Vanderbilt education researcher Christopher Loss has won the American Education Research Association, Division J (Post-Secondary Education) Dissertation of the Year Award.

The national award will be presented at the organization’s annual conference March 27 in New York City.

Loss completed the winning dissertation, “From Democracy to Diversity: The Politics of American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century,” at the University of Virginia in 2007. Prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2008, Loss was a research fellow in the Governance Studies Program at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Loss is assistant professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development. He specializes in 20th century American history with an emphasis on the social, political and policy history of American higher education. His publications include peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Policy History and the History of Education Quarterly.

In 2006, he won the James Madison Prize, awarded annually to an outstanding article on the history of the federal government by the Society for History in the Federal Government. Most recently, in 2007, he was a recipient of the Award for Excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Virginia.   

The AERA award recognizes the dissertation that best “makes innovative use of methods, extending the approaches available to conducting research in the field; integrates research and theory grounded in a variety of intellectual traditions into his or her own research; and generates and/or extends theory in potentially useful ways for researchers and practitioners.”

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Contact: Melanie Moran, (615) 322-NEWS
melanie.moran@vanderbilt.edu