History doctoral candidate Noaquia Callahan wins Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics

Friday, February 20, 2015

Noaquia CallahanNoaquia Callahan, a doctoral candidate in the University of Iowa Department of History, has won the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics from the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University.

The prize is an annual competition designed to encourage and reward scholars embarking on significant research in the area of women and politics.

Callahan's dissertation is titled, “Divided Duty: African American Feminist Transnational Activism and the Lure of the Imperial Gaze, 1888 – 1922,” and investigates the ways race, gender, and citizenship intersected with empire and foreign policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dissertation explores the career and networks of Mary Church Terrell, an African American feminist prominent on the international stage, as a window into the international activism of African American women.

Callahan has also been awarded the 2015 German Historical Institute’s Doctoral Fellowship in African American History to conduct research in the Washington, D.C. area, and has been selected as a 2015 Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Fellow.

The Department of History is part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.