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JENSEN-MILLER PRIZE

The Western History Association offers the Jensen-Miller Award for the best article in the field of women and gender in the North American West. No time period restrictions apply, and essays will be judged on their significance to the field, their contributions to knowledge and their literary quality. The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University funds this $500 cash prize and provides a plaque to the author of the winning essay. The Coalition for Western Women's History began awarding the Jensen-Award Miller in 1990 and administered the prize until the WHA became the award facilitator in 2009. 


Any WHA member, publisher, or author of an essay/article, may nominate work that was published in 2022. Unless a journal editor notifies you about nominating your work, authors must submit a copy of the journal, an offprint, or a photocopy to each member of the award committee listed below.


Journals, editors, and authors may submit nominations electronically through the email addresses provided below. Submissions must be one pdf file and include the:

  1. Cover page
  2. Copyright page
  3. Table of contents of the journal/anthology in addition to the article/essay


-2023 Awards Cycle opens January 25, 2023

-2023 Award Submission (Postmark) Deadline: April 15, 2023


The WHA office sends notifications to selected award recipients at the end of August.


JENSEN-MILLER PRIZE COMMITTEE

Jordan Biro Walters, Chair
College of Wooster
jbirowalters@wooster.edu

Celeste Menchaca
University of Southern California
cmenchac@usc.edu

Julia Ornelas-Higdon
California State University, Channel Islands
julia.ornelas-higdon@csuci.edu

RETURN TO AWARDS

PAST RECIPIENTS:

JENSEN-MILLER PRIZE

2022 | Lina-Maria Murillo, "Birth Control, Border Control: The Movement for Contraception in El Paso, Texas, 1936-1940," Pacific Historical Review (Summer 2021)

2021 | Celeste Menchaca, "Staging Crossings: Policing Intimacy and Performing Respectability at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1907-1917," Pacific Historical Review (Spring 2020)

2020 | Jordan Biro Walters, "'So Let Me Paint': Navajo Artist R.C. Gorman and the Artistic, Native, and Queer Subcultures of San Francisco, California," Pacific Historical Review (Summer 2019)

2019 | Natalia Molina, “Deportable Citizens: The Decoupling of Race and Citizenship In the Construction of the ‘Anchor Baby,’” in Deportation in the Americas: Histories of Exclusion and Resistance, Kenyon Zimmer and Cristina Salinas, eds. (Texas A&M Press, 2018)

2018 | Beth Lew-Williams for "'Chinamen' and 'Delinquent Girls': Intimacy, Exclusion and a Search for California's Color Line," Journal of American History (December 2017)

2017 | Katrina Jagodinsky for "A Tale of Two Sisters: Family Histories from the Strait Salish Borderlands," Western Historical Quarterly (Summer 2016)

2016 | Katherine Eillinghaus for "'A Little Home for Myself and Child': The Women of the Quapaw Agency and the Policy of Competency,"  Pacific Historical Review (August 2015)

2015 | Verity McInnis for "Indirect Agents of Empire: Army Officers’ Wives in British India and the American West, 1830–1875" Pacific Historical Review (August 2015)

2014 | Sarah M.S. Pearsall for “Having Many Wives in Two American Rebellions,” American Historical Review (October 2014)

2013 | Grace Peña Delgado for “Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903-1910,” Western Historical Quarterly (Summer 2012)

2012 | Hilary A. Hallet for “Based on a True Story: New Western Women and the Birth of Hollywood,” in Pacific Historical Review
 (May 2011)

2011 | Jennifer Thigpen for “’You Have Been Very Thoughtful Today‘: The Significance of Gratitude and Reciprocity in Missionary-Hawaiian Gift Exchange,” Pacific Historical Review (November 2010).

2010 | Lori Flores for “An Unladylike Strike Fashionably Clothed: Mexicana and Anglo Women Garment Workers Against Tex-Son, 1959–1963,” Pacific Historical Review (August 2009)

2009 | Kathleen DuVal for “Indian Intermarriage and Metissage in Colonial Louisiana,” William & Mary Quarterly (April 2008)

For the list of Jensen Miller Prize recipients when it was awarded by the Coalition for Western Women's History, please visit their website. 


Western History Association

University of Kansas | History Department

1445 Jayhawk Blvd. | 3650 Wescoe Hall

Lawrence, KS 66045 | 785-864-0860

wha@westernhistory.org 


The WHA is located in the Department of History at the University of Kansas. The WHA is grateful to KU's History Department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for their generous support!