Virginia Culpepper Memorial Award

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The Virginia Culpepper Memorial Award recognizes an outstanding undergraduate at USM working in the field or war and society and the humanities.  The Culpepper Award can recognize an outstanding student essay on the intersection of war and society and the humanities and the arts, underwrite a promising research topic, or support a paid internship for an undergraduate working on a war and society/military history topic with the Dale Center and one of its institutional partners, such as the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, or an outside public history institution.  In years when no suitable paper or project is available, the Culpepper Award is not awarded.  

The Virginia Culpepper Memorial Award was created in 2015 in memory of one of the Dale Center’s most enthusiastic supporters, Mrs. Virginia Culpepper. Along with her husband, Dr. J.P. Culpepper III, Virginia regularly attended Dale Center events, contributed to our endowment, and was an enthusiast supporter of Dale Center scholars and students. Virginia was also a longtime supporter of the arts in the Hattiesburg community and at the University of Southern Mississippi.

 

2023-2024 Essay Award Winner:

Morgan Myres, an Art major with a Spanish minor, won the 2023-2024 award for her insightful essay "A 'Revolutionary” Portrait': A Lesser-Known Portrait’s Place in the Struggle for Women’s Equality in France during the French Revolution" which she presented at the 2024 Undergraduate Research Symposium.  The paper was  an excellent example of scholarship on the intersection of military history with the arts and humanities.

2022-2023 Internship Award Winner:

Anna Roberson, a Hospitality Tourism and Management major and History minor was selected as the first internship recipient of the Virginia Culpepper Internship Award.  Anna is a stellar student and the daughter of a Mississippi National Guard member.  She  worked on a Dale Center-sponsored oral history project on the history of the Mississippi National Guard, under the direction of Dale Center Fellow Dr. Kevin Greene, who is also the Director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at Southern Miss. 

Of her experience, Ms. Roberson related "I now have a better understand why properly documenting history and people’s experiences is vital. . . . This [project] has not only taught me the significance of documenting this information and how to do that properly, but it has also shown me the importance of interviewing as many people as possible to get different [historical] perspectives . . . to be able to inform future generations properly."  

2021 Essay Award Winners:

Dual History and English major AJ Blaylock received a Culpepper research award for his Undergraduate Research Symposium presentation of "Militiaman to Martyr: Oliver Cromwell and the Transformation of the Mississippi State Militia, 1868-1890.”

History major Katie Newsome received a Culpepper research award for her research project on “The Mental Illness Crisis: Holocaust Survivors and Israel."

2020 Research Award Winners: 

Dual History and English major AJ Blaylock received a Culpepper research award to support his honors thesis on Mississippi’s state militia and its role as a tool for political, economic, and racial control between the ratification of the state’s constitutions of 1868 and 1890. This grant allowed AJ to purchase essential books and access to newspaper databases and digitized census records to research the militia’s activities.

History major Austin Boudreaux received a Culpepper research award to support his honors thesis focused on civil rights struggles during the Union Army’s occupation of Civil War and Reconstruction-era Mississippi. The award helped him purchase key books for his research as well as a subscription to several digital newspaper databases. 

History major Maggie Neupert’s Culpepper research grant supported her work an honors thesis on the WWI British home front. Maggie’s award paid for a subscription to the British Library Newspaper Archive, which is a digital collection of thousands of British newspapers and other historical records.

English major Savannah Underwood received a Culpepper research grant to support her creative writing project, which featured a series of short stories about an American GI and his Japanese wife, who he meet on a tour in Okinawa. Her award paid for books for background research.

2018 Essay Award Winner:

History major Kristen McGuire received a 2018 Virginia Culpepper Memorial Award for her paper, “The Blacklist Curtain Call,” which investigated Hollywood’s resistance to McCarthyism in the 1950s. 

2016 Essay Award Winner:

The second annual Virginia Culpepper Memorial Award was awarded in April 2016 to Armendia Hulsey for her analysis of the Jefferson Davis Soldier Home, Beauvoir.  

2015 Essay Award Winner:  

The inaugural Virginia Culpepper Memorial Award was awarded on April 25, 2015 to Erin Blackledge. Erin’s paper on Britain's public relations use of the death of nurse Edith Cavell to inspire greater support for allied forces and opposition to Germany in World War I was an excellent example of war and society scholarship. Erin's use of traditional archival and historical sources to show how Cavell's death was used by British propagandists in posters, poetry, and in film, made her an excellent recipient for the first Virginia Culpepper Award.