Top row: Adam Lax, Xavier Segura, Alexis Dominey, Andrew Clark, Christoffer Bovbjerg, David Leyzerovsky, Jeremy Levine-Murray

3rd row: Joseph Kniaz, Laura Grai, Jeremy Davidson, John Ganz, Benjamin Fox, Alexandra Mitter, Michael Adler

2nd row: Alena Aniskiewicz, Clare McGuire, Erin Lichtenstein, Lara Finkbeiner, Shelley Greene, John Oquist

Bottom row: Katherine Godwin, Priya Goel, Callie Wang, Sheila Merchant, Erika Jerwick

More photos of Symposium

The twenty-five students in the History Honors Class of 2008 spent an intensive senior year researching and writing an honors thesis. Their efforts culminated in the Twenty-Third Annual History Honors Symposium on Friday, April 25, 2008 in the William L. Clements Library when honors students gave presentations of their thesis research to an audience of their faculty advisors, family, and friends.

The History Honors Program requires three terms of rigorous research and writing. Even as students work with their individual faculty advisors, they also participate in a writing workshop with others in the program, this year under the supervision of Professor John Carson. Most of these students prepared to write their thesis in a junior year honors colloquium with Professors Christian de Pee and Jonathan Sheehan.

Thesis topics ranged across the globe. Click here to read the program.

Many thanks to this year's Honors Committee, Professors John Carson, Micah Auerback, and Julius Scott and to the many dedicated thesis advisors, evaluators, and the award donors, for making the History Honors Program a success.
The Honors Committee is pleased to announce the following awards for outstanding thesis writing and oral presentations. These awards are made possible through the generosity of several donors to the History Department. Three students also won Goldstein Honors awards from the LSA Honors Program for their work as noted below.
 

Thesis Awards 2008

The Arthur Fondiler History Award
Katherine Godwin
Pierre Ayrault v. the Society of Jesus: Gallican-robin Constructions of Paternal Authority on Legal, Political, and Religious Grounds
Advisor: Michael MacDonald

 Erin Lichtenstein  - also co-winner of the Robert Hayden Humanities Award from LSA Honors
 Gendered Threads: The Division of Tasks in the Lyonnais Silk Industry, 1467 – 1667
 Advisor: Diane Hughes

John A. Williams History Award
Jeremy Levine-Murray  - also winner of the  Marshal Sahlins Social Science Prize from LSA Honors
Fight Blight!: Race, Class and Revitalization in a Detroit Neighborhood
 Advisor: Matthew Lassiter

Stephen J. Tonsor History of Ideas Undergraduate Honors Award
 Alexandra Mitter  - also  co-winner of the Robert Hayden Humanities Award  from LSA Honors
Political Possessions: Mary Glover, Anne Gunter, and Emerging Ecclesiastical Tensions in Early Modern England
Advisor: Michael MacDonald

James A. Knight Scholarship in History
Andrew Clark
Reason and Revelation: American Presbyterian Ministers and the Case for the American Revolution
Advisor: David Hancock
 
Alexis Dominey
 Earth First! And Dave Foreman: Philosophical Influences, Founding Principles, and the Challenges of Leading a Movement
Advisor: Phillip Deloria

Benjamin Fox
U.S. Foreign Policy and the Iranian Revolution
Advisor: Juan Cole

 Joseph Kniaz
Confrontation and Counterculture: The Ann Arbor New Left, 1968-1970
Advisor: Matthew Countryman


Elizabeth Sargent Lee Prize in the History of Medicine
Clare McGuire
Defining the Nervous American: Neurasthenia, Religion, and Assimilation 1880-1915
 Advisor: Martin Pernick

Stephen J. Tonsor Best Oral Presentation of Thesis Award
Michael Adler
‘Spirit of Reform’: The Criminal Justice System in Post-Revolutionary New York City, and  the Men Who Tried to Change It
Advisor: David Hancock

Christoffer Bovbjerg
The Role of Violence in the Formation of the Ritsuryō State c. 300 BCE – 702 CE
Advisor: Hitomi Tonomura

Honors 2007
Honors 2006
Honors 2005
Honors 2004
Honors 2003