C. Vann Woodward Award

Award Description

The C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize recognizes the best dissertation in Southern history defended in the previous calendar year. The prize consists of a $3,000 stipend funded by the Woodward Fund, the generous bequest left to the SHA by C. Vann Woodward. Authors of eligible dissertations should submit the following information in a single pdf file via email to Manager, Southern Historical Association ([email protected]) by May 1, 2025: cover letter with full contact information; title page, abstract, and table of contents; along with a sample chapter. The full dissertation should not be submitted. Based on these materials, the prize committee will solicit full dissertations for further consideration. The author should also make arrangements with their dissertation advisor to send in a letter of support to the same address by May 1: [email protected]. All letters of support should contain the dissertator's name in the email subject line, along with a reference to the Woodward Prize.

2025 Award Committee

Gregory Mixon, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Chair
Jessica Brannon-Wranosky, Texas A&M University, Commerce
Ryan A. Quintana, Wellesley College

Past Winners

2023 - Liana Demarco
"Sick Time: Medicine, Management, and Slavery in Louisiana and Cuba, 1763-1868"

2022 - Esther Cyna
"Shortchanged: Racism, School Finance and Educational Inequality in North Carolina, 1964-1997"

2021 - John Bardes
“Mass Incarceration in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation: Fugitive Slaves, Poor Whites, and Prison Development in Louisiana, 1805-1877"

2020 - Justin Mark Randolph
"Civil Rights Arrested: Black Freedom Movements and Mass Incarceration in Rural Mississippi, 1938 to 1980," Yale University

2019 - Owen James Hyman
"The Cut and The Color Line: An Environmental History of Jim Crow in the Deep South’s Forests," Mississippi State University

2018 - Jason Hauser
"By Degree: A History of Heat in the Subtropical American South,” Mississippi State University

2017 - Angela Esco Elder
"Married to the Confederacy: The Emotional Politics of Confederate Widowhood,” University of Georgia

2016 - Matthew C. Hulbert
"Guerrilla Memory: Irregular Recollections from the Civil War Borderlands," University of Georgia

2015 - Andrew Horowitz
"The End of Empire, Louisiana: Disaster and Recovery on the Gulf Coast, 1915-2012," Yale University

2014 - Craig B. Hollander
"Against a Sea of Troubles: Slave Trade Suppressionism During the Early Republic," Johns Hopkins University

2013 - William Thomas Okie
"'Everything is Peaches Down in Georgia': Culture and Agriculture in the American South," University of Georgia

2012 - Crystal R. Sanders (Co-Winner)
"To Be Free of Fear: Black Women's Fight for Freedom Through the Child Development Group of Mississippi," Northwestern University

2012 - Matthew J. Karp (Co-Winner)
"'This Vast Southern Empire': The South and the Foreign Policy of Slavery, 1833-1861," University of Pennsylvania

2011 - Darren Grem (Co-Winner)
"The Blessings of Business: Corporate America and Conservative Evangelicalism in the Sunbelt Age, 1945-2000," University of Georgia

2011 - Drew Swanson (Co-Winner)
"Land of the Bright Leaf: Yellow Tobacco, Environment, and Culture along the Border of Virginia and North Carolina," University of Georgia

2010 - Robert Blakeslee Gilpin
"John Brown Still Lives! America's Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change"

2009 - Benjamin E. Wise
"Cosmopolitan Southerner: The Life and World of William Alexander Percy," Rice University

2008 - Max Grivno
"'There Slavery Cannot Dwell': Agriculture and Labor in Northern Maryland, 1790-1860," University of Maryland

2007 - Bethany E. Moreton
"The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise 1929-1994," Yale University

2006 - Christopher Myers Asch
"No Compromise: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer," University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

2005 - Françoise N. Hamlin
"'The Book Hasn't Closed, The Story Isn't Finished': Continuing Histories of the Civil Rights Movement," Yale University

2004 - Edward J. Blum
"Reforging the White Republic: Race, Protestantism, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898," University of Kentucky

2003 - Chandra Miller Manning
"What This Cruel War Was Over: Why Union and Confederate Soldiers Thought They Were Fighting the Civil War," Harvard University

2002 - Robert Perkinson
"The Birth of the Texas Prison Empire, 1865-1915," Yale University