Tom Cinq-Mars Awarded AHA Bernadotte Schmitt Grant

This past spring, Tom Cinq-Mars received a Bernadette Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African, or Asian History from the AHA. Scholars can apply for these modest grants of $1000 each annually to continue research in progress and may use the funds to offset a variety of costs, including travel to archives and libraries, copying source materials, as well as childcare. Fifteen grants were awarded nationally this year. Tom will use the funds to travel to Harvard University’s Lamont Library, where he will examine microfilmed minutes of the plenums of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USSR copied from the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History in Moscow. Tom’s dissertation project, now titled “Fossil Fuel Communism: The Druzhba Oil Pipeline and the Making of the Eastern Bloc, 1948-1994,” explores the construction of the longest petroleum pipeline in the world (roughly 5,500 kilometers) and its effects on the political economies of Eastern Europe’s former socialist republics. For more information on the AHA’s Schmitt Grant, visit: https://www.historians.org/awards-and-grants/grants-and-fellowships/bernadotte-e-schmitt-grant. Applications are due every year on February 15.