Equity Awards
The submission deadline has passed. Awardees are announced in the fall, and the next contest will begin in the spring.
The AHA Equity Awards are meant to recognize and publicize those who have achieved excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into the historical discipline.
To further this goal, the AHA has established two equity awards to be given annually: one for individuals and another for academic units. The awards can be conferred for new initiatives or for sustained efforts. The current prize amount is $1,000 each for the individual award and the institutional award. See the list of past recipients.
Deserving nominees will have records that include such achievements as mentoring, program building, fundraising initiatives, pursuing civic engagement, and enhancing department and campus culture to promote a supportive environment.
Academic units such as departments of history, public history programs, and interdisciplinary programs and research institutes are eligible for the institutional award. Such units may have taken advantage of university and community resources to diversify their students and faculty or to provide professional experience through teaching, research, post doctoral, or internship programs.
Individuals or institutions can nominate themselves or be nominated. Cover letters for nominations should emphasize specific outcomes. The AHA’s Committee on Minority Historians will serve as the award committee that will review the nominations to make the awards.
Application Process
Log into your MY AHA account at historians.org/myaha and click “Available Application Forms” in the AHA Awards, Grants, and Jobs section. If nominating someone else, select the Nominate button and search for the nominee’s existing record or create a new record. (For the Institutional award, select one person to be the primary nominee.)
- Fill in the application form, which includes the nominee’s contact information and the name of academic unit (for Institutional award).
- Upload an Application Packet as a single PDF. Include the following documents:
- Cover letter (up to 750 words) describing the new initiative or sustained effort of the nominee
- CV (for the Individual Award)
- Nominators should be prepared to provide a list of references with contact information (minimum of 3) at the request of the award committee. These can be students, former students, parents, colleagues, and others. There is no set proportion or formula on the “right” mix of references. Individuals organizing nominations should solicit a cross selection as appropriate to address the essential elements noted above.
Please Note: Entries must be received by May 15, 2022, to be eligible for the 2022 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2022 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2023 AHA annual meeting in Philadelphia.
For questions, please contact awards@historians.org.
2021 Equity Awards
Individual Award: Crystal Sanders, Penn State University
The AHA Committee on Minority Historians is pleased to award the 2021 Individual Equity Award to Crystal R. Sanders, associate professor of history at Penn State University. While an assistant professor in 2016, Sanders created, supervised, and recruited for the Emerging Scholars Program, a summer program for undergraduate students from historically underrepresented backgrounds to demystify graduate school and promote the profession through workshops and simulated doctoral seminars. As of the summer of 2020, at least nine former African American and Latinx program participants are in graduate school. From 2018 to 2020, Sanders served as director of Penn State’s Africana Research Center, where she oversaw a successful postdoctoral program that prepared recent PhD graduates for future faculty positions. While both programs were active, she created and ran the Midcareer Faculty Advancement Program, a resource to assist underrepresented associate professors in advancing to full professorships. These programs represent only a glimpse into Sanders’s sustained efforts in diversifying the profession and the academy.
Institutional Award: Northeastern State University, Department of History
The AHA Committee on Minority Historians is pleased to award the 2021 Institutional Equity Award to the Department of History at Northeastern State University, located in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the seat of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. Northeastern State’s history department actively recruits and supports Indigenous students, creating a sustained pipeline for Indigenous students to enter the profession as social studies teachers, public historians, and graduate students who are welcomed back to campus as internship supervisors, History Day judges, and guest speakers. With a full third of recent history and social studies education graduates identifying as Indigenous, the department’s faculty have demonstrated a sustained commitment to secure and sustain diversity in the discipline.