Dr. Schmidt Receives 2007 Bernard Nachbahr Award

Dr. Elizabeth Schmidt was awarded this year’s Nachbahr Award recognizing outstanding scholarly or creative contributions to the Humanities.  The award was announced late last spring.  Dr. Schmidt will present a talk on “Theory and Praxis:  Education for Action in a Diverse and Changing World” as part of the Honors Convocation on parents’ weekend.  The talk will be on Friday, September 28 at 5:00 in Reitz Arena.

Dr. Schmidt received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1987.  Her first book, Decoding Corporate Camouflage: U.S. Business Support for Apartheid (Washington, 1980), grew out of her involvement in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s.  The book was nominated for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Award.  Her second book, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (Portsmouth, NH, 1992) was a revision of her doctoral dissertation.  The book garnered much acclaim and several awards:  it was a finalist for the Herskovits Award, was named by Choice as an “outstanding academic book,” and received a “Special Mention” in the Alpha Sigma Nu book competition.  After publication of the book, Betsy shifted her scholarly focus, moving from Anglophone southeastern African to Francophone West Africa.  In 2005 she published Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958 (2005).  A follow-up book entitled Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958, was published in September 2007.  In addition to her monographs, she has published a number of essays in leading journals, including the American Historical Review, the Journal of African History, and Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 

Congratulations Betsy!  And congratulations to the History Department.  Three out of the past four winners have been historians.