Awarded to a graduate student whose essay has been adjudged by the Editors of the Pacific Historical Review to be of outstanding quality.
2023 Mette Flynt (University of Oklahoma), for “Mapping the Good Neighbor: Cartography and American Tourism in Mexico, 1930-1945” (Spring 2022)
2022 Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson (London School of Economics), for “The Invisible Hand of Diplomacy: Chinese Textiles and U.S. Manufacturing in the 1970s” (Summer 2021)
2021 Yu “Toku” Tokunaga (Kyoto University), for “Japanese Farmers, Mexican Workers, and the Making of Transpacific Borderlands” (Spring 2020)
2020 Chris Suh (Emory University), for “‘America’s Gunpowder Women’: Pearl S. Buck and the Struggle for American Feminism, 1937-1941” (Summer 2019)
2019 Ana Stevenson (University of the Free State [South Africa]), for: “Imagining Women’s Suffrage: Frontier Landscapes and the Transnational Print Culture of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States” (Fall 2018)
2018 Julia Katz (Rutgers University), for “Ahuna and the Mo’o: Rethinking Chinese Success in Hawaiian Commercial Food Production” (November 2017)
2017 Heather M. Sinclair (University of Texas, El Paso), for “White Plague, Mexican Menace: Migration, Race, Class, and Gendered Contagion in El Paso, Texas, 1880–1930” (November 2016)
2016 Lawrence H. Kessler (Temple University), for “A Plantation upon a Hill: Or, Sugar without Rum: Hawai‘i’s Missionaries and the Founding of the Sugarcane Plantation System,” (May 2015, Vol. 84, no. 2)
2015 Paul Hirsch (University of California, Santa Barbara), for “‘This is Our Enemy’: The Writers’ War Board and Representations of Race in Comic Books, 1942-1945” (February 2014, Vol. 83, no. 1)
2014 Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr. (Yale University), for “The Chinle Dog Shoots: Federal Governance and Grass-roots Politics in Postwar Navajo Country” (February 2014, Vol. 83, no. 1)
2013 Laura Renata Martin (University of California, Santa Cruz), for “‘California’s Unemployed Feed Themselves’: Conservative Intervention in the Los Angeles Cooperative Movement, 1931-1934” (February 2013, Vol. 82 no. 1)
2012 Angela Hawk (University of California, Irvine), for “Going ‘Mad’ in Gold Country: Migrant Populations and the Problem of Containment in Pacific Mining Boom Regions” which appeared in the February 2011 issue.
2011 co-winners:
- Mary C. Greenfield (Yale University), for “‘The Game of One Hundred Intelligences’: Mahjong, Materials, and the Marketing of the Asian Exotic in the 1920s” (August 2010)
- Philip Van Huizen (University of British Columbia), for “Building a Green Dam: Environmental Modernism and the Canadian American Libby Dam Project” (August 2010)
2010 Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (University of California, Santa Barbara), for “Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt: Right-to-Work Campaigns and Anti-Union Conservatism, 1943–1958” and Karin Huebner (University of Southern California) for “An Unexpected Alliance: Stella Atwood, the California Clubwomen, and the Indians of the Southwest, 1917–34” which appeared in the February 2009 and August 2009 issues, respectively.
2009 Lori Flores (Stanford University) for “An Unladylike Strike Fashionably Clothed: Mexicana and Anglo Women Garment Workers Against Tex-Son, 1959–1963” which appeared in the August 2009 issue.
2008 Ryan Fischer (University of California, Davis), for “Cattle in Hawai‘i: Biological and Cultural Exchange,” which appeared in the August 2007 issue.
2007 Matthew Morse Booker (North Carolina State University), for “Oysters and Oyster Pirates: Property and Inequality on San Francisco Bay,” which appeared in the February 2006 PHR as part of the forum on water and western cities.