Raymond J. Cunningham Prize
The 2020 submission deadline has passed. Awardees will be announced this fall.
The American Historical Association offers the Raymond J. Cunningham Prize annually for the best article published in a journal written by an undergraduate student. The prize was established in memory of Raymond J. Cunningham, who was an associate professor of history at Fordham University. He was an authority on American historian Herbert Baxter Adams. See the list of past recipients.
Eligibility
The prize selection committee has typically given preference to articles that incorporate primary sources. The article must be published in a journal between May 1, 2020, and April 30, 2021.
Submission Details
Nominations should include:
- A letter of support (no more than 2 pages). Be sure to include the name of the undergraduate author of the article, the publishing journal, and the faculty advisor.
- A copy of the article
Please note: Only ONE article from a specific journal may be nominated each year.
Nominations must be submitted by May 15, 2021, to be eligible for the 2021 competition. Mailed, emailed, or faxed applications will not be accepted. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2021 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2022 AHA annual meeting in New Orleans.
For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.
2019 Cunningham Prize
Lena Giger, Stanford Univ. (BA, 2019)
“The Right to Participate and the Right to Compete: Stanford Women’s Athletics, 1956–1995,” Herodotus (Spring 2019)
Faculty Advisor: Estelle Freedman
This article on women’s participation in college athletics is written with verve, and clearly argued. It makes excellent use of the Stanford archives, especially oral histories, without losing sight of the national context. Admirably, Lena Giger explores complex change over time and avoids a simple progress narrative, investigating three periods and characterizing each to demonstrate how participation, tension, and then competition won out in women’s athletics. Giger shows how generational divides, and ideas about competition versus participation, made the implementation of Title IX difficult. The detailed analysis of Stanford’s programs is convincing enough to make it more widely applicable.