Introducing: S-USIH Grants & Partnerships Committee

Greetings, intellectual historians! We are excited to debut the Society’s new Grants and Partnerships Committee. The committee’s task is to identify potential grants and partnership opportunities for both our members and for the organization itself. Our four committee members are already hard at work compiling a database of funding and partnership resources that you’ll be able to access directly from the S-USIH website.

If you’d like to join, helping hands are always welcome! Contact Lauren Lassabe Shepherd at [email protected] if you’d like to work on this project. Let’s welcome our first cohort of researchers for the Grants and Partnerships Committee:

Natalie Mendoza

Natalie Mendoza (Ph.D. University of California Berkeley, 2016) is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a social and intellectual historian of the United States who specializes in the history of Mexican Americans, U.S. Latinx communities, social movements, and race and racism. Her current book project, Good Neighbor at Home: Mexican American Politics in the World War II Era, examines how ideas about race, geopolitics, and historical narrative shaped the racial identity and political thinking and activism of Mexican Americans during World War II (under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press). Natalie’s research has been funded by the American Historical Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities (Summer Stipend, 2023), and with the David J. Weber Fellowship (2019-2020) from the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. In addition to studying the past, Natalie has an active research agenda in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History (History SoTL), a body of literature that uses theoretical and evidence-based research to examine the discipline-specific problems in the teaching and learning of history.

Brandon James Render

Brandon James Render is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His current book project is Colorblind University: A History of Racial Ideologies in Higher Education, a study that traces the evolution of racial colorblindness along admissions policies, curriculum design, and department structures. His research and teaching interests include twentieth century U.S. history, African American history, and public policy. You can find his published research in The Journal of Civil and Human Rights, Black Perspectives, and the Washington Post.

Tiana U. Wilson

Tiana U. Wilson, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow in African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and an incoming assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (Fall 2024). She recently completed a Ph.D. in History with a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Wilson’s broader research interests include Black Women’s Internationalism, Black Women’s Intellectual History, Women of Color Organizing, and Third World Feminism. Drawing on political speeches, newsletters, articles, pamphlets, and travel logs, her book project, “Revolution and Struggle: The Enduring Legacy of the Third World Women’s Alliance,” traces the intellectual genealogies of a “women of color” feminist praxis rooted in the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements of the 1970s and still used today for political activity. Her project examines Black women’s contributions to women of color feminist groups in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Center for Engaged Scholarship, Sallie Bingham Center, Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, Smith College Libraries, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. You can learn more about Dr. Wilson on her personal website: tianauwilson.com.

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is an instructor in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans and an IUPUI-SUSIH Community Scholar. Shepherd’s expertise is in the history of United States higher education from the 20th century to present, especially on the topic of conservatism in the academy. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (UNC Press, 2023). Her second book manuscript is underway (thanks to the resources provided by the USIH Community Scholars program!) and offers a historical survey of colleges and universities in the United States since the 1960s.