Faculty Awards and Achievements

Congratulations to Teo Ruiz who, in March 2008, was a recipient of the campus Distinguished Teaching Award.  On June 1, 2008 winners will be honored by the UCLA Alumni Association.  In the Fall of 2008 winners will be honored by the Academic Senate committee and the Office of Instructional Development, which will present awards at the Andrea L. Rich Night to Honor Teaching.  UCLA Today writes about this award.

Congratulations to Saul Friedlander for being honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.  This singular award, the most important writing award in Germany, is an international peace prize given annually at the Frankfurt Book Fair.  He was honored at the award ceremony on Sunday, October 14, in Frankfurt-am-Main.  UCLA Today interviewed Saul about the prize and his work.

Congratulations to Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez who has won the Western Historical Quarterly's Oscar O. Winther Award for best article for "The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration:  A Cross-Border Examiniation of Operation Wetback, 1943-1954."  The article appeared in the journal in Winter 2006. 

News Release from the UCLA Office of Media Relations, April 23, 2007  - "Five UCLA Professors Win 2007 Guggenheim Fellowships"

     Two of the five winners are History Department professors, Teo Ruiz and Arch Getty.  The release begins by saying, "Five UCLA professors have won 2007 Guggenheim fellowships and a share of the $7.6 million that will allow 189 artists, scholars and scientists in the U.S. and Canada to spend a year working on a specific research project."
     "J. Arch Getty, a history professor and authority on the former Soviet state, hopes to finish a book on the role that centuries-old forms of cultural etiquette may have played in Soviet society, especially politics.
     “The Soviet state, with its rules, regulations and structures, may have been a kind of façade which hid what was really going on — namely personal connections and networks,” he said. “It’s the old adage that it’s not what you know but who you know.”
     Getty plans to spend six months doing research in the archives of the Communist Party in Moscow."
     "Teofilo F. Ruiz, a history professor who specializes in medieval Spain, will work on a book about Spanish festivals between 1350 and 1640. In the hope of shedding light on the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, Ruiz has extensively researched practices relating to royal entries, carnivals and Corpus Christi processions, as reflected in Spanish and French archives."

Continuing the department’s tradition of teaching excellence, in the past three years three of our colleagues have received the campus Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2004, Joan Waugh (United States) earned the Distinguished Teaching Award, for which she was especially cited for her ability to engage undergraduates through her exceptional use of multimedia (see http://www.uclalumni.net/AlumniStories/Awards/bio/Waugh.cfm); the previous year she also won the UCLA Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology.  In 2006, Geoffrey Symcox was recognized for a long career as a dynamic undergraduate lecturer who has taught a wide range of upper division courses in European history lower division General Education courses in both Western Civilization and World History, and as an inspirational mentor to generations of graduate students (see http://www.uclalumni.net/AlumniStories/Awards/bio/Symcox.cfm).  Although their lecturing styles are quite different, both Joan and Geoffrey excel in their ability to engage students, hold their attention, and inspire them to do their very best work. In addition, Valerie Matsumoto, who has a split appointment with Asian American Studies, won the first C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies, and in March 2007, was a recipient of the campus Distinguished Teaching Award.

The faculty continues to garner awards for the publications and professional achievement.
Margaret Jacob was named University Research Lecturer at UCLA in 2004 and in 2005 won an award for the best book on French Masonic history from the Institut Maconnique de France for Les Lumières au Quotien: franc-maçonnerie et politique au siècle des Lumières (translated from Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and politics in eighteenth-century Europe (1991). Teo Ruiz was elected to a three-year term as Vice President for Research of the American Historical Association. Naomi Lamoreaux was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Norton Wise was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This June Lynn Hunt received an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University and Carlo Ginzburg an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University.

In 2004 Ellen DuBois was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Bologna in Italy. Patrick Geary was a Resident Fellow at the American Academy in Rome for Spring Quarter 2006. Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob will be Consortium Scholars at the Getty Research Center next year. Emeritus Professor Peter Loewenberg is the Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna this summer. Anthony Pagden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, which he will take in 2007-2008. This past year Gabi Piterberg was the Alistair Horne Fellow in Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford and his An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play won the M. Fuat Köprülü prize from the Turkish Studies Association. In 2004 Claudia Rapp was invited to be the Belle van Zuylen Professor at Utrecht University and in 2005 she received a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Jan Reiff was a co-editor of the multiple award-winning The Encyclopedia of Chicago in 2004. William Summerhill was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Brazil; next year he will be an American Academic of Learned Societies Burkhardt Fellow at the Huntington Library. Last year Craig Yirush was a Warren Fellow at Harvard University.  Finally, Assistant Professor Ghislaine Lydon, a specialist in the history of western Africa and the Sahara, will be a Fulbright Scholar at Sana'a University in Yemen in 2007-2008.