Collin Cortinas, a history and religion major from Fairhope, Alabama, has received the 2022 Hardin-Churchill Travel Award. Cortinas is the third recipient of this prestigious scholarship, which provides a two-week trip to the University of Cambridge’s Churchill College.

Housed at Churchill College is the world-leading Churchill Archives Centre, where Cortinas will spend most of his time handling and studying primary documents to support a research topic of his choice. He has worked Dr. Mark Lester, Michael Atchison Professor of History, to narrow down his focus: the relationship between Winston Churchill and First Sea Lord and Admiral Sir John Fisher.

“I am very much looking forward to working at one of the most prestigious colleges in the world and representing BSC and the history department in another part of the world,” Cortinas says.

The Hardin-Churchill Archives Centre Endowed Travel Award was established in 2019 with gifts from numerous friends in honor of Edward L. Hardin, Jr. ’62. The scholarship supports one student researcher each year in their discoveries at the Churchill Archives, which includes 2,500 boxes of papers produced between 1874 and 1965 relating to Winston Churchill’s personal life and political career.

Along with this research opportunity, BSC is also one of only 20 colleges and universities in the United States with full access to the digitized Churchill Archive. The late Robert B. Callahan ’50 and his wife, Ginger Callahan, gave a gift to the College that underwrote access to the archive and funded the Churchill Seminar Room in the BSC library, where history seminars are taught and where students, faculty, and visiting scholars can access the collection.

Lester and other history department faculty oversee the selection process for Churchill Scholars and awarded Cortinas in fall 2021. After learning about the opportunity from several of his professors, Cortinas realized that the scholarship would be an incredible undergraduate opportunity that also prepares him for graduate school research.

Throughout the spring term, Cortinas will begin his research on campus – which examines Churchill and Fisher’s relationship when Churchill served as First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I – so he can spend most of his time at the University of Cambridge examining documents and finishing up the paper. The archive preserves documents of more than 600 other political and scientific figures, so Churchill Scholars can take their research in a wide range of directions.

Inaugural Churchill Scholar Connor Hansen ’20 focused his research on lifelong friend of Churchill and fellow politician Leo Amery – a research focus that combined Hansen’s major in history and minor in Arabic studies. Amery helped to draft the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s 1917 statement supporting a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

Like Cortinas, Hansen completed his research with plans for graduate school on the horizon – international programs in particular. Now, Hansen is a graduate student in the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Cortinas is involved on the Hilltop as the president of the Interfraternity Council, a member of Alpha Tau Omega and the Religious Life Leadership Team, and an orientation leader. But history has been a longtime passion and is what originally drew him to BSC and opportunities like the Churchill Travel Award.

“One of the reasons I chose Birmingham-Southern is because of how prestigious the history department is,” Cortinas says. “The professors wish the best for you and want to push you to your limits. I’ve been so thankful for that.”