The Arthur Kouguell Memorial prize was established by the parents and friends of the late Arthur M. Kouguell ’73. The prize is awarded annually by the Department of History to the senior honors thesis that best represents Arthur Kouguell’s commitment to scholarly and humane values.
2024 Kouguell Prize
This year, we split the Kouguell Prize between two outstanding undergraduate senior thesis writers, Sarah Annis, for her thesis titled, “Murder Fines, Jurisdiction, and State Power in Anglo-Norman England,” and Zeqing Li for his thesis titled, “Xiao Xin’an and the Anti-Netherlands Movement: Gender and Nationalism in 1930s China.”
Sarah Annis wrote a thesis analyzing the murder fine in Medieval English pipe rolls using a mix of social, legal, and computational analysis. Her paper resituates the fine in post-conquest England while offering a new way of measuring the fiscal impact of the fine under the reign of Henry II. Even more, she offers a methodological toolkit that has implications beyond this subject and may potentially bring fresh insights across her field.
Zeqing Li’s thesis explored the sexual assault of a Chinese woman, setting the case in the context of changing ideas about gender in early 20th c. China, and the ways both fomented a growing strain of nationalism centered around anti-Netherlands sentiment. If his methodology is more familiar, his paper brings to light a case and a dynamic that has been largely neglected in the field while the writing and his analysis is of a level of sophistication that we believe merits publication.
Congratulations Sarah and Zeqing!
Recent Senior Honors Theses
2023-24 Senior Honors Theses
- 2024 Kouguell Prize Winner
Sarah Annis (advisor: Lester)
“Murder Fines, Jurisdiction, and State Power in Anglo-Norman England” - 2024 Kouguell Prize Winner
Zeqing Li (advisor: Meyer-Fong)
“Xiao Xin’an and the Anti-Netherlands Movement: Gender and Nationalism in 1930s China” - Zhikang Xie (advisor: Hindmarch-Watson)
“The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and Charles “Chinese” Gordon: Narrating Masculinity, Martyrdom and Heroism in Late-Victorian Britain”
2022-2023 Senior Honors Theses
- Honorable Mention
Hanan Abdellatif (advisor: Turner)
“Medicalizing Race and Gender at the Johns Hopkins Hospital: An Examination of Howard Kelly’s Life and Career” - 2023 Kouguell Prize Winner
Holly Nelson (advisor: Makalani)
““A Rare Standing Ovation”: Ballet Diplomacy, Russian Myth, and Black Transnationalism in the Theatre of Harlem’s Soviet Union Tour” - Benjamin Schlesinger (advisor: John Marshall)
““To Suffer as a Traitor to the Kingdom of England”: Trial of the Duke of Hamilton” - Jessica Shaffer (advisor: Pearsall)
“Sinful Creatures: Animals and Magic in the Salem Witch Trials, 1692-1693” - Jane Slaughter (advisor: Harms)
“Nuclear Ties: An Investigation into the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl Accidents”
2021-2022 Senior Honors Theses
- Lauren Anthony (advisor: Furstenberg)
“Blood Ties: A study of the relationship between Johns Hopkins’ clinician-scientists and the Black Baltimorean community” - Grace George (advisor: Jelavich)
“Marni Nixon and the Rise and Fall of Ghost Singing” - Elle Grant (advisor: Hindmarch-Watson)
“Villainous Business: The Evolution of the Capitalist James Bond Villain” - 2022 Kouguell Prize Winner
Alanna Margulies (advisor: Harms)
“Baltimore School for the Arts and the City that Built It” - Joe Paul (advisor: Harms)
“Changing the Game: U.S. Sports Reform in the Late Cold War”
2020-2021 Senior Honors Theses
- Marjorie Bowerman (advisor:)
“Our Very Own Goddess: The Crown and the (Un)Making of a National Mythology” - Jeffrey Carrano (advisor: Hanson)
“Disease Maps of the Third Plague Pandemic: New Epidemiological Reality of a Global Society” - 2021 Kouguell Prize Winner
Sophia Loughlin (advisor: Harms)
“An Elusive Promise: Baltimore School Reform in the 1990s” - Sabrina Rodriguez (advisor: Harms)
“From High Expectations to Expatriates: How the Soviet Educational Aid Program Altered Cuban Students’ Perceptions of their Country” - Anna Sargeantson (advisor: Shepard)
“Visual Propaganda & Gender in Regime Legitimization: Francoist Spain, 1936-1942” - Benjamin Schneider (advisor:)
“Work from Home: Johns Hopkins and Urban Redevelopment in East Baltimore” - Angel Zhao (advisor: W. Rowe)
“An “American” Question: Chinese American Activism and Identity in Late 19th Century America”
2019-2020 Senior Honors Theses
- 2020 Kouguell Prize Winner
Heidi Hansen (adviser: Lester)
“Prayer and Personal Identity: The Book of Hours and the Middle Class in Fifteenth-Century France” - Elizabeth Lomvardias (advisor: Hindmarch-Watson)
“British Broadcasting in a Changing World: National Identity and the 1977 Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting”
2018-2019 Senior Honors Theses
- Hana Chop (advisor: Meyer-Fong)
2019 Kouguell Prize Winner
“In Pursuit of a New Image: The Empress Dowager Cixi on a Global Stage” - Abigail Greene (advisor: Pahl)
““The Great Patriotic War” and “The Rape of Berlin”: How Memory Laws Shape National Identity in Central and Eastern Europe” - Rachel Long (advisor: Morgan)
“The Famous Nell Butler: Freedom Suits on Maryland’s Western Shore, 1770-1798” - Dana Murray (advisor: Mooney)
“The Battle Over Disease Etiology Made Manifest: Contagionism and Anti-contagionism in Baltimore, 1793-1832 - Sang June Oh (advisor: Han)
“K-Pop: A Look at its History and the Influence Over Protest Culture in South Korea” - Alexandra Rice (advisor: Maciejko)
“A Literary Look: Prostitutes and Religious Minorities in 16th Century Spain” - Alana Surowiec (advisor: Fissell)
“Talk Dirty to Me: Washerwomen, Laundresses, and the Production of Cleanliness in Early Modern London” - Juliann Susas (advisors: Lurtz and Walters)
“Iron Man and Captain America: Illustrations of 1960s Patriotic Ambivalence”
2017-2018 Senior Honors Theses
- Anders Bright (adviser: Furstenberg)
“Rebuffing Buffon: The American Philosophical Society and the Debate Over New World Climate Degeneracy” - Hana Chop (adviser: Meyer-Fong)
“In Pursuit of a New Image: The Empress Dowager Cixi on a Global Stage” - Oscar Hairston de Amicis (adviser: Refini)
“Calcio Storico Fiorentino: The Origins” - Kira Henson (adviser: Furstenberg)
“A Complicated Sense of Sympathy: George Catlin’s Indian Gallery in America” - Mallika Iyer (adviser: )
2018 Kouguell Prize Winner
“From the Myth of Fantasy to the Myth of Certainty: French Cartography and the Mapping of Asia” - Sierra Love (adviser: Walters)
“Not so Silent Minority: Filipina Immigrants to the United States Post World War II” - Sarah Schreib (adviser: Lurtz)
“The Art of Persuasion: Exploring the Genre of Documentaries on the Chilean Coup”