Spencer Hall (Board Chair), Tiffany Greene, and Jennifer Ortiz (Director)

History Department PhD candidate, Tiffany Greene, received the 2024 Helen Papanikolas Award from the Utah Historical Society. The Helen Papanikolas Award goes to the best college or university student’s paper on the subject of “Women’s History in Utah.”  This award is funded by Linda Thatcher and Patricia Lyn Scott.

Tiffany's paper, “Summer Camp as Consumption, Not Conservation," explores how the nature study and youth summer camp movements grew and intersected in early twentieth-century Utah, leading to the establishment of girls’ summer camps in the Wasatch Mountains. Her paper analyzes the gendered nature of the camp movement and  how summer camps transformed nature study into “a metaphorical vehicle to teach young girls their expected gender roles” as a tool to preserve the innocence of girlhood. This approach transformed nature into a commodity to be consumed, rather than one Utah girls grew up studying and learning about to protect or conserve.

The History Department congratulates Tiffany on this well-deserved award!