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
2015	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
	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”