Our faculty have been busy since you last heard from us! Read on for news dating back to spring 2020.

Molly Ball, lecturer, published her first book, Navigating Life and Word in Old Republic São Paulo (UP of Florida, 2020).

Ted Brown, professor emeritus, was awarded the Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Tom Fleischman, assistant professor, published his first book, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall (University of Washington Press, 2020).

Mical Raz, Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor in Public Policy and Health, received tenure and promotion to the rank of full professor. She has been very busy during the pandemic with her duties at the hospital but still has made time for her research and writing. You can find opinion pieces from her in the Washington Post here and here. She has also written many other articles, which you can find links to here on her faculty page. Her new book, Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way, was published by University of North Carolina Press (2020).

Pablo Sierra, associate professor, became the first recipient of the President’s Ferrari Humanities Research Award in spring 2020. He was also awarded the James Alexander Memorial Prize by the Conference on Latin American History in 2020. 

Laura Ackerman Smoller, professor, was quoted in a Forbes story about the latest planetary conjunction that took place on the winter solstice in 2020. She was also featured in a University of Rochester NewsCenter article on the subject.

Brianna Theobald, assistant professor, was awarded both the G. Graydon ('58) and Jane W. Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching and the Abraham J. Karp Teaching Excellence Award. She has also earned multiple prizes for her first book, Reproduction on the Reservation (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). In addition, the book was a finalist for the Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. women's and/or gender history from the Organization of American Historians and was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020. To read more from Brianna, check out articles here, here, and here.

Stewart Weaver, professor, was awarded the Curtis Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 2021. He has also continued working on his Carnegie Fellowship sponsored project on climate change in the Himalayas. He recently weighed in on the 1921 partition of Ireland here.

History Department faculty members Joan Rubin, Ruben Flores, Molly Ball, Pablo Sierra, and Brianna Theobald (among faculty from other UR departments) were awarded funding for a Mellon-sponsored Sawyer Seminar on Immigration in the Americas, 

Jacqui Rizzo, department administrator, received the AS&E Staff Recognition Award for the month of May 2021 for her tireless work maintaining the department during a 10-month staff shortage.

Margaret Huetti (BA '08) has a recent article in the Journal of Ethnohistory, "Treaty Stories: Reclaiming the Unbroken History of Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Sovereignty." Additionally, she achieved a millennial dream by collaborating on the reboot of the Oregon Trail video game on Apple Arcade. Her work was featured on NPR.

Rohma Khan (PhD '20) was named one of 41 new Leading Edge Fellows by The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). This publicly engaged humanities initiative is made possible by a $3.6 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Andrew Kless (PhD '20) was the recipient of the UR Outstanding Dissertation Award for his work, “Infighting at the Front: The German Occupation of Poland, 1914-1915."

Tucker Million (PhD '20) accepted a job with the Hammond School, a small private school in Columbia, SC. He'll be teaching world literature, a task for which his training at UR and his extensive use of literary sources in his dissertation has made him well prepared.