The Walter Nugent Graduate Student Paper Award, a $500 award given for the best graduate student paper presented at the IAH Annual Conference, is named in honor of Walter K. Nugent, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Nugent, a renowned historian of the American West, was the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of eleven books, including Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (1992) and the acclaimed Into the West: The Story of Its People (1999), which won the Caughey Prize of the Western Historical Association, and is considered an ideal example of social-demographic history. In 1981, Professor Nugent, then teaching at Indiana University Bloomington, was elected as the first president of the Indiana Association of Historians.
The award is open to all graduate students who appear on the program and will be selected by a prize committee prior to the meeting. The award will be announced at the IAH Annual Conference.
Founded in 1980, the Indiana Association of Historians welcomes anyone interested in the study, enjoyment and promotion of history. As an organization, we bring together educators, scholars, genealogists, archivists, public historians, librarians and the general public interested in the pursuit of history. Our purpose is to provide a forum for professional historians to come together as a group for dialogue about the academic discipline they share, but the IAH is also committed to reaching out beyond the university community, or communities, to share the study of history with other professional historians and with the broader public.