This year’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research, recognizing outstanding non-tenured faculty members at the Maxwell School, will be given to Jeffrey Gonda, assistant professor of history.
Jeffrey Gonda
The award will be presented at the Maxwell School’s annual Graduate Convocation Ceremony on Friday, May 11, in Hendricks Chapel. As a new Moynihan Award winner, Gonda will be the featured speaker at Convocation.
The Moynihan Award was established in 1985 by its namesake, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had once been a junior faculty member at Maxwell himself, prior to his celebrated career in the U.S. Senate. In creating the award, Moynihan described the crucial importance of retaining promising young faculty members, and funded the award to help Maxwell do so.
Gonda’s research focuses on the use of litigation campaigns by black communities to challenge racial discrimination. These campaigns culminated in the 1948 Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, studied by Gonda in his book “Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement” (University of North Carolina Press). In 2015, the Supreme Court Historical Society awarded him the coveted Hughes-Gossett Award, given to the best article published in the flagship Journal of Supreme Court History. Gonda received it for his “Litigating Racial Justice at the Grassroots: The Shelley Family, Black Realtors, and Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).”
“Almost from the moment he joined our faculty in fall 2012, Jeff electrified us with his energy, intellectual rigor, and passion for his field,” says Norman Kutcher, chair of history, who nominated Gonda for the Moynihan award. “We are deeply fortunate to have him in the history department and at Maxwell.”
