News & Announcements

November 24, 2025

ASLH Dissertation Prize Winners 2025

William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize 

Michael Borsk, “Measuring Ground: Surveyors and the Properties of States in the Great Lakes Region, 1783-1840.” (Queen’s University, 2024)

“Measuring Ground” is a comparative study of state formation through surveying techniques and paperwork in Upper Canada and Michigan Territory from the 1790s-1837. Borsk argues that the very processes of surveying and of building the archives asserted state power and authority. Surveying regulations structured the production of knowledge around boundaries, a process which depended upon indigenous participation and recognition for legitimacy. However, surveying also ultimately eroded indigenous claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty, as it converted surveyors into actors with legal authority. Turning their attention to surveyors’ papers, Borsk demonstrates how these documents and their associated archival processes produced knowledge, which in turn drove policy. The authority to determine boundaries and ownership migrated from surveyors’ offices to the courts, which applied their own standards of law and evidence.

This innovative study is based on deep archival research and makes provocative connections between the geographic and epistemological elements of the legal processes of colonization in the Upper Midwest. It expands and refines our understanding of how defining and securing individual property rights has related to state formation. Borsk also describes the way in which archival methods and processes interacted with legal rules and procedures to produce knowledge and authority, and ultimately to construct government. This work traces how indigenous knowledge and participation ironically played a key role in ultimately extinguishing indigenous claims to territory. This scholarship opens new lines of research and offers novel ways of conceptualizing the law itself.

Shay R. Olmstead, “’Refuse to Run Away’: Transsexual Workers Fight for Civil Rights, 1969-1992.” (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2024)

“’Refuse to Run Away’” is a history of thirty cases from the 1960s to the 1990s in which transsexuals (they use the contemporary term) challenged workplace
discrimination on the basis of sex or disability. Administrative agencies and courts rarely granted these plaintiffs favorable rulings. Even when they did, they did so by redefining “sex” under the law in ways that benefitted only normative, “respectable” claimants and ultimately harmed other sexual minorities. Moreover, variations in decisions among states and agencies led to the creation of multiple “cis states.” Victims of discrimination fared better when they brought claims under “disability,” because federal legislation was not written in a way that obviously excluded transsexuals from protection or defined “disability” in a way that was incompatible with transsexuality. However, in response to some scattered successful litigation, Republicans in Congress amended the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude transsexuals, effectively closing that avenue for remedying discrimination.

Olmstead’s description of the shift from sex-based to disability-based discrimination claims is highly persuasive, and invites the reader to contemplate the liquidity of the category of “disability.” They present their analysis as evidence that legal campaigns alone are insufficient to bring about civil protections against discrimination in the workplace, and argue that political organizing must be part of the equation as well. Their discussion of rights protections is revelatory and potentially offers lessons for current campaigns to protect marginalized people.

ASLH Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective

Vladislav Lilić, “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912.” (Vanderbilt University, 2024)

Vladislav Lilić’s superb dissertation, “Empire of States: Law and International Order in Ottoman Europe, c. 1830-1912,” makes a strikingly original contribution to European and global legal history by supplanting familiar narratives of Balkan state formation. The dissertation traces how small Balkan states took shape not through the influence of surging nationalism but through conflicts conducted in the medium of imperial law. Lilić demonstrates that in Montenegro and Serbia varied sets of legal actors—from viziers and Ottoman officials to pastoralists and journeymen—engaged in legal disputes that gradually reset the coordinates of political belonging, property, and public order. As a result, provincial states emerged within the empire before featuring as states in the international order. The dissertation is elegantly structured and based on extensive research in multiple languages and archives, and it combines a deft narrative style with nuanced interventions in the literature on European sovereignty and legal pluralism in global perspective.

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919-1998),” (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2024)

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín’s outstanding dissertation, “‘Architects of the Better World’: Democracy, Law, and the Construction of International Order (1919–1998),” constitutes a seminal contribution to both the history of international law and global legal history. By tracing what he designates as the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s move to institutions in the short twentieth century (1919–1998), Quiroga-Villamarín reconstructs the formation of international parliaments from interwar Geneva to the conclusion of the Cold War. Attending to architectural and material templates originating in Europe and their subsequent translations across continents, the dissertation spatializes history and historicizes space, shifting the perspective from figurative “architectures” to tangible built environments. The conceptual framework proves particularly innovative, foregrounding how architecture simultaneously mirrored and enabled aspirations of global order. Drawing on extensive archival research in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, it situates its argument within a rigorous methodological apparatus and advances its findings in elegant and compelling prose.