Joseph Stuart is a PhD Student in History and Dean L. May Fellow at the University of Utah. His previous academic work has explored the connections of race and religion in the formation of New Religious Movements in the United States and the ways that religions use science as a means of gaining social acceptance in the United States.

Joseph's accomplishments this year include the following:

• J. Talmage Jones Award of Excellence from the Mormon History Association
• Presented papers at the African American Intellectual History Conference and was slated to present at the Organization of American Historians' Conference

Congratulations Joseph!

Jeff Turner is a PhD candidate in US History. Jeff studies immigration history, American religious history, Digital Humanities, and history of the American West. 

Jeff's accomplishments this year include:

• Publishing "The Push and Pull of Digital Humanities: Topic Modeling the 'What is digital humanities?' Genre" in Digital Humanities Quarterly 
  http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/1/000450/000450.html
• Being awarded the The Steffensen-Cannon Scholarship, which was established in 1989 by Hugh Cannon to honor his mother, Ellen Christina Steffensen Cannon. The scholarship enables University of Utah students to pursue excellence in their chosen fields of Education and Humanities, without the burden of employment.

Congratulations Jeff!

Elizabeth Giraud has penned, "Beyond the Bungalow:  the Arts and Crafts Movement in the Salt Lake City School District."  It concerns the relationship between arts and crafts philosophy and manual training in the early twentieth-century educational landscape.  The arts and crafts movement represented the aesthetic arm of progressive aims to revamp education.

 The article is scheduled to be included in the Utah Historical Quarterly's fall 2020 edition. 

Congratulations Elizabeth!

Matthew Green is currently studying for a History PhD as a Maybelle Burton Graduate Fellow at the University of Utah. His principal area of interest is mountaineering and what its history says about American culture. 

Matthew's accomplishments this year include:

 Fellowships:

•  Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace, Summer Intensive Language Program (Chinese), Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, CA, June 11–August 5, 2020

• Department of Education Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship for Chinese from the University of Utah’s Asia Center for the 2020 summer term

Papers presented:

•  “‘Quixotic Dreams’ of Backcountry Skiers and Outdoor Recreation Industry Leaders" - LSU 2020 Graduate History Conference, March 6-7, 2020.

 Papers accepted for presentation:

•  “‘Quixotic Dreams’ of Backcountry Skiers and Outdoor Recreation Industry Leaders" - Pacific Coast Branch meeting of the American Historical Association, 2020 meeting scheduled for August 6-8th in Portland, Oregon, at Portland State University.
•  "Wasatch Range Backcountry Skiing Oral History Project" - Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA) Annual Conference, Las Vegas, September 11-13, 2020

 Scholarship:

• SOHA 2020 General Scholarship to attend and participate in the Annual SOHA Conference.

Congratulations Matthew!

Cindy Solomon-Klebba is completing her dissertation and teaching in a variety of settings. While writing and research are important, it is her passion for teaching that prompted her to pursue a PhD.

 Cindy's accomplishments this year include:

• A University of Utah History Department Travel Grant for research at the Girl Scout archives in New York City
• A Roosevelt Presidential Library travel grant for research in the Eleanor Roosevelt Archives at the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, NY
• The Ramona W. Cannon Award for Graduate Student Teaching Excellence in the Humanities for 2020

Congratulations Cindy!

Shavauna Munster is from Salt Lake City, Utah and received her B.A. in History from the University of Utah in 2015. She is interested in the history of medicine, the body, and legally sanctioned physical punishment. Her current research focuses on connections between medical knowledge and law codes governing implements of discipline in the Middle Ages. 

Shavauna's accomplishments this year include:

• Presenting her paper  "Riding the Horse: The Punishment of Forgery in the Theodosian Code," Interdisciplinary History Conference at the University of Colorado-Boulder in September 2019
• Beginning an internship at the Utah Historical Quarterly in Spring 2020
• Being hired as the Communications and Marketing consultant and assistant to the Director of the Utah Division of State History 
• Starting a Newsletter for the HGSA, serving as the HGSA President 2019-20 and beginning the Grad. Work-in-Progress talks

Congratulations Shavauna!

The History Department is proud to announce that Spencer Woolley has authored two papers that have been accepted to major international conferences this year.

• "Perpetua Memoria: Perspectives on the World History of Memetic Sustainability" was accepted for the World History Association Conference 
• "Byzantine Borders in Britain: An Early Medieval
  Intellectual History" was accepted for the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK. 

Congratulations Spencer!

Emily Larsen is a part-time M.A. student and currently works full-time as the Head of Exhibitions and Programs at the Springville Museum of Art. She is interested in the art and visual culture of the American West, museums, and public history. Her current research projects focus on Utah women artists and dealers c.1890-1950.

Emily's accomplshiments this year include:

• Being awarded the Fellowship in Collections Engagement, from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA). According to the UMFA website, "The awards are part of a joint project, “Landscape, Land Art, and the American West,” meant to stimulate research, pedagogy and engagement with the collections and resources of the Museum and the Library." Emily's reserach will focus on a different type of women’s labor in “Utah’s Women Artists and the American West, c. 1890–1950.”  Her research will fill a significant historical gap in contextualizing the work of artists such as Verla Birrell, Mabel Frazer and Florence Ware, who were among the first women to become fine arts professors at the U. 
• Her paper titled, "Negotiating Postwar Mormon Femininity: Verla Birrell, the 'Globe-trotter' of Utah Art", has been accepted to the Mormon History Association Conference.

Congratulations Emily!

Julia Huddleston is an M.A. student in U.S. History at the University of Utah where she studies race, gender, and labor in the American West. She earned a Masters in Library and Information Science with an emphasis in Archival Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2015.

Julia's accomplishments this year include:

• Being awarded the Fellowship in Collections Engagement, from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA). According to the UMFA website, "The awards are part of a joint project, “Landscape, Land Art, and the American West,” meant to stimulate research, pedagogy and engagement with the collections and resources of the Museum and the Library." Her project, “Women’s Work in the American West: Teaching with Primary Sources,” will build a curriculum aimed at undergraduates, dissecting the undertheorized but crucial role of women’s labor to the nation’s program of westward expansion.
• Being awarded the Floyd A. O’Neil Fellowship through the American West Center.
• Julia also plans to pursue her Ph.D at the University of Utah, beginning fall 2020.

Congratulations Julia!

Morgan Hardy is a M.A student at the University of Utah where he studies race, identity, and resistance in colonial and Atlantic history, with an emphasis on the early modern French empire.  

This year, Morgan's proposal was selected for the 2020 Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) Pre-dissertation Field Research Grant. The award will assist in travel costs for his research related travel to Martinique.

Congratulations Morgan!

Brandon Clark is a PhD Candidate and an environmental historian of the colonial Americas. 

Brandon's accomplishments this year include:

• Contracting with ABC CLIO to write an article for their forthcoming volume on the history of racial violence in America.
• Receiving a fellowship from the Clements Library (Univ. of Michigan) and spending two weeks there, conducting archival research.
•  Creating maps for Paul Reeve's recent article “Reconstruction, Religion, and the West: The Great Impeacher Meets the Mormons,” Journal of Mormon History, in press, April 2020.
• Presenting a Work In Progress of my dissertation's introduction to the Tanner Humanities Center.

Congratulations Brandon!

Travis Hancock is a PhD student and Maybelle Burton Graduate Fellow. Travis studies 19th-century American colonialism, culture, evangelism, and science from a Pacific perspective. 

Travis' accomplishments this year include:

• Being accepted as a 2020 Graduate Fellow in the Summer Institue on Global Indigeneities, hosted by the University of Washington, Aug. 9-15, 2020
• Receiving a Dee Foundation grant to study the Hawaiian language through the University of Hawai'i at Manoa this summer.

Congratulations Travis!