Shannon Burton has received the Terrence McDonald Award for "the finest thesis which made substantial use of archives or museums." Shannon's thesis, Feeding the Roman World: A Reevaluation of Granary C65 from Karanis, was directed by Arthur Verhoogt. David Stone was the second reader.
In his nominating letter, Arthur Verhoogt writes:
"Shannon is among the most mature students I have worked with during 20 years of teaching at the University of Michigan. I have never taught her in a class setting, but from her sophomore to senior year I have mentored her in various research projects, first under the umbrella of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), then as an independent study, and in her senior year as she wrote her Honors Thesis. Intellectually, I rank Shannon in the top 5 percent of undergraduate students, and in her capacity of carrying out innovative research already at the undergraduate level, I rank her in the top 2 percent. Shannon can work independently and, in dealing with masses of unpublished data kept in museum and library archives, has a superb grasp of what is important and what is not for the research question at hand.
Shannon’s Honors Thesis, Feeding the Roman World: A Reevaluation of Granary C65 from Karanis, is an intellectual tour-de-force that is hardly ever seen on the undergraduate level.
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Shannon’s Honors Thesis is a model for how careful archival research and collecting of sources, combined with the right amount of historical imagination, can lead to interesting and exciting discoveries, also on the undergraduate level. This is what undergraduate research should be all about."
In his nominating letter, David Stone writes:
"One thing that I really admired was the growth that I witnessed in Shannon’s progress toward through the writing process. Her first chapter, submitted in November, was a largely descriptive account of Egyptian history, geography, and archaeology. This was a necessary step that Shannon had to take to familiarize herself with the material, but in subsequent chapters, she learned how to identify problems and questions, research them, and present the data in an interesting fashion. Thus, the whole thesis documents nicely Shannon’s process of growing as a researcher, and her chapters three and four represent high-level undergraduate scholarship."
Congratulations, Shannon!