Monday, December 8, 2025

Cromwell and ASLH Early Career Fellowships: 2025 Awardees

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the early career fellowships

The William Nelson Cromwell foundation has long awarded early career fellowships "to support research and writing in American legal history by early-career scholars." The ASLH has recently launched a complementary initiative, awarding funding to "early career scholars, publishing in English, who are working on projects in legal history relating to non-U. S. history topics." 

Via the ASLH, we have the following list of fellowship recipients, along with the titles of their projects:

Cromwell Early Career Fellowship Recipients

Thalia Chrysanthis, Unexpected Soldiers: Civil War Militaries and Gender Multiplicity in the Ranks 

Aaron Freedman, The Securities State: Washington and the Making of Modern Wall Street, 1979-1992 

Hannah Hicks, In Her Defense: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War U.S. South

Madison Ogletree, A Peculiar Freedom: Law, Free People of Color, and the Making of the Old South, 1790-1860

Alex Reiss-Sorokin, Trust in Search: Credibility and Doubt in Legal Research Technologies

Hannah Reynolds, Gendering Settler Property: Women, Families, and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Land Policy

Joseph Wrobleski, Wabanaki Legalities and the Making of Property on the Maritime Peninsula, 1620 – Present: Survivance, Sovereignty, and the Contest for Land

Early Career Global Legal History Research Fellowship Recipients

Shachar Gannot, “Defending the Indefensible: Nazi Defense Attorneys in the Post-War Era,” Ph.D. History candidate Princeton (expected 2028).

Aden Knapp, “Judging Empires: International Court of Justice and Decolonization 1945-71,” Ph.D. History, Harvard, 2023, Postdoctoral Fellow Yale University (2024-26).

Stephanie Painter, “Women’s Defiance in Late Imperial China,” Ph.D. History University of Chicago, 2023, Assistant Professor of East Asian History, SUNY.

Ayse Polat, “Statelessness, Ottoman Empire 1850-1900,” Ph.D. History, University of Cambridge, 2023, Postdoctoral Fellow Cornell University (2024-26).

Alexander Williams, “Elite Corporate Lawyers’ Role in the Polical Economy of Capitalism since the late 19th century in India,” Ph.D. History candidate, Yale (expected 2027).

Congratulations to all!

-- Karen Tani