2023 Dissertation Prize Winners

Congratulations to our 2023 Dissertation Prize winner Mejgan Massoumi, Fellow & Lecturer at the Stanford Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program for her dissertation entitled "The Sounds of Kabul: Radio and the Politics of Popular Culture in Modern Afghanistan, 1960-79."

As noted by the committee: This dissertation explores the history of Afghanistan as a major producer of music across Islamic Eurasia and throughout its own global diaspora. A project about global networks, it is based on research in many archives, including in Kabul, many of which the author visited against serious odds.  Massoumi explains that the radio was a global technology that revolutionized the relationship between everyday people (both men and women) and the world and that permitted Afghans to articulate their place in the world through global lenses like the cold war, decolonization, and student movements worldwide. Massomi makes multiple important contributions to research and analysis in world history, including the emerging field identified as the history of sound. This dissertation presents an important analysis of the relationships between multiple spatial scales in modern world history, showing how radio and sound history offer a way to understand a synthesis of global and local. Moreover, this dissertation makes an excellent case for the importance of popular culture in the shaping of global connections. Massoumi’s analysis of the populism of the Afghan pop star Ahmad Zahir, for example, is a significant contribution to understanding the relationships between pop culture, global cosmopolitanism, and local tradition. It shows the diffusion of popular culture through the diffusion of technology, demonstrating the rise of a local and regional culture that first assimilated and then disseminated secular world popular culture among a Muslim population that world history surveys seldom acknowledge.

The committee has determined two honorable mention winners for this year's prize:

Hayley Genevieve Brazier for her dissertation entitled “Seafloor Machina: Aging Technologies in the Depths of the Pacific Ocean.” As noted by the committee:  This dissertation, an innovative interdisciplinary project that combines research in history and marine science, is a unique and skillfully researched study of the history of the impacts of industrial technologies on the ocean seafloor from the 1890s onward, with a focus on oil and gas drilling, undersea telegraph cables, and cabled observatories. The work is an important contribution to the “blue humanities” and to science and technology studies as well as world history. Brazier makes an excellent case for how historical study can assist in elucidating the long-term environmental impacts of industrial technology by drawing attention to global environmental impacts of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century imperialism. Her work touches on animal studies, technology, and industrialization, revealing a dazzling range of undersea human activity. This methodologically capacious work includes oral interviews and scientific information as well as archival records, and it deftly links ocean and industrial history to twenty-first century global concerns.

Rob Konkel for his dissertation entitled "Building Blocs: Raw Materials and the Global Economy in the Age of Disequilibrium.” As noted by the committee: This lively and relevant dissertation is a globally resonant account of trade in tungsten and manganese, two strategic raw materials needed for steelmaking, which were concentrated in locations that were remote from sites of advanced steel production. Konkel focuses on the decades between the 1880s and the 1940s and on the economic warfare and actual warfare that top steel producers engaged in to obtain the materials in question.  The dissertation is well written, and the proposition that “raw materials are key drivers of global history” is a terrific one for the field to take up. The study is spatially acute, organized around its central proposition that heavy industry was intractably global even as locations of resources and production were relatively fixed and distant from one another. Konkel argues that “bloc thinking” in international affairs was an effort to sequester natural resource supply chains into self-contained units, and he is also well attuned to the implications of his work for contemporary concerns like the race for rare earths today.

Thank you to all of the scholars who submitted their work to this year's competition. Thank you to the 2023 Dissertation Prize Committee: Ruth Mostern (chair), Peter Adebayo, Andrew Barnes, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, John Voll, and Urmi Willoughby for all of the work you put into this process. You can read the committee's full report here. And congratulations again to this year's winners!

2024 Dissertation Prize Submissions

Submissions for this prize open on August 15, 2024.  The World History Association awards the annual WHA Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in world, global, or transnational history—that is, one that examines any historical issue with global implications, including but not limited to the exchange and interchange of cultures, the comparison of two or more civilizations or cultures, or the study in a macrohistorical manner of a phenomenon that had a global impact. To be eligible for the 2024 prize, the dissertation must have been defended as part of Ph.D. or equivalent degree between the dates of 31 August 2022 and 21 August 2024.  Eligible candidates are allowed to submit once, not multiple years.  Deadline date for submissions is October 1, 2024.

The 2024 prize, which consists of a $500 award, a certificate, and a one-year membership to the WHA, will be formally awarded at the WHA’s 2025 conference if the awardee is in attendance.

Submissions should include a cover letter or contact information sheet, abstract, and a PDF file of the full dissertation. All dissertation submissions must be in the English language.  The cover or sheet should include the following: name, professional or home address, email, telephone and name of PhD granting institution. 

Click here to apply for the WHA Dissertation Prize.

Entries must be submitted by 1 October 2024. Late entries and submissions that do not adhere to these guidelines will be disqualified.

The Dissertation Prize Committee will determine the winner of the prize. In the event that the committee considers that the quality of the entries does not warrant the awarding of any prize, it shall have the right to make no award.

Contact the WHA with any questions regarding the prize or its guidelines.

Past Winners

2022

• Carl Kubler: “Barbarians on the Shore: Global Trade and Everyday Life on the South China Coast, 1780 - 1860"

Honorable mention

• Ellen Nye: “Empires of Obligation: Law, Money, and Debt between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1670 - 1720"

2021

• Kristyl Obispado: “The Pacific Sailors: Global workers at and on the edge of the Spanish empire (1580s – 1640s)”

Honorable mentions

• Jake Richards: “Liberated Africans and Law in the South Atlantic, c. 1839 – 1871”
• Nicholas Roberts: “A Sea of Wealth: Sayyid Sa’id bin Sultan, His Omani Empire, and the Making of An Oceanic Marketplace”

2020

• Erik Glowark: “The Christianization of Kyushu: A World-Historical Interpretation of the Jesuit Mission to Japan, 1549-1650”

2019

• Kristen Alff: “The Business of Property: Levantine Joint-stock Companies, Land, Law, and Capitalist Development Around the Mediterranean, 1850-1925”

2018

• Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky: “Imperial Refuge: Resettlement of Muslims from Russia in the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1914”

2017

• Sara Silverstein: “Doctors as Diplomats: The Origins of Universal Healthcare in International Society”

2016

• Barry McCarron: “The Global Irish and Chinese: Migration, Exclusion, and Foreign Relations among Empires, 1784–1904”

Honorable mentions

• Kathryn Hain: “The Slave Trade of European Women to the Middle East and Asia from Antiquity to the Ninth Century”
• Isaiah Wilner: “Raven Cried for Me: Narratives of Transformation on the Northwest Coast of America”

2015

• Patrick Kelly: “Sovereignty and Salvation: Transnational Human Rights Activism in the Americas in the Long 1970s”

Honorable mention

• Phillip Guingona: “Crafted Links and Accidental Connections of Empire: A History of Early Twentieth-Century Sino-Philippine Interaction

2014

• Bryce Beemer: “The Creole City in Southeast Asia: Slave Gathering Warfare and Culture Exchange in Burma, Thailand, and Manipur, 1752–1885”