Tue, 10 Aug 2004 04:00:00 -0400
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Awards for UMBC Historians

UMBC�s historians are recent recipients of some of the most prestigious awards available to scholars in their field:

Distinguished University Professor of History Warren I. Cohen, one of the world�s leading experts on the history of American-East Asian relations, received the Norman and Laura Graebner Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Cohen is the ninth person ever to win the award. Given every two years, the Graebner Prize is a career achievement honor that recognizes a senior historian of U.S. foreign relations who has made significant contributions to the field through excellence in teaching, scholarship and service.

Associate Professor of History Kriste Lindenmeyer was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant for the 2004-2005 academic year. She is one of approximately 800 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad to some 140 countries for the year through the Fulbright Scholar Program. Lindenmeyer, who specializes in the history of women, gender and childhood, will be teaching courses in American history and public history at the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany.

Associate Professor of History Marjoleine Kars received an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship by the John Carter Brown Library, a major research institute for the colonial history of North and South America on the campus of Brown University. Kars will be using the award to continue her research on a massive slave uprising in the 1760s in the Dutch colony of Berbice�an area now part of the Republic of Guyana.

With these recent awards, Cohen, Lindenmeyer and Kars add honors to an already distinguished history faculty, whose members have been past recipients of prestigious fellowships and awards from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Historical Association and the National Science Foundation.

Says John Jeffries, professor and chair of the Department of History, �It is a noteworthy accomplishment to have three historians in a relatively small department win major national awards within the same year; but, in fact, this reflects the scholarly strengths and achievements of the department as a whole. The recent awards Professors Cohen, Lindenmeyer and Kars have earned are consistent with the history department�s remarkable record of success with highly competitive fellowships and other distinctions.�

Jeffries was recently honored for his own research when he was named a distinguished lecturer for 2004-07 by the Organization of American Historians. The OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program is designed to enable institutions and organizations to identify and invite as speakers historians “who have made major contributions to the many fields of American history.”

(7/13/04)