2006 Stow Persons Prize

The winner of the 2006 Stow Persons Prize for the best undergraduate honors thesis in the History Department is Megan Roy.  Ms. Roy's thesis, "Divis Flats:  The Social Implications of a Modern Public Housing Complex in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1968-1998," stood out among a very strong and diverse group of successful honors essays.  Her work displays admirable mastery of two separate fields of inquiry:  first, the tangled history of Northern Ireland's "troubles" in the late 20th century and, second, the proponents and critics of modernist architecture emerging from the Bauhaus School of the early twentieth century and then applied to problems of urban renewal after World War II.  Ms. Roy's thesis brings these two subjects together by focusing her innovative inquiry on the social consequences of the construction of a modernist complex of housing flats in West Belfast.  She makes a convincing case for the significance of architecture and urban design in both the rise and decline of paramilitary violence over the course of a generation.  Built on strong archival research as well as personal experience among the people of Belfast, Ms. Roy's impressive essay is a model for what can be accomplished in the Honors Program in history.