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THE MURPHY INSTITUTE

Murphy Institute People

Walter Stern
  • Graduate Fellow 2012-2013
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Biography

Walter Stern is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Tulane. He is currently writing his dissertation, The Origins of an Urban Education Crisis: Schools, Housing, and Racial Inequality in New Orleans, 1917-1960, under the direction of Lawrence N. Powell. Revising landmark studies that emphasize the impact of housing policies upon schools, he argues that public schools also played a central role in the evolution of residential segregation.

Stern received the Tulane History Department’s Peter T. Cominos Memorial Award for the best graduate paper of publishable quality in 2009 and 2011 and the Louisiana Historical Association’s Hugh F. Rankin prize for the best graduate paper in Louisiana history in 2010.

The Murphy Institute

Established in memory of Charles H. Murphy, Sr. (1870-1954), and inspired by the vision of Charles H. Murphy, Jr. (1920-2002), The Murphy Institute exists to help Tulane faculty and students understand economic, moral, and political problems we all face and think about. More important, it exists to help us understand how these problems have come to be so closely interconnected.