The Loomie Prize

The History Department of Fordham University annually awards the Loomie Prize (with a cash prize and certificate) to the best seminar paper produced during the previous academic year. All MA and PhD students who have taken the proseminar/seminar sequence or a research tutorial are eligible.

The award honors the many years of teaching and service by Rev. Albert J. Loomie SJ, a long-time member of the department who died in November, 2002. Educated at Fordham Preparatory School, Fr. Loomie received his BA from Loyola University in Chicago; a PhL from West Baden College; his STL from Woodstock College; and a PhD from London University. He joined the Fordham faculty in 1958, where he rose to full professor in 1969, served as Department Chair in 1978-81, and retired in 1993.

In addition to The Spanish Elizabethans: The English Exiles at the Court of Philip II (1963), Fr. Loomie wrote seven books and numerous articles that explored Catholicism in England following the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. He specialized in tracing Spanish influence in court and society during the early Stuart dynasty, and was equally adept in the diplomatic and political history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and England. His other books include: Toleration and Diplomacy: The Religious Issue in Anglo-Spanish Relations, 1603-05 (1963); Spain and the Jacobean Catholics (2 vols., 1973 and 1978); and Spain and the Early Stuarts, 1585-1655 (1996). 

Click here to donate to the Albert J. Loomie, SJ, Memorial Prize Fund.

  • 2021

    Matthieu Langlois, "Oh! Father Burke, there is so much we should do': Laywomen participation within the N.C.W.C in Europe"

    2020

    Owen Clow, "Google Street View Photography and the Visual Culture of American Poverty"

    2019

    Ronald Braasch

    2018

    Glauco Schettini, "Geographies of Revolution: Italy, Europe, and the Mediterranean in the Age of the French Revolution"

    2017

    No Award Given

    2016

    Tobias Hrynick, "Docke and Recordane: The Case Study of a Milling Dispute in the Latin East"

    2015

    Christine Kelly, "Gender, the Popular Front, and the Folk Song Revival through Sing Out! Magazine, 1950-1968"

    Rachel Podd, "Interrogating the Guaridoras: Women, Medicine, and Magic in Catalonia Before the Plague"

    2014

    Tobias Hrynick, "The Customs of Romney Marsh: Compromise and Common Interest in Wetland Administration"

    2013

    Louisa Foroughi, "This Was Found in An Olde Written Booke: An Edition of Fols. 1-32 of Columbia University Library Plimpton MS 259, A Late Medieval Miscellany"

    Hannah Shepard, "Vanished in Plain Sight: Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Wisconsin, 1830-1890"

    2012

    Jeffrey Doolittle, "Negotiating Murder in the Historiae of Gregory of Tours"

    2011

    Anna Moscatiello, "Ward Communities and Local Administration in Medieval London, 1250-1400"

    2010

    Margaret Gurewitz Lutes, "Paul Albar's Apocalyptic Theology in the Indiculus Luminosus"

    2009

    Richard Hresko, "London Arms and Amor-makers in the Fourteenth Century: A Portrait of a Medieval Industrial Sector"

    2008

    No Award Given.

    2007

    Samantha Sagui, "Crime and Conviviality: The Social Space of Urban Drinking-Houses in Medieval England"

    Mellisa Kelley, "'The Bond that Binds Us:' The Supreme Court of the Confederate States of America, and the Ideological Underpinnings of the Confederate States of America"

    2006

    Maeve Ryan, "The Lambs Bit Back: Rebel Laity and the Birth Control Revolution"

    2005

    No Award Given.

    2004

    Lena Amarosa, "Distress in the Little Commonwealth: Investigating Household Violence in Seventeenth-Century America"

    2003

    Heidi Febert, "Buckled, Wired and Pinned: The Mass Consumption of Metal Dress Accessories in Late Medieval England"

    2002

    Clare Brewster, "Brokering Salvation and Preaching Paradise for Profit: The Friars in Merchants' Clothing and the Emergence of a Commercial Culture in Late Medieval Europe"

    2001

    Robert Jensen, "A Man between Two Worlds: The Idea of Conversion in the Works of Cassiodorus"

    2000

    Daniel Bornstein, "Labourers Asserting Themselves: Labour Migration in Post-Black Death Lincolnshire"

    1999

    Michael A. Vargas, "Settling a Dispute In Foro Penitentie in Thirteenth-Century Catalonia: Raymond of Penyafort's Experiment in the Rhetoric of Peacemaking"

    1998

    Brian Klinzig, "The Gendering of the Supernatural: A Typology of the Mir acles in the Golden Legend"

    1997

    No Award Given

    1996

    Laurel Ann Wilson, "The Other Cloth: Linen and Canvas in Medieval England"

    1995

    Derek A. Rivard, "Pro Iter Agentibus: The Ritual Blessings of Pilgrims and their Insignia in MS Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense 614"

    1994

    Dalia Leonardo,  "League Polemics and Monarchical Crisis During the Reign of Henry III (1588-1589)"