UW–Madison Emeritus Professor Gregg Mitman received the award of Knight Commander, Humane Order of African Redemption, one of the highest honors conferred by the Republic of Liberia. The distinguished honor was given by the President of the Republic of Liberia in a ceremony on July 24, 2025, celebrating the country’s 178th Independence Day. The award …
UW–Madison History Professor Marcella Hayes’ forthcoming book, Black Self-Governance: The Making of Political Culture in Seventeenth-Century Lima, is already receiving praise. Black Self-Governance has won the 2025 Founder’s Prize for manuscripts in development from the Sixteenth Century Society. The book will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2026. Black people were the …
Launched in October, UW–Madison’s Puerto Rican Studies Hub is the first initiative of its kind in the Midwest and is already emerging as a dynamic center for scholarship, public engagement, and community connection. Supported by a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hub brings together historians, artists, students, and community members …
Louise Young, the Marilyn B. Young Professor of History at UW–Madison, has been honored with a 2025-26 WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) Named Professorship, a prestigious award that recognizes faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge through research, teaching, and service. Professor Young, a historian of modern Japan, has previously led …
Over the last two years, Professors Florence Hsia and Devin Kennedy have played key roles in an interdisciplinary effort to rethink how artificial intelligence is studied on campus. Working as part of a team led by Associate Dean Grant Nelsestuen, Hsia and Kennedy helped lay the intellectual and institutional groundwork for what is now the …
In fall 2025, Professor Stephen Kantrowitz, the Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History at UW–Madison, was nominated for an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Southern Denmark. The honorary doctorates are awarded by the University of Southern Denmark “to researchers whom the university wishes to honour for their scientific …
In August 2025, Professor Brandon Bloch published his first book with Harvard University Press, entitled: Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy. The book tells the story of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after World War II, while evading their church’s history of complicity with Nazism. You can find …
Congratulations to Assistant Professor Marla Ramírez (History & Chican@ and Latin@ Studies) on receiving the 2025 Mentor Award for her outstanding work as a mentor, teacher, and contributor to the UW–Madison community. Professor Ramírez takes an innovative approach to mentoring that blends teaching, community engagement, and professional-level research opportunities for undergraduates. In 2019, she co-founded …
In August 2024, Gloria Whiting published her first book, Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England, which explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery. The book was one of four finalists for the 2025 Frederick Douglass Prize, an annual …
Professor Allison Powers Useche recently published an article in the journal Diplomatic History entitled “Defining Dispossession: Arbitration and the Transformation of Sovereign Debt.” In this article, Professor Useche examines how nineteenth-century arbitration tribunals—particularly the 1868 United States–Mexico Claims Commission—reshaped the meaning of “sovereign debt” and “dispossession.” She traces how international law transformed local disputes into …