Holy Cross Professor Receives Prestigious Award for Book on Historic Charleston

WORCESTER, Mass. – Stephanie E. Yuhl, associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, has received another award for her acclaimed book, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Yuhl’s most recent award is the 2006 Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association of Women’s Historians (SAWH) for the best book published by a woman in any topic or period of southern history. She will accept her award at the Southern Historical Association Meeting in Birmingham, Ala., on Nov. 16.

SAWH is one of the nation’s esteemed academic associations, open to women and men who are interested in U.S. southern history and/or women’s history, as well as all women historians in any field who live and teach at universities in the southern states. In addition to the book award, SAWH sponsors the Southern Conference on Women’s history every three years.

In A Golden Haze of Memory Yuhl chronicles Charleston’s construction of a new civic identity between 1920 and 1940. She details the self-conscious manner in which civic groups, among them the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings, went about determining which parts of the city’s heritage would be remembered and how they would be interpreted for visitors — a process she terms “memory shaping.”

Earlier this year, Yuhl’s book was honored with the 2006 Historic Preservation Book Prize, sponsored by the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. Judges cited her book as a groundbreaking account of how Charleston came to be saved for future generations, and agreed that her scholarship “will change how the history of historic preservation in the United States is written.”

A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2000, Yuhl has served as a member of the Campus Center Advisory Board; the Community Standards Board; the Cantor Art Gallery Acquisitions Board; and the Curricular Goals Committee as well as both president and vice president of the Holy Cross chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.