E-Newsletter - Spring 2023 | Department of History

As another academic year closes, we look back at the many accomplishments of our history community. Within our undergraduate program, the number of declared majors is the highest it has been in a decade, which is no surprise when you look at the talent of our faculty. This year, we were honored to have Professor Adam Warren named as a finalist for the Distinguished Teaching Award, one of the highest honors within the University of Washington, as well as Professor Purnima Dhavan recognized as a nominee for the Marcia L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. It’s not just our faculty who excel, though, we also had the distinction of Tracy Maschman Morrissey, our director of academic services, as a nominee for the Distinguished Staff Award.

We would also like to recognize and thank Professors Ileana Rodriguez-Silva and Matthew Mosca as they end their terms as director of undergraduate studies and director of graduate studies, respectively. Their service and leadership have been invaluable to the department and its students.

We invite you to scroll through the pages of this newsletter to discover many more of the year’s highlights and celebrate with us.

The Unexpected Journey of Tevye's Ottoman Daughter

Writing a work of history is a journey full of twists and turns in which the final destination is often a surprise. This was a lesson UW history PhD (2017) and current UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies Associate Director Sarah Zaides Rosen learned first-hand when writing her book Tevye’s Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire. Sarah’s journey began in 2010 when she was admitted to the University’s history PhD program with the intention of writing a history of… Read more

Sharing the Beauty of Urdu Poetry

For more than a decade, UW history professor Purnima Dhavan and Asian languages and literature professor Heidi Pauwels have been collaborating on a book project titled Urdu’s Origins Revisited: Vali Dakhani’s Reception in Multilingual South Asia. Focusing on the 18th century poet Vali Dakhani, the book explores a moment during the 1720s and 30s when his poetry exploded in popularity, with groups across India reading and writing responses to his poems. This phenomenon sheds light on the cross-… Read more

A Conversation with Graduate Student Sierra Mondragón

These past two years have seen unprecedented success for a number of our history graduate students, many of whom were awarded some of the country’s most competitive and prestigious fellowships: two Fulbright fellowships, two Ford fellowships, a Society of Scholars fellowship, and a Social Science Research Council fellowship. One of these scholars, Sierra Mondragón, who is a first-year doctoral student studying Indigenous history, received a three-year predoctoral Ford Foundation fellowship.… Read more

Get to Know: Melinda Whalen

The American Historical Association’s (AHA) annual conference is considered the premier conference for historians working within the American university system. It’s the kind of gathering where one expects to find many of the greatest historians of the era: tenured faculty, renowned academics, leading experts, and occasionally a lucky and precocious graduate student. Yet, amid all these academic “big shots” was UW senior Melinda Whalen, who traveled to this year's AHA conference in Philadelphia… Read more

The Wide World of History: Updates from the History Community

An ariel view of the University of Washington Quad during cherry blossom time looking out towards the downtown Seattle

Our history community is a busy one, and you wouldn’t be hard pressed to find one of us outside of campus doing what we do best: promoting and educating on history. From writing about current events, such as Christopher Tounsel’s recent piece on the ongoing violence in Sudan or Ross Coen’s interview in Time Magazine about another period in U.S. history… Read more

History Celebrates 2023 Award Winners

The Department of History is thrilled to provide $213,000 in scholarships and prizes this year in recognition of the academic and service excellence of our students. In total, 61 undergraduate prizes were awarded to 33 students and 5 prizes were given to 4 graduate students. In addition, the department presented awards to a faculty member and an outstanding Washington high school history teacher. These awards would not be possible were it not for the generosity of our alumni and friends, and we… Read more

None of the accomplishments we celebrate in the Department of History would be possible without the support of our alumni and friends. Giving is the lifeblood of the department and allows us to address the most pressing needs of our programs. Your gifts help develop new courses, support research, provide scholarships, recruit and retain top talent, host public lectures and events, build partnerships within our wider community, and much more.

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