2024 WINNER

Winner:  Merve Fejzula, “Negritude and the Afro-Black Public Sphere 1947-77”

The SFHS/WSFH Awards committee is delighted to award Dr. Merve Fejzula the Laurie Wood Travel Award for 2024. It will enable Dr. Fezjula to complete the research for her first book, currently entitled Negritude and the Afro-Black Public Sphere 1947-77. Dr. Fejzula’s work promises to provide a new intellectual history of negritude alongside a novel political economy of the Black public sphere. Dr Fejzula’s clear research plan and her innovative work promises to make a major intervention in the field. Her multi-sited global portrait of negritude and the Afro-Black public sphere continues in the spirit of Prof. Laurie Wood’s global and personal approach to the Francophone world. We wish her well as she completes the vital research for her book - now under contract.

Past Winners:

2022:
Sarah Runcie, Muhlenberg College, “Doctors with Borders: Decolonization and International Health in Cameroon.”

2021:
Kelly Presutti, Cornell University, “‘Agglomerations’: Accretive History in New Caledonia.”

2020:
Megan Brown, Swarthmore College, “Racing Against Decolonization: The Rallye Méditerranée-Le Cap and the Infrastructures of Empire.”

2019:
Ian W. Merkel, Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Turin, “Terms of Exchange: Brazilian Intellectuals and the Rethinking of the French Social Sciences.”

2018:
Miranda Sachs, Yale University, "Child’s Work: Welfare, Family, and Work in Third Republic France."

2017:
Nimisha Barton, Princeton University, "Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France."

2016: 
Bronwen McShea, Columbia University, "Patroness of Empire: Duchesse Marie d’Aiguillon and French-Catholic Expansion in 17th-Century Asia, America, and Africa."

2015: 
Laurie M. Wood, Florida State University, "Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire."

2014: 
Burleigh Hendrickson, Northeastern University, "Imperial Fragments and Transnational Activism: 1968(s) in Tunisia, France, and Senegal."

2013: 
Elena Napolitano, University of Toronto, "Prospects of Statecraft: Diplomacy, Territoriality, and the Vision of French Nationhood in Rome, 1660-1700."

2012: 
Alexia Yates, Harvard University, "Selling Paris: Real Estate and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Metropolis."

2011:
Christina Firpo, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, "'Abandoned Children': The Crises of Racial Patriarchy and the Forcible Removal of Mixed-Race Children in Colonial Indochina, 1890-1956."

2010:
Jennifer Palmer, University of Chicago, "An Ocean between Them: Race, Gender and the Family in France and Its Colonies."

2009:
Jonathyne Briggs, Indiana University Northwest, "Anarchie en France: Hypermodernity and French Popular Music, 1958-1981."

2008:
Claire Salinas, Colorado College,"Settling Society in France and Algeria: Emigration, Colonization, and Liberal Politics, 1830-1870."

2007:
Junko Tankeda, Syracuse University, "Between France and the Mediterranean: Absolutism and Commercial Humanism in Marseille, 1660-1720."

2006:
Rebecca Pulju, Kent State University, "The Woman's Paradise: Gender and Consumer Culture in France, 1944-1965."

2005:
Sara Beam, University of Victoria, "The Body of the Criminal in Europe, 1500 - 1750."

2004:
Richard Keyser, Western Kentucky University, "From Gift to Contract: The Transformation of Medieval Property Dealings, Champagne 1100-1350."

2003:
Richard C. Keller, University of Wisconsin-Madison, "Developing Madness: The Psychiatrist's Civilizing Mission in French North Africa, 1900-1962."

2002:
Sean Kennedy, University of New Brunswick, "The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français in Algeria."

2001:
Nancy Locklin, Maryville College, "Women in Early Modern Brittany: Rethinking Work and Identity in a Traditional Economy."

2000:
Patrick R. Young, Fordham University, "The Consumer as National Subject: Bourgeois Tourism in the French Third Republic, 1880-1914."

1999:
Michael Lynn, Agnes Scott College, "Popular Science in the French Enlightenment: The Dissemination of Natural Philosophy and the Creation of an Urban Scientific Culture."

1998:
Nancy Edwards, Bowdoin College, "Regendering the Nation: the Role of the Housewife in French Indentity Formation from 1918 to Vichy."

1997:
Mathew S. Kuefler, Rice University, "A Study of the Manuscripts of the Vita Sancti Geraldi Aureliancensis."