Lissa Wadewitz, associate professor of history at Linfield College, is the recipient of the 2014 Albert B. Corey Prize for her book “The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea.”
The book, published in 2012, focuses on the variables that affected the salmon population of the transnational Pacific Northwest during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the book, she examines how the U.S. and Canada boundary endangered salmon.
The Corey Prize is awarded every two years by the American Historical Association (AHA) in recognition of the best book on Canadian and American relations or on the history of both countries. The American Historical Association is a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies. As the largest organization of historians in the United States, the AHA is comprised of more than 13,000 members and serves historians representing every historical period and geographical area.
Earlier this year, Wadewitz earned a $33,000 fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation to support research on a project titled, “Whaling the Pacific World: Race, Sexuality, and Environment on the High Seas.” She also received a highly competitive Franklin Research Grant of $4,000 from the American Philosophical Society in support of the same project.
Wadewitz, at Linfield since 2007, received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 2004. She spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow in native and newcomer relations at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. In 2005 Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West awarded Wadewitz a second, two-year post-doctoral fellow position. She teaches courses on U.S. environmental history, Native American history and the history of the American West. She received her bachelor’s in Asian studies from Pomona College and her master’s in history from UCLA.