2025 AHA Research Grant Winners

Each year, the American Historical Association awards research grants to support the study, exploration, and advancement of history in several subject areas. The AHA is pleased to announce 41 winners for the 2025 Albert J. Beveridge Grant, Michael Kraus Research Grant, Littleton-Griswold Grant, and Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant, who will be conducting research over the course of the year. This year, we are also awarding four scholars the new LGBTQ History Research Grant for the first time. Congratulations to our winners!

Albert J. Beveridge Grant to support research in the Western hemisphere (United States, Canada, and Latin America)

• Javier R. Ardila (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Drawing Outside the Margins: Catholic Missionary Cartography and the Formation of Northern South American Borderlands, 1753–1861
• Joseph Bienko (Pennsylvania State Univ.), The Ecology of Empire: Warfare and Environmental Change in the 17th-Century Atlantic World and Caribbean
• Dannie Brice, Imperial Grounds: Coffee, Entangled Empires, and the British Occupation of Saint-Domingue, 1789–1833
• Eimeel Castillo Dona (Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Imperial Encounters: Gender Politics in US-Occupied Nicaragua, 1912–1933
• Anne Marie Creighton (Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Language, Water, Place: Early Modern Multilingualism and Its Contemporary Afterlives in Colca, Peru
• Luiz Paulo Ferraz (Brown Univ.), Becoming “the Real Climate Leaders”: The Rise of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples as Environmental Defenders in the Global Political Arena, 1960s–1990s
• David Barrios Giraldo (Mount Royal Univ.), Funerals of Dissent: The Role of Liberal Mourning Rituals in Conservative Colombia
• Alejandro Guardado (Emory Univ.), Reimagining Community: Indigenous Organizing in Mexico’s Neoliberal Turn, 1968–2000
• Matthew D. Harris (West Virginia Univ.), Hour of Justice: Indigenous Uplift and the United States’ Imperialism in Central America, 1800–1860
• Abigail Jean Kahn (Stanford Univ.), The Classrooms Behind the Fence: Education and Racialization of Japanese Americans at Minidoka Concentration Camp, 1942–1945
• Santiago Bestilleiro Lettini (Georgetown Univ.), The Greater Pampas: Politics, Ecology, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Río de la Plata Grasslands, 1770–1920
• Erica Neighbors (Duke Univ.), The Evolution of Modas Mexicanas: Nationalist Beauty Ideals during Mexico’s Capitalist Expansion, 1920–1982
• Daniel Alejandro Ramos Matos (Lehigh Univ.), The Black Experience in the Spanish Caribbean Borderlands: Maritime Histories from Puerto Rico and Venezuela in the 18th Century
• McKensie Sprow (Univ. of Buffalo, State Univ. of New York), Contours of Control: Family Planning in 20th-Century Buenos Aires
• Justin Stuart (Univ. of Oklahoma), The Rise and Fall of Liquid Sunshine: Environmental Change and the Florida Citrus Industry since 1950

Michael Kraus Research Grant to support research in American colonial history

• John Balz (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison), Slavery’s Church: German Pietism, Empire, and Race in the Danish West Indies
• Clare M. Byers (John Carter Brown Library), Forgotten Journeys: The French Bestsellers That Shaped American Exploration
• Elizabeth Hines (Johns Hopkins Univ.), War in the Time of Anglo-Dutch Empire
• Molly Nebiolo (Butler Univ.), Constructing Health: Concepts of Well-Being in the Early Atlantic World

Littleton-Griswold Research Grant to support research in US legal history and in the general field of law and society

• Joseph Angelillo (Univ. of Alabama, Tuscaloosa), Securing the New Order: The Role of Black Jurors in the Ku Klux Klan Trials
• Aaron Freedman (Columbia Univ.), The Securities State: Washington and the Making of Modern Wall Street, 1975–1992
• Christine Mertens (Univ. of Amsterdam), “Servus”: The Reception of Roman Law in Virginia
• Jan Michael (Northwestern Univ.), Homegrown Goliath: How the Homeschool Movement Reshaped the US State and American Education
• Hannah A. Reynolds (Northwestern Univ.), Gendering Settler Property: The Political Economy of 19th-Century US Land Policy
• Magdalene Zier (Stanford Univ.), Women at the Bar: Forging Feminism through Law and Liquor, 1873–1973

Bernadotte Schmitt Grant to support research in the history of Europe, Asia, and Africa

• Ridwan Muhammed Aribidesi (Univ. of Kansas), Constructing Reproductive Identities in Nigeria and Brazil, 1830–1988
• Rashmi Banerjee (Univ. of Virginia), Criminalizing the Womb: Infanticide and Abortion in Colonial India, c. 1856–1930
• Carter Barnett (Johns Hopkins Univ.), Beyond Medicine: The Mission Hospitals of Palestine, 1850–1950
• Burak Bulkan (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Crafting Grand Strategy: Ottoman Legalism and the Making of International Law in a European World Order
• Yeseul Byeon (Stanford Univ.), Paper Cuts and Paper Ties: Media and Partition in South Korea
• Eguono Lucia Edafioka (Vanderbilt Univ.), Fashioning the Self: The Slave Trade, Cloths, and Identity in West Africa, 1700–1900
• Guy Erez (New York Univ.), Neighborly Ecologies: Animals and Urbanization in Early Modern France
• Junyi Han (Yale Univ.), Borders of Conflicts: The Collapse of Sino-Vietnamese Alliance in Cold War Yunnan, 1964–1993
• Jan Lambertz (US Holocaust Memorial Museum), “Vital Statistics”: Demographic Practices in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
• Francis Newman (Harvard Univ.), Weathering Bodies: Medicine, Qi, and Knowing Places in the Qing Empire’s Tropical Borderlands
• George Ofori-Atta (Ohio Univ.), Modernization, the State, and Disaster in Contemporary Ghana: An Environmental History of Accra, 1862–2000
• Calvin Paulson (Univ. of California, Berkeley), Imperial Lightning Rod: Competing Visions of Race and Labor among Colonial Kenya’s Settlement Schemes, 1870–1939
• Bonnie Soper (Texas A&M Univ., Corpus Christi), Vying for Influence Through Suffering: The Discourses of Restoration Martyrology in 18th-Century Scottish and English Politics
• Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon (Univ. of Pennsylvania), The Black Image in the Socialist Mind: Blackness in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, 1949–1989
• Giovanna Violi (Florida International Univ.), Black Martinican Girlhood across the Atlantic: Educational Migration from Martinique to France in the 1920s and 1930s
• Yixue Yang (Univ. of California, San Diego), The Gender of Mao’s Silk Road: Rural Women and Knowledge Production in China’s Export Economy, 1949–1980

LGBTQ History Research Grants to support new and continuing research in LGBTQ history

• Charles Brown (Univ. of Virginia), Empire’s New Grooves: Queer Military Leisure and the Vietnam War
• Kartik Maini (Univ. of Chicago), Of Shaykhs and Hermaphrodites: Getting Medieval in South Asia
• Maggie Schreiner (Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York), Finding Lesbian Housing Practices in the Lesbian Switchboard Call Logs
• Keara Sebold (Boston Univ.), A Morbid Affection: Romance, Murder, and the Emergence of the Lesbian Threat

The next research grant competition will open in late fall 2025 with a deadline pf February 15, 2026.