History PhD student secures several awards for archival research
The Office of Fellowships is thrilled to announce that Hope McCaffrey, a PhD student in the Department of History, has won several awards to fund research for her dissertation! Over the next year, Hope will travel to archives in the Midwest, California, and New York.
After earning a BA in history and an MM in vocal performance, Hope began her graduate studies in history at Northwestern in fall 2019. Hope’s research broadly aims to interrogate why and how white women have used gendered politics to preserve the power afforded them by their race and even by their own subordinate status under the system of patriarchy. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “ ‘White Men or None’: White Women and Democratic Politics in the Free States, 1840–1865,” investigates the form and substance of Democratic white women’s politics in the non-slave states, such as California, Illinois, and New York, in the Civil War era. Her research so far has found that these women were fiercely partisan, and that they rallied around the same causes that men of the party promoted: patriarchy, white supremacy, aggressive national expansion, and anti-feminism.
Hope’s dissertation project was awarded honorable mention by the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics, furnished by Iowa State University. Her archival research will be supported by a two-week short-term research fellowship at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, granted by the New York Public Library. Additionally, Hope’s project was selected for the Gunther Barth Fellowship to support archival research undertaken at the Bancroft Library, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
The Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics is an annual competition designed to encourage and reward scholars embarking on significant research in the area of gender and politics. Since the first prize was awarded in 1995, a total of $144,100 has been awarded to 133 research projects.
The New York Public Library offers short-term research fellowships to support scholars, based outside the New York metropolitan area, engaged in graduate-level, postdoctoral, and independent research in the arts and humanities. This fellowship is intended to support projects that would significantly benefit from research conducted on-site at one of the library’s three research centers.
The Gunther Barth Fellowship supports projects generally in the area of nineteenth-century history of the North American West, with preference given to areas of special interest to Professor Barth: the environment, exploration, immigrants, urban history, cultural landscapes, and built environments, such as city or memorial parks.
Contact Jason Kelly Roberts at jason-roberts@northwestern.edu to learn more about these awards.