Zinn Memorial Research Award

Thanks to the generous support of American Studies donors, we have succeeded in endowing the Howard Zinn Memorial Research Award!  With this award we are not only honoring Howard Zinn, who devoted his life and work to advancing the cause of social justice in the United States, but we also are ensuring that research on issues Howard Zinn held dear will always be supported at Purdue University. As you may recall, we started this initiative in 2014; now, about three years later, we have raised the required funds to endow the Howard Zinn Memorial Research Award Fund in American Studies Endowment.

This ensures that deserving graduate students will forever be recognized for performing research in American Studies with a focus, like Howard Zinn’s, on the men and women typically left out of the master narrative – dissenters, African Americans, Native Americans, women, working people, and other underrepresented groups or a derivative area of research.  

We are extremely grateful to all who supported this very important endeavor.  As Zinn himself once said in an interview, “History is instructive.  And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper.  Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy.  And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.”

Thank you for your support!

If you have questions or are interested in providing additional support for the Howard Zinn Memorial Research Award Fund in American Studies Endowment – keeping in mind that the more we grow the endowment, the more funds there will be available to award – please contact David Williams at dmwilliams@prf.org  or (765) 494-8341.

 Sincerely,

Susan Curtis, Professor of History
Paul Benhamou, Professor Emeritus of French