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Edward A. White Award

The Edward A. White Award in American Studies is given annually to a senior who has done outstanding work in the study of the United States and its history, culture, or politics as evidenced in her senior thesis. A list of past winners and their thesis topics is available below.

Year Winner Thesis Topic
2020 Julia Gottlieb Performing Power: Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey’s Cold War Choreographies
2019 Katherine M. Cashion The Icon Formation of Ruby Bridges within Hegemonic Memory of the Civil Rights Movement
2018 Natalie Johnson Making America White Again: Twitter, the Alt-Right, and Colorblindness in Trump America
Edith Jaicel Ortega California as a ‘Blue-Print’ for Progressive Immigration Reform?
2017 Eden Amital Developmental Measures: The Zika Virus, Microcephaly, and Histories of Global Northern State Anxieties
2016 Jinna Johnson “Dans le pays des Hurons”: Female Spirituality, French Jesuits, and the Huron Nation in France and New France During the Seventeenth Century
Sierra McCormick “Blood on the Leaves”: Lynchings, Police Murders, and the Narration of Racial Terrorism Against Black Bodies
2015Ìý Anna Marburger Queer Content in Science Fiction Allegory and Analogue: Is It In Disguise?
Laurel Schwartz #Flawless: The Intersection of Celebrity Culture and New Media in the Feminist Movement
2014 Theresa Iker Gals Getting ‘Reno-vated’: Individual Transformation and National Change During the Rise and Fall of the Reno Divorce Ranches
2013 Carolyn Angius The Concrete River: Industry, Race, and Green Justice on the Banks of the Los Angeles River
2012 Caroline Daly Collective Memory, Commemoration & ways of Remembering Little Rock: 50 Years after the Integration Crisis at Central High School
Jennifer Plumlee Televising Memory: The Tenth Anniversary of 9/11
2011 Laura Nolan Storytelling, Dislocation, and Healing: Community Led Responses to Displacement and Disaster, Katrina to the Present
2010 Casey Near Contested Spaces: Freedom and Race in Philadelphia’s Penny Press
Ìý Allyson Woodard Hemmed In: Wilderness and Desire in the American Gothic
2008 Clare Cannon American Nightmare, Twilight of Dreams
2007 Ashley Boothby Spectacles of ‘White Trash’: ‘Whiteface Minstrelsy’ and American Popular Culture
2006 Kellin Crossman Pioneering Women: Los Angeles Clubwomen and the Growth of a Feminine Consciousness, 1875-1911
Tarrin Petersen Sex As the City: The Emergence of Detroit in Joyce Carol Oates’ Them and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex
2005 Sarah M. Einowski Latinos/as and the Law: Getting Beyond the Black/White Paradigm in Equal Protection Jurisprudence
2004 Erika Linden Babies, Bullets and Bombs: How Race and Gender Politics Have Defined Reproductive Freedom from Margaret Sanger to George W. Bush
2003 Elizabeth Payne From Genocide to Justified: Ideology, Literature and the Re-Writing of the Vietnam
2002 Megan Harris Memory in Celluloid and Stone: Saving Private Ryan, the National World War II Memorial, and Collective Memory
2001 Katherine V. Wise Blueprints for Activism: Women’s Responses to Breast Cancer and AIDS
2000 Amanda Carr Indian Hill: An Ethnohistory
1999 Emily Stoddard The Cyber Substitute: Queer Youth Online Commentaries
1998 Melissa Robertson The Violence Against Women Act of 1994: Its History and Implementation
1997 Poppy Meier The Politics and Prejudice of Welfare Reform
1996 Sarah Prehoda Undermining the Consensus Coalition: The Roots of the 1995 Welfare Reform Effort
Elizabeth Siebel Public Action and Private Interest: Patterns of Women’s Political Action in the United States, 1848-1992
1995 Mei Zhan Making Chinese Medicine: Refiguration of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Western Scientific and Medical Community of the New Age Movement
1994 Anneke Voorhees Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigen: The Convergence of a Poet and a Painter
1993 Jennifer Barker-Benfield The Older the Fiddle, The Sweeter the Tune: A Study of Sunset Hall, Retirement Home for Radicals
Leticia Hernandez Three Writers Meet in the Borderlands: A Comadrehood
1992 Nancie Carollo Voice from the 1950s: Women and the Traditional American Family
1991 Melissa Milstein Women in the AIDS Epidemic: Problems in Prevention Education
Camille Parker Folklore and Modern City Culture in Twentieth Century America
1990 Jeanne Renee Hammond Women and the Feminine: The Gendered Meaning of Representations of the War in Vietnam
1989 Melissa Kay Kiefer Female Heroes on the Overland Trails
1988 Jennifer Cate The Limitations of Jack Kerouac’s Zen
1987 Dung “Zoon” Nguyen Basic Human Needs: A Foundation for American Development Assistance in Central America
1986 Allison Gee Finding a Voice in a Silent Existence: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Folklore Motifs in a the Woman Warrier
Kathleen Jackson The Chicago Race Riot of 1919: Was it an Inevitable Event in the History of Chicago?
1985 Luciana Herman “The U.S. v. ‘Ulysses’: Censorship in America”