Kimberly Welch Awarded Dan David Prize

History Alum Awarded Major Prize

Kimberly Welch (PhD, 2012 Advisor: Ira Berlin) is a recipient of a 2022 Dan David Prize. Kimberly is currently Associate Professor of History and Assistant Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. She is a historian of the US who specializes in the topics of slavery, race, and the law in the early American South. Welch's first book, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) is a historical and socio-legal study of free and enslaved black Americans’ use of the local courts in the slave South. This book has won numerous prizes: the J. Willard Hurst Prize for the best book in socio-legal history, Law and Society Association, 2019; the David J. Langum Sr. Prize for best book in American Legal History, Langum Charitable Trust, 2019; the James H. Broussard Best Book First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2019;  the Chancellor’s Award for Research, Vanderbilt University, 2019; and the Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History, 2019.

Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, the Law and Society Association, the American Historical Association, and the University of Maryland among many others. In 2019-2020 Welch was the American Council of Learned Societies Oscar Handlin Fellow in American History.

From the Dan David Prize website: "The Dan David Prize, endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University, was founded in 2001 by entrepreneur and philanthropist Dan David with the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. Twenty years in the Prize celebrates scholars and practitioners whose work illuminates the human past and can enrich public discourse with a deeper understanding of history.

The Dan David Prize awards up to nine prizes of $300,000 each year to outstanding early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The Prize is given in recognition of the winners’ contribution to the study of the past and to support their future endeavors."

See an interview with Kimberly Welch about the Prize in The Washington Post.

Images courtesy Kimberly Welch and Vanderbilt University Department of History.