Mary Shi, LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow in U-M Sociology, was just announced as the winner of the prestigious Dissertation Award by the American Sociological Association (ASA) for her dissertation, "Settlers’ Republic: Land, Infrastructure, and the Emergence of New Technologies of Government in the United States, 1789-1862." Shi completed her dissertation at UC-Berkeley prior to joining our U-M community.
The selection committee for this award reviewed nearly 30 submissions before selecting Shi's dissertation as its winner. Shi's research “provides us with new theoretical tools to think about settler colonialism writ large, as well as its central role in driving U.S. state formation and subsequent logics of governance,” the committee writes. UC-Berkely’s Professor Mara Loveman also praised this dissertation in a letter to ASA, dubbing it "ambitious, bold, provocative, and highly original…” Loveman specifically noted the dissertation’s ability to serve as a foundation for a forthcoming book and attract scholars of many different disciplines, such as political geography, American studies, and Native American studies.
This selective award recognizes Mary Shi's outstanding scholarship, with the committee celebrating her “theoretically and methodologically rich, innovative, and sophisticated” work. We at the U-M Department of Sociology extend our heartfelt congratulations to Mary Shi for this remarkable achievement.
