The Fellowship Committee of NESAH is excited to announce our two 2026 fellowship winners, Sarah Moses of Harvard and Joshua Tan of MIT.

Sarah Moses, 2026 John Coolidge Dissertation Fellowship Winner

Sarah Moses is a PhD candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her current work examines segregationist projects at public beachfront leisure sites in the United States as attempts to spatialize race – to inscribe ideas about race in space – and to racialize space – to make Black users experience disparate treatment in their movements across space, through surveillance, bars to access, and inequitable dictates of public decorum. Prior to her enrollment at Harvard, Sarah was a public historian for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission where she wrote about lesser-known episodes in New York City’s past. Sarah holds both Master of Architecture and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where the focus of her research was conflict between the collective desire to memorialize and the protective impulse to stigmatize, sanitize, or obliterate sites with traumatic or violent associations.

Her dissertation examines the collusions of architects, bureaucrats, resort developers, residents, and enforcement officers to segregate public beaches in the United States. After the Civil War (1861-1865) and through the Great Migration (ca. 1915-1970), millions of Southern Black migrants sought work in the service sectors of Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities. Despite the absence of overt segregationist statutes at most of those cities’ shorelines, Black residents and travelers alike were met with rampant prejudice and segregationist practices couched as concessions to white Southerners’ “sensibilities” or to “custom.” While most of the instantiations I consider were products of white segregationists’ schemes to subject Black users to inequitable treatment in public space, others represent Black entrepreneurs’ efforts to cultivate autonomous and safe leisure retreats for Black travelers. 

Sarah will present a lecture on her Coolidge fellowship-funded research to NESAH in 2027. Congratulations, Sarah!

Joshua Tan, 2026 Robert Rettig Annual Meeting Fellowship Winner