The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives is pleased to announce its 2010 Dorothy Mohler Travel Grant winners. The grants help defray research and travel costs for researchers using the collections at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives here at CUA. This year’s winners are engaged in several worthwhile projects that make use of a range of our archival collections:

Robert Bauman, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History at Washington State University Tri-Cities. His book, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East LA, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008. His other publications include, “Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950” which won the Charles Gates Award for the best article published in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly in 2005, and “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” Journal of Urban History (January 2007). Professor Bauman’s current book project is tentatively titled “Religion, Community Organizations and the Long War on Poverty.”

Barbra Mann Wall, Ph.D. is on the faculty of nursing, and serves as the Associate Director of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book was titled Unlikely Entrepreneurs: Catholic Sisters and the Hospital Marketplace, 1865-1925, published in 2005 by the Ohio State Univ. Press. In 2006, it won the American Association for the History of Nursing award for the best book. She is currently at work on her second book on the history of Catholic hospitals from 1925 to the present, scheduled for publication by Rutgers University Press in 2011. Her project is titled “A History of Religious Institutions and Health Policy in 20th Century America.”

Shannen Dee Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She earned a B.A. (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in history from Agnes Scott College in 2004 and a M.A. in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2006. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Subversive Habits: Black Nuns and the Struggle to Desegregate Catholic America after World War I.” Her project explores the lives and labors of three generations of Black Catholic women religious in their quest for racial and educational justice in post-World War I America.

Among the collections these scholars will consult are collections of the National Catholic Welfare/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, National Catholic Education Association, and Catholic Charities USA.