 2025–26
Please join us in congratulating the following faculty, staff, students, and alumni on their accomplishments.
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Alumni
Eric Becklin (PhD ‘25) received his PhD in August 2025 for his dissertation, “Religious Identity and Internationalization in the Formation of the Lutheran Church of China: Religioscape, Social Networks, and Spaces, 1890–1949.” His advisor was Ann Waltner.
Ryan Bandy (BA ‘10) was honored in the Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal's “40 Under 40” list for his work as the Chief Business Officer with Indeed Brewing.
Hao-Wen Cheng (PhD ‘26) received his PhD in spring 2026 for his dissertation, “Living Under Different Sun Flags: Post-War Memory of the Taiwanese Imperial Japan Servicemen.” His advisors were Ann Waltner and MJ Maynes.
Elizabeth Dillenburg (PhD ‘19) received the 2026 Provost’s Midcareer Scholars Award at Ohio State University, where she is an associate professor and is currently co-chairing Ohio State's Center for Historical Research 2025–27 program on "Bridging Global Lenses on Servitude & Unfree Labor: From Ancient Times to the Present."
James Gresock (PhD ‘26) received his PhD in December 2025 for his dissertation, “From Bloodshed to Broadsheet: Visual Narratives of Justice and the Mediation of Meaning in 17th Century Public Executions.” His advisors were Howard Louthan and JB Shank. He is currently an Assistant Editor at the Austrian History Yearbook.
Eunice Kim (PhD ‘26) received her PhD in June 2026 for her dissertation, “Bases and Borders: Forced Migration after WWII, South Korea and Guam.” Her advisor was Erika Lee.
Tim McDonald (PhD ‘25) received his PhD in November 2025 for his dissertation, “Holy Russia in the Holy Land: the Russian Presence in Ottoman Palestine, 1856-81.” His advisor was Theofanis Stavrou.
Matthew Miller (PhD, 2006) has published a Russian edition of his book, The American YMCA and Russian Culture: The Preservation and Expansion of Orthodox Christianity, 1900-1940.
Jacob (Coby) Oertel (BA ‘20) received a CLA Outstanding Service Award for his work with the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies.
Noam Sienna (PhD ‘20) published Jewish books in North Africa: Between the early modern and modern worlds (Indiana University Press, 2025) and spoke about the book with the History Book Club in April 2026.
Jeffrey Manuel (PhD ‘09) published Ethanol: A Hemispheric History for the Future of Biofuels (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025) and spoke about the book with the History Book Club in February 2026.
Hannah Smith (PhD ‘25) received her PhD in August 2025 for her dissertation, “‘A Monstrous Incongruity’: Midwives, Childbirth, and Power over the Pregnant Body in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1750-1840.” Her advisor was Katherine Gerbner.
Margie Tang-Whitmore (PhD ‘26) was awarded the 2025 Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and successfully defended her dissertation and received her PhD in May 2026. Her work, “The ‘Oriental Julia Child’: Chinese American Cuisine, Gendered Orientalism, and the Cold War,” was advised by Erika Lee (pictured below).
Joe William Trotter, Jr. (PhD ‘80) was shortlisted for the Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award for his work Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life.
Ana Vergara Sierra (PhD ‘25) accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at Susquehanna University. She was awarded the Antoine Tibesar Prize from the Conference on Latin American History for the most distinguished article published in The Americas in 2024, "The Escribano of Babel: Power, Exile, and Enslavement in the Venezuelan Llanos during the War of Independence (1806-1833).” Ana was also awarded a short-term fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library for Summer 2026.
Alexander Wisnoski (PhD ‘15) was promoted to full professor at the University of North Georgia.
Undergraduate Students
Samson Black received the 2025–26 Non-Western Paper Prize for his writing on "Zainichi Leftists and the Japanese Communist Party: Nationalism and Division in the Postwar Japanese Communist Movement."
Reid Campani, Dori Catz, Zach Khan, Malia Knoblauch Killian, Talia Magnuson, and Charles Payne, working with Yalile Suriel and Archivist Ellen Holt-Werle, were awarded the Alice Smith Prize for public history by the Midwestern Historical Association for their West Bank Skyway exhibit “Students Speak Out.” Magnuson traveled to the Association’s annual conference to accept the award on the group’s behalf.
Jerry Jerabek received the 1889 Prize for his writing "Faith, Family, and the Franks: The Assassination of Wenceslas I in Context."
Hannah Kiresuk was awarded the John T. and Elizabeth L. Harnsberger Scholarship for her project In Captivity and Silence: New Zealand’s Forgotten Anzacs.
Talia Magnuson was awarded the Hedley Donovan Scholarship in the summer of 2026 for her project Peacekeeping without the Police: Civilian Law Enforcement in 19th Century London. She was also awarded the 2025–26 Howard Reinmuth Prize in European History for her writing "Leveraging Masculine Fears of Domination: Josephine Butler's Use of Gendered Language in Government by Police."
Charlie Payne was awarded the Hedley Donovan Scholarship in the summer of 2026 for his project Population and Power on an Atlantic Frontier: The Movement of Indigenous and Spanish Women in Late Colonial Rio de la Plata.
The Students of HIST 3001: Public History (Fall ‘25) and the Spring 2026 History Lab Internship produced UMN, Farm Aid, and Activism, a new undergraduate student-created and designed exhibit, is now on display in the West Bank Skyway until April 1, 2027 and available to view virtually online.
Andrew Wagner was awarded the Hedley Donovan Scholarship for the summer of 2026 for his project on Memory and Identity in Christian Martyrdom Accounts of the Early Islamic Period.
George Wellock received the George D. Green North American History Research Prize for his paper "Woven Lives: Migration, Morality, and the Making of the Wellock Family."
Tyler Zupancich was awarded the Hedley Donovan Scholarship for the summer of 2026 for his project, Racialization and Americanization of Slavic Immigrants on the Iron Range, 1918-1930.
Graduate Students
JoJo Bell was shortlisted for the Museum of African American History’s Stone Book Award for her book Red Stained: The Life of Hilda Simms. She also moderated the “Being Black and Betty Crocker” event with MNHS and Barbara Jo Davis.
Myra Billund-Phibbs has published several pieces of work. An entry to MNHS’ “MNopedia” on the 1975 Minneapolis Non-Discrimination Ordinance, as well “has a solicited post on Process, the blog for the Organization of American Historians on “Doing Trans History Despite It All,” in the summer of 2025. She also published “Psychiatrist, Surgeon, Historian: Authority, Risk, and Mid-century Legacies in the Practice of Trans Oral History” with the Journal of Australian Feminist Studies in September 2025. Billund-Phibbs was also awarded the 2024–25 RA Award for her work with Tracey Deutch.
Madeline Halbach published “Murder on Lake Pepin: Indigenous Power and Transcultural: Justice in the Western Great Lakes” with Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal in March 2026.
Alisa Kuzmina had two columns published in Perspectives on History with the American Historical Association in the summer of 2025: “Divided Lives, Connected in the Archive” and “The Emotional Textures of the Archive,” a connected set on the intersections between her research and her experience as an international student. She also received a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for spring 2026.
Keira Mac Neill was granted the Allan Bérubé Research Stipend for summer 2026.
Elena Paulsen was awarded the David Plath Prize for best graduate paper on Northeast Asia, by the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs. She was published in December: in Studies on Asia with her article “Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan: Through the Lens of Yoshiya Nobuko’s Hanamonogatari,” and in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality with “Inventing ‘Lesbianism’: Hiratsuka Raichō and Female Same-Sex Attraction in Early Twentieth Century Japan.” In January 2026, she was a presenter at the AHA conference on a panel she organized, "Youth and Citizenship in the Age of Conflict: Belonging in the World War I Era."
Jude Pitti was granted the Hella Mears Graduate Fellowship for 2025–26.
Elizabeth Quillen published Medieval Nuns at War: Rebellious, Resilient and Rowdy Women (Pen and Sword, November 2025), and spoke about her new book with the History Book Club in October 2025.
Kelly Rogers published with local journalism hub Racket on the recent Minneapolis mayoral election: “Meet the Big-Money Donors Trying to Buy Your Vote in Minneapolis.” She was awarded the Paul Murphy Fellowship in Legal History for summer 2026.
Lindsey Willow Smith coauthored an article, “‘Many Buds Blooming’: Lived Experience and Insights From Native American Graduate Students” in New Directions for Student Services.
Amelia Spell co-authored “‘Frothy Discourses’ and ‘Brain-Sick Fancies': Truth, Errors, and Lies in News Reporting during the English Civil War” with Timothy Fehler, chapter three in Religion and Freedom of Expression in the Early Modern Period.
Margie Tang-Whitmore was awarded the 2025–26 Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship through the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Faculty & Staff
David Chang published the digital humanities project Ka’iana: Voyage of a Chief.
Anna Clark has been appointed the Cornerstones Visiting Chair in History at the University of Richmond for fall 2026.
Kirsten Fischer has been awarded a fellowship with the University of Helsinki for fall 2026 and was named a Fullbright Scholar affiliated with the American Studies Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland during spring semester 2027.
Katharine Gerbner published Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke, 2025), a collaborative digital project Adga Tome: Damma’s World, From Ghe to Dutch Creole, and has been promoted to professor starting in fall 2026.
J. David Hacker has been appointed as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Economic History at Lund University in Sweden during the summers of 2026 and 2027.
Aaron Hall was awarded the 2025 William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize by the American Society for Legal History for his article “Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South,” published in the Journal of American History in 2024.
Christopher Isett will complete his second semester as a visiting research fellow at the World Sinology Center - Beijing University in fall 2026.
Hiromi Mizuno received the 2024 Vernon Carstensen Memorial Award from the Agricultural History Society for her article, "Okinawa Agriculture and the Sterile Insect Technology," Agricultural History (Nov. 2024).
Kevin Murphy and Yalile Suriel were awarded $1 million from the Mellon Foundation’s Division of Higher Learning for “The Renewal Project: Reckoning with University-Driven Displacement and Dispossession.”
Zozan Pehlivan was named co-winner of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA) Book Prize for 2024 for her book The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century. She was named the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair for 2025-2028.
David Perry published The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).
Emerita professor Carla Rahn Phillips has self-published a book titled Gun-toting Angels and Other Stories from the Spanish Empire.
Steven Ruggles, as the director for the IPUMS Center for Data Integration, received the Geospatial World Leadership Award 2025 for Research, Science & Technology Institution of the Year. He was also appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in The John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress in spring 2027.
Noam Sienna (PhD ‘20) has been appointed the new Deinard Chair in Jewish History, starting fall 2026.
Igor Tchoukarine has finished his work with his 2022–25 Swedish Research Council grant, and continues on with his 2024–26 Imagine Fund Annual Faculty Research Grant.
Ann Waltner has co-edited a volume (with Ihor Pidhainy) Biographical Traditions in Early Modern East Asia with Palgrave McMillan, published in January 2026.
