Edward A. White Award
The Edward A. White Award in American Studies is given annually to a senior who has done outstanding work in the study of the United States and its history, culture, or politics as evidenced in her senior thesis. A list of past winners and their thesis topics is available below.
| Year | Winner | Thesis Topic |
| 2020 | Julia Gottlieb | Performing Power: Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey鈥檚 Cold War Choreographies |
| 2019 | Katherine M. Cashion | The Icon Formation of Ruby Bridges within Hegemonic Memory of the Civil Rights Movement |
| 2018 | Natalie Johnson | Making America White Again: Twitter, the Alt-Right, and Colorblindness in Trump America |
| Edith Jaicel Ortega | California as a 鈥楤lue-Print鈥� for Progressive Immigration Reform? | |
| 2017 | Eden Amital | Developmental Measures: The Zika Virus, Microcephaly, and Histories of Global Northern State Anxieties |
| 2016 | Jinna Johnson | “Dans le pays des Hurons”: Female Spirituality, French Jesuits, and the Huron Nation in France and New France During the Seventeenth Century |
| Sierra McCormick | “Blood on the Leaves”: Lynchings, Police Murders, and the Narration of Racial Terrorism Against Black Bodies | |
| 2015听 | Anna Marburger | Queer Content in Science Fiction Allegory and Analogue: Is It In Disguise? |
| Laurel Schwartz | #Flawless: The Intersection of Celebrity Culture and New Media in the Feminist Movement | |
| 2014 | Theresa Iker | Gals Getting ‘Reno-vated’: Individual Transformation and National Change During the Rise and Fall of the Reno Divorce Ranches |
| 2013 | Carolyn Angius | The Concrete River: Industry, Race, and Green Justice on the Banks of the Los Angeles River |
| 2012 | Caroline Daly | Collective Memory, Commemoration & ways of Remembering Little Rock: 50 Years after the Integration Crisis at Central High School |
| Jennifer Plumlee | Televising Memory: The Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 | |
| 2011 | Laura Nolan | Storytelling, Dislocation, and Healing: Community Led Responses to Displacement and Disaster, Katrina to the Present |
| 2010 | Casey Near | Contested Spaces: Freedom and Race in Philadelphia’s Penny Press |
| 听 | Allyson Woodard | Hemmed In: Wilderness and Desire in the American Gothic |
| 2008 | Clare Cannon | American Nightmare, Twilight of Dreams |
| 2007 | Ashley Boothby | Spectacles of ‘White Trash’: ‘Whiteface Minstrelsy’ and American Popular Culture |
| 2006 | Kellin Crossman | Pioneering Women: Los Angeles Clubwomen and the Growth of a Feminine Consciousness, 1875-1911 |
| Tarrin Petersen | Sex As the City: The Emergence of Detroit in Joyce Carol Oates’ Them and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex | |
| 2005 | Sarah M. Einowski | Latinos/as and the Law: Getting Beyond the Black/White Paradigm in Equal Protection Jurisprudence |
| 2004 | Erika Linden | Babies, Bullets and Bombs: How Race and Gender Politics Have Defined Reproductive Freedom from Margaret Sanger to George W. Bush |
| 2003 | Elizabeth Payne | From Genocide to Justified: Ideology, Literature and the Re-Writing of the Vietnam |
| 2002 | Megan Harris | Memory in Celluloid and Stone: Saving Private Ryan, the National World War II Memorial, and Collective Memory |
| 2001 | Katherine V. Wise | Blueprints for Activism: Women’s Responses to Breast Cancer and AIDS |
| 2000 | Amanda Carr | Indian Hill: An Ethnohistory |
| 1999 | Emily Stoddard | The Cyber Substitute: Queer Youth Online Commentaries |
| 1998 | Melissa Robertson | The Violence Against Women Act of 1994: Its History and Implementation |
| 1997 | Poppy Meier | The Politics and Prejudice of Welfare Reform |
| 1996 | Sarah Prehoda | Undermining the Consensus Coalition: The Roots of the 1995 Welfare Reform Effort |
| Elizabeth Siebel | Public Action and Private Interest: Patterns of Women’s Political Action in the United States, 1848-1992 | |
| 1995 | Mei Zhan | Making Chinese Medicine: Refiguration of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Western Scientific and Medical Community of the New Age Movement |
| 1994 | Anneke Voorhees | Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigen: The Convergence of a Poet and a Painter |
| 1993 | Jennifer Barker-Benfield | The Older the Fiddle, The Sweeter the Tune: A Study of Sunset Hall, Retirement Home for Radicals |
| Leticia Hernandez | Three Writers Meet in the Borderlands: A Comadrehood | |
| 1992 | Nancie Carollo | Voice from the 1950s: Women and the Traditional American Family |
| 1991 | Melissa Milstein | Women in the AIDS Epidemic: Problems in Prevention Education |
| Camille Parker | Folklore and Modern City Culture in Twentieth Century America | |
| 1990 | Jeanne Renee Hammond | Women and the Feminine: The Gendered Meaning of Representations of the War in Vietnam |
| 1989 | Melissa Kay Kiefer | Female Heroes on the Overland Trails |
| 1988 | Jennifer Cate | The Limitations of Jack Kerouac’s Zen |
| 1987 | Dung “Zoon” Nguyen | Basic Human Needs: A Foundation for American Development Assistance in Central America |
| 1986 | Allison Gee | Finding a Voice in a Silent Existence: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Folklore Motifs in a the Woman Warrier |
| Kathleen Jackson | The Chicago Race Riot of 1919: Was it an Inevitable Event in the History of Chicago? | |
| 1985 | Luciana Herman | “The U.S. v. ‘Ulysses’: Censorship in America” |