MHA Dissertation Award

The Midwestern History Association is proud to announce that Elena Telles Ryan has been selected as the inaugural winner of its Dissertation Prize. Telles Ryan’s dissertation, “Legal Lineage: Families and the Transformation of Belonging in the Southwestern Great Lakes,” was completed under the supervision of Laura F. Edwards and Elizabeth Ellis at Princeton University in 2025. 

“Legal Lineage” helps us to consider new tools and approaches to eighteenth and nineteenth century histories of North America. Telles Ryan highlights how legal systems evolved from the ground up and were negotiated by communities who created their own categories of belonging based on kinship, adoption of cultural practices, and communities of exchange in the southwestern Great Lakes region. By focusing on the concept of belonging as practiced by trading families who inhabited the southwestern Great Lakes, Telles Ryan points to exciting new ways to conceptualize region, ethnicity, and the law during the period between 1760 and the 1840s. Elegantly written, “Legal Lineage”  melds strong archival research with a variety of historical subfields. The dissertation highlights the vibrant scholarship grounded in the geographic region that would become known as the Midwest.

The winner of the MHA Dissertation Prize receives $500 and the opportunity to participate in an MHA awards panel or workshop at an MHA annual conference.