Grant Honors Former Distinguished Visiting Professor at Catholic University
The Department of History is proud to announce the first Gerald Bonner Graduate Research Award.
This award honors Professor Gerald Bonner, who was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Early Christian Studies at the Catholic University of America from 1991 to 1994. Before coming to Catholic University, Professor Bonner was Reader in Theology at the University of Durham (United Kingdom). He was an internationally distinguished scholar of patristic studies, his books including St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies and Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom.
The award has been made possible through the generosity of his son, Dr. Jeremy Bonner, who received his Ph.D. from the Department of History in 2001, and is the author of The Road to Renewal: Victor Joseph Reed and Oklahoma Catholicism 1905-1971 and Called Out of Darkness Into Marvelous Light: A History of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, 1750-2006 and co-editor of Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action Before and After Vatican II and Costly Communion: Ecumenical Initiative and Sacramental Strife in the Anglican Communion. The purpose of the Bonner award is to provide financial support for current Ph.D. students in the Department to pursue dissertation research.
The first recipient of the Bonner Award is Atlas Xu, Ph.D. candidate in American history. It will support Atlas’s research in the archives of Malone, New York for his dissertation “Navigating Worthiness in America: White Attorneys, Chinese Immigrants, and Black Pensioners, 1873-1924”. Malone, though a small town, ranked second among border towns in admitting large numbers of Chinese into the United States in the early 1900s, and was an easier port of arrival for Chinese immigrants than San Francisco. Atlas says “I am grateful and humbled to receive this award. It will allow me to delve into largely untapped sources about immigrant attorneys’ work in early 1900s Malone, a vital case study in my research about quotidian mediators between the state and its minority subjects during the early Progressive Era.”