Past Mansfield-Wefald Winners
Past Mansfield-Wefald Winners
Eric Wefald (SP74 CB75 TA76) and Mary Mansfield (SP76 CB77 TA78) died August 31, 1989 in southern France in a car accident. The 1990 Convention established the Mansfield-Wefald Memorial Fund, from which the Association awarded the Mansfield-Wefald Memorial Grant for several years. This grant, consisting of a cash stipend of $5,000 was given to a person engaged in writing a thesis, book, or other publication of exceptional merit. The quality and originality of the scholarly work as well as the applicant’s previous and ongoing service to TA were key factors given consideration when awarding the grant. Learn more about applying here.
Mansfield-Wefald Thesis Prize Recipients
2023 Recipient: Oksanna Samey, Harvard University
Thesis: “Solving the Promethean Paradox: Elucidating the dynamics of liver regeneration by designing a novel in vivo repeated injury model”
2022 Recipient: Emily Sánchez, Princeton University
Thesis: “Dismantling Development: How Black Activists Spearheaded Affordable Housing in Paterson, New Jersey, 1950-1980”
2021 Recipient: Alice Zhang, Harvard University
Thesis: “Instead of Just Invisible: Transnational Impact on Expression and the Formation of Digital Public Spheres in First-Generation Chinese Immigrant Communities.“
2020 Recipient: Emma Morgan-Bennett, Swarthmore College
Thesis: “Revolutionary Mamas: Radical Doulas and the Black Maternal Mortality Crisis.”
2019 Recipient: Richard Yarrow, Harvard University
Thesis: “Scientific Nationalism in the Origins of Chemical Warfare: Ideologies of Elite German Scientists in the Early Twentieth Century.”
2018 Recipient: Cengiz Cemaloğlu, Harvard University
Thesis: “Capitalist Ethics of the Halal Economy: Islamic Finance in Malaysia.”
2017 Recipient: Helena Ratté, University of Michigan
Thesis: “Multiple Displacements: Bosnian Refugee Journeys to Germany and Back, 1992-2016“
2016 Recipient: Erica X. Eisen, Harvard University
Thesis: “From Curios to Collectibles: Yamanaka Sadajiro and the Politics of the Changing Asian Art Canon”
2015 Recipient: Chinelo Onyilofor, Cornell University
Thesis: “Ranking the Stability of Ammonium, Imidazolium, and Phosphonium Cations under Alkaline Conditions and Their Influence on Alkaline Anion-Exchange Membrane Properties
2014 Recipient: Madeline Chan, Amherst College
Thesis: “Prison Education: Its Rhetoric and Practice In the Neoliberal State”
2013 Recipient: Katherine Huang, Princeton University
Thesis: “In the shadow of the law: Evolving Orientations towards dispute resolution among rural migrants in Shanghai”
2012 Recipient: Ana Miller-ter Kuile, Stanford University
Thesis: “Resource Availability determines Abundance, Predator Body Size, and Food Web Structure in Terrestrial Arthropod Communities at Palmyra Atoll”
2011 Recipient: Ali Akbar Hussain, Cornell University
Thesis: “Pakistan: The Islamic Republic for Some”
Recipient: Andrei Stetsenko, Princeton University ($500)
Thesis: “Gazprom, the Kremlin, and the EU: Whither the ‘Energy Weapon’?”
2010 Recipient: Ian Crovisier, Cornell University ($500)
Thesis: “The Canons of Criticism: Warburton, Johnson, and the Invention of Editorial History”
2009 Recipient: Paul Katz, Harvard University
Thesis: “The Politics of ‘Percepticide’: The Struggle For Institutional Accountability and Human Rights in the Argentine Jewish Community, 1976-2009”
2008 Recipient: Tyler Zoanni, University of Chicago
Thesis: “Hooker, Hobbes and Early Modern Political Philosophy”
2007 Recipient: Irene Yuan Sun, Harvard University
Thesis: “Population as Discourse: Medicine in Late Colonial Kenya”
2006 Recipient: William Woolston, Harvard University
Thesis: “Do ‘Great Expectations’ Matter? The Relationship Between Teacher Expectations and Student Academic Success”
2005 Recipient: Averill Leslie, Columbia University
Thesis: “To Produce the Best Type of Future Citizens: The Eugenics Survey of Vermont and the Construction of Definitive Vermonterhood”
2004 Recipient: Previn Warren, Harvard University
Thesis: “In Pursuit of Peirce: Habermas’s Reconstruction of a Fugitive Philosopher”
2003 Recipient: Julia Chuang, Harvard University
Thesis: “Challenging Poverty with Culture: Filial Adaptation to Labor Migration in China”
2002 Recipient: Albert Cho, Harvard University
Thesis: “The Rainbow and the Pot of Gold: Ethnic Diversity and Economic Development in Mauritius”
2001 Recipient: Timothy Stewart-Winter, Swarthmore College
Thesis: “Manning the HomeFront: Gender, Citizenship, and Conscientious Objection during World War II”
2000 Recipient: Selena Kyle, Stanford University
Thesis: “There Goes the Neighborhood: The Failure and Promise of Second Units as a Housing Source for the Midpeninsula”
1999 Recipient: Julia Watts, Cornell University
Thesis: “Demons Within: The Persecution of Witches amid Social Transformation in Reformation Germany”
1998 Recipient: Ani Mukherji, Cornell University
Thesis: “‘Uncle Tom Meets Uncle Sam’: The Role of International Ideological Tensions and the Soviet Mediation of Radical Politics in the Formation of American Civil Rights Discourse, 1930-1947”
1997 Recipient: Mark Jason Greif, Harvard University
Thesis: “The American Transformation of the Holocaust, 1945-1965”
1996 Recipient: Laura Diane Steele, Cornell University
Thesis: “Superstructures, Space, and Social Life: Aceramic Neolithic Architecture of the Taurus/Zagros Foothills”
1996 Honorable Mention: Diana Gibson, Harvard University
Thesis: “On the History of a Misunderstanding: the Hymenaios and the Etymology of the Hymen Refrain”
1995 Recipient: Carlos Rojas, Cornell University
Thesis: “Nietzsche and the Body Politic: Culture and Subjectivity in Twentieth Century China”
Mansfield-Wefald Memorial Grant Recipients
1994 Recipient: Award suspended pending review of purpose & plan. The thesis prize was then established and awarded in 1995.
1993 Recipient: Matthew Trail, to support the completion of this dissertation, “ Mikhail Gorbachev and the Politics of Organizational Transformation: the CPSU, 1985-91”
1992 Recipient: Michael Shae, to support revision of his dissertation, “Dramas of Sublimity and Sublimities of Drama: Kant, Kleist, Schiller, Wagner” into a book.
1991 Recipient: The first Mansfield-Wefald fellow was Paul Levesque, a summa cum laude Cornell graduate, Telluride Association member, and was, at the time, a Mellon Fellow in German at the University of Wisconsin. The fellowship was to support Levesque’s innovative post-doctoral work on the relationship between Thomas Mann’s art and his politics.