Elmore County, Alabama native and senior history major Jana Venable has been awarded the 2021 Randall Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award. Venable received the award for her work, “Recovering Hidden Histories: Memorializing Lynching Victims in Elmore County, Alabama,” which she completed as part of Associate Professor and Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South John Giggie‘s Alabama Memory project, which seeks to recover the lives of black Alabamians lost in decades of race-driven lynching violence.  Venable is the third consecutive undergraduate researcher associated with the Alabama Memory project to win the award.

Venable is a past recipient of the The Lee David and Florence Weinberg Black Scholarship and has been named the 2021 recipient of the Charles Grayson Summersell Memorial Scholarship for Most Distinguished Undergraduate in History.

The Randall Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award was established in 1997 by Randall Publishing Company and the Randall family. It honors the memory of Henry Pettus Randall, Jr., an alumnus of The University of Alabama, creator of Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges, and founder of what is today Randall-Reilly Publishing. Venable will be recognized, along with Dr. John Giggie, at a luncheon during the first week of April.