The 2006–07 Fellowship in Aerospace history, which is sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and administered by the AHA was awarded to Victoria Vantoch, a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. The NASA Fellowship honors advanced historical research in aerospace, throughout all fields and periods of history (scientific, cultural, technical, etc.). Vantoch, who is interested in the history of gender and sexuality, the history of science and technology, and social history and popular culture, is working on her doctoral dissertation entitled "Ambassadors of the Air: The Airline Stewardess, Glamour, and Technology in the Cold War, 1945–1969," in which she seeks to make a comparative study of the role of female flight attendants in the United States and the Soviet Union during the critical years of the Cold War, examining in particular, their relationship to technology, politics, society, and culture. Vantoch is looking at society's representations of these women, their function as icons of national identity as well as rhetorical tools in the ideological war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Through an analysis of these images, she seeks to expose broader perceptions of womanhood and female ideals in both societies. She was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 to research at the National Air and Space Museum.

Jameson Fellowship

Lisa Tetrault, assistant professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, has been awarded the 2006–2007 J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in U.S. history. This fellowship, offered by the AHA in partnership with the Library of Congress (LOC), helps junior scholars conduct research that can make extensive use of the general and special collections of the Library of Congress. Tetrault obtained her PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004.

Tetrault's research at the LOC will help her to complete her first book, which is based on her dissertation, "The Memory of a Movement: Woman Suffrage and Reconstruction America, 1865–1890." Her manuscript examines the ontological myth of the woman suffrage movement, the Seneca Falls creation story, and will be the first to investigate its "middle decades" (1865–1890). Her work is situated within the broader context of the memory of the Civil War and the construction of U.S. national identity in the late 19th-century.

Tetrault will be consulting, among other sources, the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Collection, the Ida Husted Harper Collections, the scrapbooks of Matilda Gage, the Adelaide Johnson papers, and the William E. Chandler papers.

Details about these fellowships are available at http://www.historians.org/prizes/Fellowships.htm (and associated links).

—Mériam Belli