2026 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 40 winners for the 2026 Beveridge Family Research Grant, Michael Kraus Research Grant, LGBTQ History Research Grant, Littleton-Griswold Grant, and Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant, who will be conducting research over the course of the year. Congratulations to our winners!

Beveridge Family Research Grant to support research in the Western hemisphere (United States, Canada, and Latin America)

• Bruna Digiacomo Cerveira (Emory Univ.), Liberated African Children Between Empires: Slavery, Freedom, and British Imperialism in Rio de Janeiro, 1831–1888
• Natalie Gasparowicz (Davidson Coll.), Contraception and Catholic Conjugality in Mexico, 1955–1975
• Cory Haala (Univ. of Wisconsin–Stevens Point), Federalism and Free Trade: State and Provincial Responses on the Northern Plains, 1985–1999
• Kiana M. Knight (Univ. of Notre Dame), Translating Racial Uplift: Black Women, Language, and Internationalist Politics, 1918–1985
• Issay Matsumoto (Univ. of Southern California), Aloha, Incorporated: Histories from the Edge of Transpacific Honolulu
• Samuel Niu (Columbia Univ.), Chinese Labor in the Post-Emancipation British Caribbean and American South, 1852–1880
• Keith Richards (Tulane Univ.), Commerce and Colonialism: Eastern Cuba and the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
• Jeffrey Rubel (New York Univ.), The Dating Trade: A History of the Dating Industry in America
• Arielle D. Steimer-Barragán (Univ. of California, Irvine), Binding Test and Power: Women Printers and the Pursuit of Empire, 1550–1698
• Rachel Tils (Univ. of Chicago), Marketing in the System: Policing the Antillean Internal Economy, 1700–1807
• Spencer Tompkins (Fordham Univ.), Negotiating the Global Industrial Order: Conflicts over Hegemony and Sovereignty in the US-Brazilian Aircraft Trade, 1959–1996

Michael Kraus Research Grant to support research in American colonial history

• Jordann Heckart (Baylor Univ.), Dissenting Women: How Women Responded to Church-State Relations, 1730–1833
• Madison Maw-Carlstrom (Utah State Univ.), “Had She Been a White Woman”: Indigenous Womanhood and the Law in 1760s Colonial Williamsburg
• Andy Post (Univ. of New Brunswick), “The Open and Free Fishery”: Colonial Policy and Indigenous-Imperial Relations in Newfoundland, Labrador, and the “Greater Gulf” to 1833

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

• Katherine Lempres (New York Univ.), Lesbian/Prostitute/Criminal: Constructing Female Sexual Deviance in Fascist Italy
• Connall MacLennan (Univ. Coll. London), The Church and the Formation of Queer Identity, Community, and Politics in the State of Georgia, 1945–2015

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

• Jennifer Depew (Stanford Univ.), Spirits of ’76: Memories of the American Revolution on the American Right, 1976–2012
• Jiajia Duan (Univ. of California, Irvine), Undocumented Chinese Migrants and the Humanitarian Border of the (Post–)Cold War United States, 1990–2010
• Jesse Flecha (Texas A&M Univ.), International Slavery, International Freedom: The Grant Administration’s Effort to End American Slavery Abroad
• John Flynn (Univ. of Utah), Western Solidarity: An Environmental History of Wastelanding and Resistance in the Great Basin
• Christen Hammock Jones (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Litigating Roe: Lawyers, Doctors, and Abortion Rights, 1973–1992
• Kate Kushner (Princeton Univ.), Violence and Governance in the American South After the Civil War
• Dhananjaya Premauden (Univ. of Pennsylvania), The Speculation College: How Land and The Speculative Economy Built Early Nineteenth-Century Public Colleges in the United States
• Joseph Wrobleski (Univ. of Maine), Wabanaki Legalities and Property Law on the Maritime Peninsula, 1620–Present: Survivance and the Contest over Land

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

• Ibrahim Bàbátúndé Anọ́ba (Univ. of California, Davis), Sacred Resistance: Entangled Modernities, African Identity, and the Evolution of Òrìṣà Religion in Nigeria, 1850–1983
• Imen Boussayoud (Brown Univ.), Descent of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in the Canary Islands and Madeira, 1370–1600 CE
• Ruochen Cao (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Women’s Reproductive Healthcare and the Politics of Emotion in Socialist China, 1949–1980s
• Debjani Chakrabarty (Stony Brook, State Univ. of New York), Vagrant Empire, Visualized Labor: The Legal and Cultural Lives of the Mobile Poor of South Asia, 1830–1945
• Devin Creed (Duke Univ.), Saving Lives? Famine Relief, Humanitarianism, and Nutrition Science in British India, 1860–1908
• Kwaku Mintah Danquah (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison), The Love of Liberty? Kru Migrants, Krutowns, and Diaspora Politics Across British West Africa and Liberia, 1847–1960
• Kim Yehbohn Lacey (Washington Univ. in St. Louis), Northern Flight: Koreans in the Russo-Japanese Borderlands, 1863–1937
• Madeleine Lemos (Cornell Univ.), Those Spanish Devils: Navigating Fascism, Neutrality, and the Liberal Order in 20th-Century Spanish Internationalism
• Ria Modak (Brown Univ.), The Political Field of Language: Caste, Class, and Ideology in Western India, 1940–1966
• Vivian Ngan (Univ. of California, Berkeley), Stewards of the Subsoil: Elites, Extraction, and Environmental Governance in the Nanling Borderlands, 1895–1960
• Aimée Plukker (Cornell Univ.), Europe Calling: Cold War US Tourism and the Production of “the West”
• Jack W. Roush (London School of Economics and Political Science), Friends of the Family: Informal Actors in Iran-US Relations During the Late Pahlavi Period
• Kejian Shi (Rollins Coll.), Sea of Luxuries: Oceanic Knowledge, Environment, and the Making of Commodity Frontiers in Maritime Asia, 1500–1900
• Margo Weitzman (Rutgers Univ.), Ekphrasis, the Senses, and Geographic Imaginaries: India Mediated by Early Modern Italian Merchants
• Nan Zhang (Harvard Univ.), Crafting Remedies: Medicinal Plants and Scientific Authority in China’s Southwestern Borderlands
• Kiki Zhao (Univ. of California, San Diego), Transpacific Intimacies: Everyday Work, Taiwanese Civilians, and American GIs, 1951–1979

The next research grant competition will open in late fall 2026 with a deadline of February 15, 2027.