Congratulations to our 2014 Dorothy Mohler Research Grant winners Jeanne Petit and Peter Cajka!

Jeanne Petit, Ph.D. is the recipient of a $500 Mohler Research Grant for her project “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in World War I America: The 1918 United War Work Campaign.”  Dr. Petit is professor of history at Hope College in Holland Michigan and the author of The Men and Women We Want: Gender, Race, and the Progressive Era Literacy Test Debate (2010, in the Race and Gender in American History Series, University of Rochester Press).  She is currently working on a book on Catholic laywomen in World War I America.

Peter Cajka is the recipient of a $200 Mohler Research Grant for his project  “The Greatest Awakening and Its Discontents: The Formation of Conscience and the Renewal of Moral Autonomy, 1939-1991.”  Pete is a historian of religion and morality in postwar America whose work intersects often with political, legal and intellectual history. His main interests are in American religious history, the history of morality and ethics, the history of the American and Global Catholic Church, secularization and religious devotions. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Boston College.  Pete’s dissertation, provisionally entitled “The Greatest Awakening and Its Discontents: The Formation of Conscience and the Renewal of Moral Autonomy, 1939-1991,” explains why during and just after the 1960s, the conscience became the premier moral and religious solution of its age.

Awarded yearly, the Dorothy Mohler Research Grants help defray research and travel costs for those using the collections at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at The Catholic University of America (ACUA).