Congratulations revisited

In this post at the beginning of the summer, which mainly congratulated some graduate students I advise and one who taught for me on various honors and awards, I mentioned that there was more good news coming up. It turned out that there was more of it than I knew: two of my former advisees (that is, people on whose dissertation committees I sat-- I didn't chair them) and another former TA (all comparativists, as it happens) won four best dissertation prizes among them.

Deborah Boucoyannis was awarded the APSA European Politics and Society section's Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award for the best dissertation on European politics and society as well as the Seymour Martin Lipset award for best comparative dissertation from the Society for Comparative Research, for "Land, Courts and Parliaments: The Hidden Sinews of Power in the Emergence of Constitutionalism."

Joon-Suk Kim was awarded the APSA Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section's William Anderson Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, or state and local politics for "Making States Federatively: Alternative Routes of State Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe."

And Matthew Kocher, TA for the Constitutionalism course way back when, was awarded The APSA Gabriel Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics for ""Human Ecology and Civil War."

Again, sincere and hearty congratulations all around. I know that Boucoyannis' and Kim's dissertations were excellent and well-deserving; while I've only read one paper of Kocher's and so can't testify to the quality of his dissertation first-hand, that paper and the conversations we had over the years about ethnic violence lead me to not be at all surprised that the dissertation was superb.