Current Graduate Students

Jonathan Adsit

Jon is a PhD student in Russian, Indigenous, imperial, and environmental history, especially in Siberia and the North Pacific. Prior to coming to Indiana, Jon was raised on a farm in a small town in Wisconsin, inspiring his love for the environment and local communities amid a transforming world. Most interested in places considered the periphery in Russian imperial history, Jon is concerned with how local peoples contest, negotiate, and appropriate projects of empire and modernity, from the early modern to the Soviet period. Jon received a BA from Wisconsin Lutheran College in 2020, majoring in Business and English, and in 2022 he received an MA in Geography from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Jon has spent multiple summers studying in Central Asia, and received a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship to study in Kazakhstan in 2023. In ongoing work, Jon utilizes his interdisciplinary background to focus on the precious metals industry and its implications for the environment and Indigenous peoples in late imperial Yakutia and the Yakut ASSR during the Soviet period. In his free time, Jon enjoys outdoor pursuits such as hunting, appreciating retro music and technology, and spending time with his lovely partner Anna as well as their persnickety beagles.

Zofia Ahmad

Zofia Ahmad is a PhD candidate who studies the history of trade, empire, and interaction in Ancient Eurasia. Prior to arriving in Bloomington, she graduated with a double-major in Classics and Economics from Bates College and went on to do a MA in Global and Comparative History at the University of Warwick and a MA in Economics at the Vancouver School of Economics. She is currently working on a double-PhD in History and Central Eurasian Studies, with a focus on transmission of identity and material culture through interregional trade networks across Eurasia during the 2nd century. In addition to research, Zofia enjoys cooking and hiking. She can be reached at zahmad@iu.edu.

Kasha Appleton

Kasha Appleton received her B.A in History and Classics from Monmouth College. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Indiana University in American History with a minor in Law. Before attending IU, she conducted research at the University of Nebraska Lincoln under Professor Katrina Jagodinsky where she transcribed and encoded 19th-century habeas corpus petitions and presented on childhood and habeas corpus. Her current research focuses on Black women in nineteenth century and the various methods they used to petition for custody of their children from abusive spouses and employers. She positions her research at the intersections of race, gender, and class through the lens of legal history. The women that she researches sit at various levels of oppression and privilege yet each one found themselves at the mercy of the American court system. She is interested in uncovering the various experiences that women had while they navigated the court systems to negotiate the rights of themselves and their children.

Leandro Aristeguieta

Leandro Simón Aristeguieta Pirela is a first year PhD student focusing on diplomatic relations between Venezuela and the United States, the oil and gas industry, and the Latin American Cold War. He is interested in the role played by trade between Latin America and the United States in the conflict and how economic concerns influenced and drove political decision-making. Prior to attending Indiana University-Bloomington, Leandro earned an MA in History from Florida Atlantic University and a BA in History and a BS in Communications from Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Leandro also worked as a journalist in northwestern Pennsylvania, covering local government, education, and crime. Born in Venezuela, Leandro has lived in Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Florida. He can be reached at laristeg@iu.edu.

Elijah Beaton

Elijah Beaton is a PhD Student in American History specializing in the built environment, economics, and technology in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their research examines the relationship between capital investment, art, architecture, and ideology that underlies the production of capitalist aesthetics. Their previous research during their MA in History and Material Culture at Mississippi State University explored the racial dynamics of erasure and consumption in the Beale Street redevelopment project in Memphis during the 1980s. Elijah became fascinated with architecture, art, and cultural history during their undergraduate degree at Colorado State University, where they majored in History and Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts. They are originally from Fort Collins, Colorado, and they enjoy making small websites and fretting over their plants.

Stephen Berck

Stephen received a B.A. in History and a B.S. in Statistics with a Mathematics minor from IU and is currently enrolled in IU’s Masters in Ancient History and Language Acquisition program. His main interests are in the chaos of the 3rd century Roman Empire and the civil wars that plagued it through to the 4th century as well as in the rise of Christianity. He comes from a military family and has lived all over the US and the world but is now, officially in the eyes of the great state of Indiana, a “Hoosier.” His time living and visiting Europe, especially Italy and Greece, helped spark his interest in the ancient world, which was later fueled by interest in the early history of the Church and the setting from which it grew. He is currently learning how to chant in the eight Byzantine Tones and collects Byzantine iconography and antique maps. This summer he refurbished a 20-year-neglected canoe and enjoys piloting it on Lake Monroe.

Isti Bhattacharya

Isti Bhattacharya grew up at Bhatpara, a small old town by the river Hooghly in India. She moved to Kolkata for higher studies where she earned her MA and BA degrees in History from Jadavpur University and Presidency University, respectively. Isti has interned as a content editor for 1947 Partition Archive and as a researcher for Delhi Art Gallery (DAG). At IU, Isti hopes to explore the urban and spatial history of South Asian cities during the colonial era. Her interest in urban history stems from her experience of leading walking tours, for a year, in Kolkata for Immersive Trails, a heritage tour company. After completing her Master’s, Isti worked as a research assistant at Jadavpur University on a government-funded project titled ‘People Narrating City’. As part of the project, she documented the women-led protest movements in Kolkata against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

Anna Biesecker-Mast

Anna is a Ph.D. student studying late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century U.S. history, with thematic focuses on race, gender, and labor. Her master’s thesis researched the diverse care work performed by enslaved and free Black women during and just after the Revolutionary War. Using eighteenth-century newspapers published in Philadelphia, her research aimed to better understand the fugitivity and maternity of enslaved Black women, as well as the city’s economy of care. Her thesis analyzes Philadelphia’s history through the lens of care while questioning the limitations and potential of the archive. In the doctoral program, Anna expands her study to include the care work of free Black women and impoverished white women in Philadelphia, especially in the context of emerging penitentiaries. Anna received a BA in History and English from the University of Dayton in 2022 and an MA in U.S. History with a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Indiana University in 2024.

Katie Blandford

Katie Blandford was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. She completed her undergraduate degrees at the University of Toledo, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in History and Women and Gender Studies. At Indiana University, Katie is pursuing a Ph.D. in American History with a focus in women’s history. Katie is a part of the Gender and Biopolitics cluster in the IU history department. Her undergraduate degrees have been used to complement her research in American women’s history. Katie's research focuses on American women’s sociopolitical movements post World War II. Specifically, she studies feminist intellectual history from the second-wave feminist movement concerning reproduction. Ideas about conception, reproduction, birth, and who controls these things are common themes that she studies. Historical questions Katie seeks to answer are: How is the second-wave feminist movement remembered? What groups/organizations are understudied? Why? How has the fight for reproductive rights shaped America?

Beverly Boone

Beverly Boone is a proud native of North Carolina, where she is from the rural southeast portion of the state. She obtained her BA History degree from Fayetteville State University in Fayetteville, N.C. A few years later she obtained her MA History degree from North Carolina Central University, in Durham N.C. She’s always had an interest in African American History, U.S. History, and ancestral studies. In recent years, she has become more inquisitive about socioeconomic status, generational trauma, and gender-based violence within the Black community. Every “now” has a beginning, so it is her mission to unearth the foundational roots of such violence. Boone’s doctoral research will focus on the history of gender-based violence in the Black community and argues that it has connective tissue with American Slavery.

Christopher Bowers

Christopher Bowers is a Ph.D student researching the surveillance of Italian political subversives living abroad during Italy’s modern diaspora. His current project examines the Italian state’s surveillance and policing in the nineteenth and twentieth century and considers the anxieties of modern states and empires regarding political radicalism in a global context. Chris received his BA and MA in history at the University of Georgia, where he studied Catholic social organization in nineteenth-century Italy. His interests lie in nationalism and political alignment and their imbrications within social and legal history.

Miriam Curp

Miriam Curp is a dual master's student in History and Library and Information Science at Indiana University. She completed a BA with a double major in History and Classical Languages and Literature/Classical Civilizations with a minor in Philosophy from Ohio University. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. A native of Seattle, Washington, she grew up in Athens, Ohio, and spent a year with her family in Warsaw, Poland while her father was there on a Fulbright fellowship. Miriam is planning to research classical reception in post-Stalinist Poland, but her historical interests range widely. You can contact Miriam at mcurp@iu.edu.

Paloma Czapla

Paloma Czapla is a Ph.D. student in Latin American history specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil, with a minor in Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies (CRPS). Her research focuses on women's incarceration, gender, race, the history of science, and photography. Paloma earned her Bachelor's degree from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and her Master's degree from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), where she was awarded a merit-based fellowship from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). In her master's thesis, she analyzed histories of women charged with murder to demonstrate how the colonial experience and ideals of gender have shaped the Brazilian criminal justice system. For her doctoral dissertation, she aims to explore photographs of women deprived of freedom in post-emancipation Brazil. Her primary interest lies in understanding how photography was used to delineate degraded forms of personhood and subjection for women of color, as well as how historians can interrupt the colonial and patriarchal gaze that have produced these women’s visual representations. Originally from Porto Alegre (Brazil), Paloma is a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner who also loves contemporary feminist art and is constantly seeking decolonial and anti-neoliberal ways of thinking and living.

Jessica David

Jessica David is a doctoral candidate in Ancient History at Indiana University. Prior to attending IU, Jessica completed a Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Southern Indiana (2008), a post-baccalaureate certificate in Classics at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (2010), and a Master of Arts in History at The Ohio State University (2012). Jessica’s dissertation research explores the manipulation of divination in classical Greece. She is particularly interested in understanding the mechanics of oracular and divinatory manipulation in their social and political contexts, including the reactions of ancient Greeks to threats of manipulation and the consequences of manipulation for belief in divination.

Jessie Day-Lucore

Jessie Day-Lucore studies modern U.S. foreign policy, with a particular interest in the foreign relations between Latin America and the United States in the 20^th century. She is interested in history that examines U.S. foreign policy through an inter-American lens, centering both U.S. and Latin American actors, and approaching foreign relations as fundamentally omnidirectional and transnational. She believes that working for a more nuanced understanding of U.S.-Latin American relations can facilitate broader questions about how U.S. power has functioned in the world at large, while offering the necessary context to understand contemporary realities and inequalities in both Latin America and the United States. Jessie holds a B.A. from Whitman College, where she wrote a thesis about Ronald Reagan’s policy toward apartheid South Africa, and an M.A. from the University of Chicago, where she wrote a thesis about Mexico, Cuba, and the United States after the Cuban Revolution.

Esmeralda Del Rio

Esmeralda Del Rio was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is a Ph.D. Student at Indiana University studying Latin American history. As an undergraduate student, she double majored in History and English Literature at the University of Southern California. Del Rio studied abroad in Shanghai, China at Fudan University during the Summer of 2013 after graduation. Her focus is on environmental history, indigenous history, gender history, ethnobotany, and history of empire. In September 2021, Del Rio started researching edible and medicinal indigenous plants native to California that would develop into an online climate adaptive database for the community at California State University, Los Angeles. In December 2023, she completed her MA in history at Cal State LA. Del Rio defended and completed her master’s thesis titled “Natural Empire: First Impressions of Indigenous Knowledge in Las Californias in the Eighteenth Century.” In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing, and jump roping.

Brock DeMark

Brock DeMark is a doctoral candidate studying modern India, colonialism, and urban design. His dissertation project is entitled “Fabricating an Industrial City: Urban Design in Kanpur, India 1875-1925.” One of the most important manufacturing hubs in India by the turn of the twentieth century, Kanpur offers unique insight into how business interest groups shaped the development of Indian cities. Examining sources at libraries and archives in Kanpur itself as well as in Lucknow, Delhi, and London, Brock argues that Kanpur was staged as a “through” space – an early version of a special economic zone. The city’s industrialists and their lobbying groups prioritized the production of globally destined goods at the expense of local habitability, and this is reflected in the physical layout of the city itself. Nevertheless, Kanpur’s residents also claimed the city for themselves. The final chapter of Brock’s dissertation details how the city served as an ideological laboratory for designing an Indian nation. Brock’s research has been supported by a Fulbright-Nehru student research grant (2024), Critical Language Scholarships for Hindi (2022 and 2023), the IU Dhar India Studies Program, OVPIA-IU, and the IU History Department. In his free time, Brock enjoys watching American football, reading Amitav Ghosh novels, hiking in Indiana State Parks, and visiting his family in Arkansas and Wisconsin.

Jiacheng Dong

Jiacheng Dong is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese history. His research focuses on the history of paper-based media in China during the Republican period (1912-1949). He received his BA and MA degrees from Sophia University, Tokyo. His Master’s thesis analyzes the Chinese newspaper Dagong Bao’s news coverages and political commentaries in the early 1930s. It examines Dagong Bao’s strategies to endure the challenge of market competition and the intricate political environment in China at the time. His current project intends to investigate the relationship between political power and the press, the network of people and resources within the media industry, and the question of censorship and self-censorship in Republican China. Jiacheng was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, and grew up in Shanghai. He has been studying and living in Japan for the past seven years. He enjoys traveling, visiting history and art museums, trying different foods from all over the world, and playing video games.

Ash Eversole

Ash Eversole is a first-year master’s student in the Ancient History and Language Acquisition (MAHLA) program. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, she completed her B.S.Ed in Secondary Social Studies Education with a minor in Classical Civilizations at Indiana University Bloomington, graduating with Highest Distinction. While enthusiastic about all aspects of ancient history, she has a specific research interest in the social histories of Classical Athens and Sparta, particularly regarding the stories of underrepresented populations. She is also interested in the development of mythology and the influence of religion and religious cult activity on Greek city-states. She is eager to continue to develop her skills as a historian at IUB and looking forward, hopes to create accessible ancient history curriculum for secondary education populations. She can be reached at ashevers@iu.edu.

Samuel Fajerstein

Samuel Fajerstein is a Russian Studies Workshop Ph.D. fellow in the Department of History at Indiana University. His research interests include the agricultural, environmental, and intellectual history of the late-imperial Russian Empire and early Soviet Union; the study of peasant communities; and the processes of Stalinization. His dissertation research examines the transformation of Russian and Soviet agronomic sciences throughout the period of Soviet collectivization. Samuel holds a B.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an M.A. from Indiana University.

Hugh Farrell

Originally from Chicago, Hugh Farrell has lived in Bloomington since 2005. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Indiana University while working at the Community Kitchen of Monroe County as a cook and volunteer coordinator. He is now undertaking graduate studies at IU with a focus on Midwestern urban history throughout the 20th Century. Hugh is particularly interested in the metropolitan periphery, and on the composition of working and surplus populations, urban planning and policing, the Great Migration, and social movements. He also currently serves on the boards of Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company and Bloomington Cooperative Living.

Maggie Fitzgerald

Maggie Fitzgerald entered the African History Ph.D. program in the fall of 2018. Originally from Medway, Massachusetts, she holds a B.A. from Roanoke College in History and Secondary Education, where she graduated as salutatorian, summa cum laude, and with Honors. Maggie studies the intellectual and cultural history of southern Africa. She is particularly interested in cultural production, black consciousness, and political resistance in South Africa. Incorporating both oral and archival research, her dissertation traces the trajectories of many cultural organizations within the domains of theatre, art, print magazines, and photography to better understand how culture itself shaped and transformed both politics and apartheid in the 1960s-1990s. She considers how South African photographers, playwrights, writers, readers, and artists debated their place within black liberation movements, argued over the meaning of race, and imagined a future after apartheid. 

Maggie additionally has work experience teaching history, isiZulu, and ceramics. She has held a position as editorial assistant at the American Historical Review. Her research has been supported by multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships as well as a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. She can be reached at maggfitz@iu.edu . 

Jessica Foster

Jessica Foster is a Ph.D. student in Modern European History with a minor in Jewish Studies. A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Jessica graduated summa cum laude from Furman University in 2020 with a B.A. in History. She received her M.A. in History from Clemson University in 2022. Her Master’s thesis examined critical perceptions of the body and the will-to-live in the published writings of several Jewish men conscripted into the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. The Sonderkommando prisoners’ forced proximity to the gas chambers and crematoria gave them access to the food, clothing, and valuables of the murdered Jews, which they used to prolong their lives. While most scholars view the Sonderkommando’s use of the victims’ belongings as a form of resistance, Jessica found that some of the prisoners perceived it as a source of enslavement. These men felt trapped in a humiliating cycle of dependence on the death of others and saw their own will-to-live as an obstacle to rebellion. Jessica plans to build on this research in her dissertation, which will look more broadly at the differing language used by victims, survivors, scholars, and the public to describe resistance and survival during the Holocaust.

Johnny Fulfer

Johnny Fulfer is a PhD student studying the history of economic ideas, political economy, money, and U.S. foreign relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Originally from La Grande, Oregon, Johnny earned dual bachelor’s degrees in History and Economics from Eastern Oregon University and an MA in History from the University of South Florida. His most recent work examines how American monetary experts connected language of economic ‘science’ with an internationally informed discourse of civilization in the first years of the twentieth century. In doing so, they helped establish the gold-exchange standard as a marker of civilization, which not only expanded the scope of the American civilizing mission, but also the range of imperial power. He is also interested in exploring how the elimination of a diverse range of global currencies to establish “civilized” monetary systems, rendered perceived ‘backward’ nations more transparent to US investors. Johnny is also the Editor of The Economic Historian, a blog he started in 2018, and the Assistant Editor of the Indiana Magazine of History."

Yunxiang Gao

Gao Yunxiang grew up in a little town called Shenze in northern China, Hebei Province. He completed his BA and MA in History at the University of Macau. Funded by the Fundação Oriental, Gao studied Portuguese at the University of Coimbra and the University of Lisbon for an academic year. His M.A. thesis, entitled “The Art of Balance: A Fiscal History of Portuguese Macau, 1800-1810” explores how Macau as a sub-state entity survived the fierce British competition and Chinese piracy in the Far East. At the moment he is broadly interested in the history of the Portuguese Empire in Asia and beyond.

K. Ermelinda García

K. Ermelinda García is a Ph.D. Candidate studying twentieth century Mexican History at Indiana University. As an undergraduate, they were involved as a Ronald E. McNair scholar at Grand Valley State University. Linda was president of their Phi Alpha Theta chapter, History Club, and founded a group for Women in Humanities on campus. In their time at Grand Valley, they worked as a Research Assistant for the Kutsche Office of Local History in which they were deeply involved with oral histories throughout West Michigan and continued their work with digitization and oral histories at the Grand Rapids Public Library Archives. Linda’s dissertation centers around community formation among women in the LGBT community in Mexico City. Moving away from politically focused depictions of the LGBT movement in Mexico, they aim to center interpersonal relationships to construct an archive of emotions.

Annewsa Ghosh

Annewsa Ghosh is a 2nd year PhD student working on the early modern socio-economic history of South Asia and the English East India Company. Hailing from the suburbs of Chandannagar, they have attained their B.A. M.A., and M.Phil at the Department of History at Jadavpur University in Kolkata. Currently, Annewsa is investigating the notion and practice of sovereignty in the Company administration of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras (1690s – 1790s) and how it helped shape colonial and post-colonial relations between the state and the people. 

Jaelyn Glennemeier

Jaelyn Glennemeier is a second year Ph.D. student studying late nineteenth and early twentieth century British History at Indiana University. In 2018, Jaelyn received bachelor’s degrees in History and English from the University of Kansas where she wrote on orientalism in British women’s travel narratives and romance fiction. She also studied subjects such as the emergence of the novel and visual culture in Victorian reading experiences. Most recently, she has used the writings of professional British medical women to examine the medico-moral language of womanhood towards the end of the nineteenth century. Jaelyn’s interests continue to sit at the intersection of gender, empire, and literature as she continues her coursework at IU.

Tobin Gold

Tobin Gold is a first-year PhD student specializing in the history of gender and sexuality and British history. He has been invested in researching historical questions related to confinement, sex work, and structures categorizing gender since his undergraduate degree, which he completed at Colorado State University in 2023. Prior to attending IU, he worked in academic publishing. Tobin’s research builds on an honors thesis that used Salvation Army records to narrate the stories and circumstances of inmates in nineteenth century London rescue homes, discussing the social barriers between moral reformers and urban women. In his limited free time, Tobin fences and plays racquetball.

Justin Hawkins

Justin Hawkins is a PhD candidate studying nineteenth century American history. He is especially interested in the way arson was an existential threat in a society in which freedom, independence, and citizenship were predicated on property ownership. Justin is assistant editor of the Indiana Magazine of History. He formerly served as an editorial assistant at the American Historical Review. In 2024, he served as a digital content reviewer for the Organization of American Historians and Colonial Williamsburg. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in 2019 where he wrote an honors thesis about Know-Nothing election riots in Baltimore during the 1850s. While at Maryland, Justin worked as a research assistant for Holly Brewer to create an edited volume about the development of slavery in the early British Empire. Justin is currently advised by Konstantin Dierks and received his master’s degree from Indiana University in 2021.

Matthew Hermane

A Navy veteran who grew up in Dayton, Ohio, Matthew Hermane earned undergraduate degrees at the University of Maryland in History and Persian Studies in 2018. He focuses on Safavid Iran while considering the broader context of Eurasian empire during the early modern period. He is particularly interested in topics related to travel, diplomacy, and absolutism in its various manifestations. In his dissertation project, Matthew is examining contemporaneous French and Persian embassies to Siam in 1685 with heavy emphasis on the travel literature they produced. Through the lens of diplomacy, science, religion, commerce, and cross-cultural exchange, he seeks an understanding of apparently similar articulations and expressions of legitimacy and authority in geographically and culturally distant contexts during a rapidly globalizing early modern period.

Alexia Hernandez

Alexia Hernandez is a PhD candidate from Logansport, IN. Prior to attending IU, she received her bachelors in history with a specialization in secondary education from Manchester University in North Manchester, IN. At Manchester, Alexia’s undergraduate thesis (and overall focus) was on the Chicano Movement, specifically how women’s involvement in this movement had been overlooked not only by historians, but also Chicanos themselves. At IU, Alexia hopes to continue pursing knowledge about the Chicano Movement and the history of Latino/a/x people in the US by highlighting the various experiences of the those in the Latino/a/x community and elevating the voices of the people so that their experiences/stories are centralized in American history.

Conor Howard

Conor William Howard is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington. His dissertation project explores the development of settler connections to land, history, and place in Maine and New Brunswick following the American Revolution and is currently titled “Imagined Homelands: ‘Settler Indigeneity’ in Maine and New Brunswick, c. 1783-1842.” This project is aimed at understanding how Anglo-American settler societies in North America diverged following American independence and how those societies came to imagine themselves as the rightful owners of lands taken from Indigenous communities. Outside of academics, Conor is a husband, father, and—when time permits—an aspiring woodworker. Originally from Michigan, Conor completed an MA in history at the University of Cincinnati before beginning a Ph.D. program at IUB. He is the author of “Remembering the Ladies: Eighteenth-Century Female Letter Writers and Patriarchy,” which evolved from his MA thesis and was published in Early American Studies.

Nate Howard

Nate Howard grew up in San Diego, California and began his career as a scholar of history at Drew University in Madison New Jersey. His undergraduate capstone thesis investigated social and cultural realities of interaction between the first Muslim sailors and Christians in the early Medieval Mediterranean. Nate’s research interests lie in intellectual, cultural, and social global history of the late antique and early medieval periods. His geographic interests are broad, but focused on the societies of the Mediterranean and surrounding regions.

Elena Kendrick

Elena Kendrick is a first-year Ph.D. student from Knoxville, Tennessee and a cohortian of the 2024 Slavery, Freedom, and (Un)Freedom Cluster. In May of 2024, Kendrick earned her B.A. in History and minor in Women’s & Gender Studies from North Carolina Central University (NCCU). During undergrad, she worked closely with Dr. Charles D. Johnson to populate the Orange County, North Carolina databases for the Digital Library on American Slavery Project. In 2023, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar in NCCU’s “Digital Archival Research in Women’s & Gender Studies” course. Her senior year capstone dissected the relationship of survival and resistance in an analysis of Ida B. Wells and a local activist from Knoxville, Tennessee. As a McNair scholar, she passionately shared her capstone at scholarly conferences. Her current research centers nineteenth century Black women’s grassroots activism in the US South and Black Feminist Thought.

Liam Kingsley

Liam James Kingsley is a Ph.D. candidate in African history with minors in global history and African studies. Born and raised in southern New York, they studied history and music composition as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Their dissertation, supported by a 10-month Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship in Windhoek, Namibia and Pretoria, South Africa, studies Namibia’s liberation movement through the lens of healthcare, centering the role of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the construction of the Namibian state. Their research interests include state formation, internationalism, queerness, and the history of medicine. When outside the archive and classroom, Liam can be found performing with the band Moon News or at home with their spouse, their cat Callan, and their dog Grandpa. They can be reached at ljkingsl@iu.edu.

Ivey Kline

Ivey is a part of the Slavery, Freedom and (Un)Freedom Ph.D. cluster, and is broadly interested in histories of the United States South with a focus on Appalachia, histories of slavery and emancipation, and archival power. Her research explores the archive as a knowledge project that has produced an exclusionary narrative of the South. Before coming to IU, her work studied Georgianna Saunders a Black midwife in southwest Virginia during the early 20th century by placing Saunders within historical context and practices of power that attempted to silence her. Ivey is originally from Rockville, Virginia and received her B.A. in History from Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. While at Roanoke she worked for the Center for Studying Structures of Race to co-create the Genealogy of Slavery project which sought to locate the names and narratives of enslaved people in Roanoke County. She also worked as the collections manager of the Maurice Berger Memorial Archive and Library.

Hayden Kolowrat

Hayden studies the history of modern U.S. foreign relations and empire. He received his BA in History and MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Under the supervision of Professor Alfred W. McCoy, Hayden’s senior honors thesis examines how the US Army “Americanized” colonial soldiers in the Philippines and his MA thesis describes how U.S. history textbooks chose to incorporate the history of the Philippine-American War over time. His dissertation will analyze how the United States used psywar and cultural assimilation to maintain its geopolitical alliances during the Cold War.

Casimir Korducki

Casimir “Casey” Korducki hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is a proud graduate of the Milwaukee Public Schools and Marquette University. His work focuses on Dominican peasant movements and opposition politics in the post-Trujillo moment, with a particular emphasis on the ways local and national groups negotiated disparate and oftentimes contradictory political ideologies in confronting the increasingly authoritarian regime of Joaquin Balaguer (1966-1978). Casey is currently living and researching in the Dominican Republic with funding from the Fulbright-Hays DDRA. While in the field, he is conducting archival research and oral history interviews in and around Santo Domingo; most recently in Mamá Tingó, Monte Plata. He can be reached at cekorduc@iu.edu .

Molly Korman

Molly Korman earned a BA in History and Classics from the University of Illinois Chicago, and is currently enrolled in the MA in Ancient History and Language Acquisition Program. Her research focuses on Roman Britain, analyzing both written and material history to better understand Roman migration and cultural identity. Outside of Britain, she is also interested in migration and expansion throughout the Roman Empire, with a particular focus on Roman provinces, as well as ancient constructions of gender and sexuality.

Ellie Kurt

Ellie Kurt is a dual master’s student in History and Library Science, her primary interest is in the place where history, literature, and memory meet. Ellie received her BA in History with minors in Political Science and Fine Arts from Roosevelt University. During her time at Roosevelt, Ellie participated in the Loundy Human Rights Project, interned at the Chicago History Museum, and served as a Newberry Library Undergraduate Fellow. Her Senior Thesis titled, “History Fictions” Curriculum and Pedagogy: An Exploration of Fact and Fiction Through Historical Narratives in Literature, explores how historians construct notions of truth by applying theories of cultural hegemony to curriculum design. Since beginning her MA, Ellie has interrogated the historiographic genre. In one case reading historical fiction as historiography, and in another inquiring into the role imperialism played in the professionalization of the field. Ellie’s work focuses on how cultural memory evolves and changes as it is reinterpreted for new purposes.

Jonathan Lanz

Jonathan Lanz is a historian of childhood, Modern European History, and the Holocaust. He is a final year doctoral candidate in History and Jewish Studies. Jonathan’s dissertation writes a history of the so-called ‘Birkenau Boys,’ a remarkable group of eighty-nine Jewish child survivors from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Throughout his studies, Jonathan has been a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies (Claims Conference), a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, and an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellow.  He is currently a Gerda Henkel PhD scholar. Jonathan has presented his research at over a dozen domestic and international conferences and has held visiting researcher positions at the University of Leicester, UK and the University of Oslo, Norway. Jonathan is presently employed as a contract researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He received a B.A. in World History with distinction at Georgetown University in 2019 and an M.A. in European History at Indiana University in 2021. You can contact Jonathan at jlanz@iu.edu.

Zoe Lawson

Zoe Lawson is a master's student in United States history. Originally from St. Charles, MO, she completed her B.A. at Ball State University in philosophy, political science, and Spanish literature and culture. There, she completed a thesis studying the pre-cursors to fascist philosophies in Civil War-era Spain, especially as they relate to violence and cultural rebirth. She now focuses on the study of radical movements in the Gilded Age U.S. Her broader research interests focus on the intellectual histories of radical groups, especially labor movements and those on the radical right, through the lens of political theory.

Janelle Lemley

Janelle Lemley is a dual masters student in Ancient History and Library Science. She was born and raised in La Porte, Indiana and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Purdue University Northwest. She has a keen interest in the ancient world as a whole, but she is especially interested in how fragments of Minoan and Mycenean culture may have been preserved in Archaic Greek oral history and myth.

Siying Li

Siying Li is a Ph.D. student in the East Asia program of the History department at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her M.A. in Chinese Ancient History from Northeast Normal University in 2019. Her research interest is utilizing newly-discovered multi-language archives, especially the Manchu and Mongolian languages to explore the Eight Banners System and the foreign relations of the Qing Empire (1644-1912) and the history of Christianity in Late Imperial China. She presented her M.A. thesis, “A Case Study of a Toksoi Da’s Adopted Son in Jinzhou during the Reign of Emperor Yongzheng as Revealed in Manchu Heitu Archives” in the Manchu Language Summer Seminar in the Research Center of Eurasian Culture at Kyoto University in 2019.

Yuruo Liang

Yuruo Liang, from China, is a PhD student studying the history of the environment and animals in China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She earned a master’s degree in China Studies from the University of Washington in 2024. During her studies, she used animals such as tigers, falcons, and horses as examples to explore how rulers utilized these animals’ mobility to shape the identities of different ethnic groups and social classes and to influence the cultural imagination of the Qing Empire. She is interested in examining how animals were embedded in social networks connecting the frontier and the Central Plains, and in investigating the power dynamics between humans and the environment, as well as between humans and animals. Beyond her academic research, Yuruo has over twenty years of experience playing the cello.

Jon Manley

Jon Manley is a PhD candidate in ancient history with a minor in Latin. He earned bachelor’s degrees in both History and Classical Studies from Indiana University and an MA in History from the University of Louisville before returning to Indiana University in 2017 to begin doctoral studies. He is broadly interested in the social and political history of the Roman Republic and early Empire. More specifically, his dissertation research is concerned with the social identity of Roman soldiers and veterans during the late Roman Republic. He has worked as an editorial assistant for The American Historical Review and has taught at Indiana University and the University of Louisville. He can be contacted at jbmanley@iu.edu.

Manuel Martinez Alvarenga

Manuel Martinez Alvarenga was born in the city of La Union, El Salvador. Before studying History at Indiana University, he attended the University of Houston and focused his studies in History and Education. He was a writer and editor for the Houston History Magazine and a member of the Mellon Research Scholars Fellowship 2019-2020 cohort. As part of his research at the University of Houston, Manuel completed an honors thesis studying the lasting effects of Salvadoran migration and activism in the city of Houston titled Finding Home in The Sunbelt: A Study of Salvadoran Activism in Houston 1980-1999. He also participated in workshops in Cuba as part of the University of Houston sponsored Translate Cuba study abroad in 2019. Manuel’s research interest includes the 20th-century Central American history, Latinx socio-cultural developments, Latinx migration patterns, and the effects of globalism through a social history lens. He is interested in how transnational narratives can represent a bridging element between the studies of Latinx populations in the United States and Central America and how these can shape identity formation and contribute to formation Pan-American concepts like Latininad.

Margarita Martínez-Osorio

Margarita Martínez-Osorio is a historian from Bogotá, Colombia. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy in 2014 and a B.A. in History in 2015 from Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá. In 2020, she completed her M.A. degree in History from Indiana University, Bloomington, and is now a PhD Candidate in History at the same university. Prior to her studies at IU, Margarita worked as a researcher at Dejusticia, a Colombian-based think tank, focusing on gender inequalities in Colombia, sexual and reproductive rights, and the gender impacts of the Colombian peace process. Since 2014, she has also served as a lecturer at the School of Human Sciences at Universidad del Rosario, teaching classes on modern Colombia’s history, ethics, and historical memory. In 2018, she began her doctoral studies in Latin American History at Indiana University, supported by the Fulbright-Colciencias scholarship and the International Dissertation Research Grant of the Social Science Research Council. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the role of peasant women in the agrarian reform process of the 1960s in the Colombian Caribbean. She specializes in feminist political ecology, agrarian studies, women's political participation, and sexual and reproductive rights. Margarita currently serves as the coordinator of the Gender thematic line at Dejusticia (Bogotá, Colombia).

Maggie McCool

Maggie McCool is a PhD student studying repression and Soviet influence in the former East Germany. She is originally from Newburyport, Massachusetts. Prior to coming to Indiana University, she received her B.A. in History and German from The George Washington University. As the recipient of the Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship, she conducted research in Berlin for her senior honors thesis “A Critical Examination of Imprisonment by East Germany’s Stasi: The Legacy of Trauma at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in History and Memory.” Maggie plans to continue examining the role of prisons and state police forces in the oppression of East German citizens, and how those institutions grew out of their Soviet counterparts.

Marina Mecham

Marina is a doctoral student in African history minoring in gender studies. She grew up in the mountains of the far north-west corner of Colorado. In 2016, she graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Colorado where her undergraduate honors thesis, “Murder on the Picket Line: Operation Rescue and the Legal Battle Against Abortion in the Denver-Metropolitan Area, 1989-1993,” won the Myra Rich Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Thesis. Her graduate research focuses on reproductive rights in South Africa. Currently, her research questions center on the affective responses from differing race, class, and religious groups to the creation of abortion laws in South Africa from 1975 to 1996. She plans to further develop this work through oral histories in her dissertation. More broadly, Marina is interested in historical questions surrounding reproductive rights and health, gender, race, sexuality, emotion, medicine, and law.

Filip Mitričević

Filip Mitričević is a Ph.D. candidate in Eastern European history, interested primarily in memory studies in the lands of former Yugoslavia, memory in a transnational context, the Cold War, and the Yugoslav involvement in the Non-Alignment Movement. After successfully defending his prospectus in 2023, he is in the writing stage of his dissertation tentatively titled The Champion of Antifascism: Yugoslavia’s Multidirectional Legitimacy Discourse in the Early Cold War (1948-1961). The project analyzes the transformative capacity of the Yugoslav communist regime’s legitimacy discourse in a domestic and international context. During the 2024/2025 school year, Filip will be focused on writing with the help of the Doris Quinn Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Before coming to Bloomington, Filip obtained his BA and MA degrees in history from the University of Novi Sad, in Serbia. On a fateful June evening in 2018, Filip discovered baseball and fell in love with the Chicago White Sox. He still believes they will prevail, eventually.

William Morgan

William Morgan is a Ph.D. student specializing in the cultural history of early America. He is interested in research questions about Black politics, the Revolution, and the first abolition movement. William has written about the Black-led campaign for legislative emancipation in New England, the intellectual activism which undergirded that campaign, and the culture and memory of Black “founders.” He ultimately hopes to reframe the Revolution around a radical agenda of abolitionism and equality which extended into the nineteenth century and which inspired the later, more well-known movement against slavery.

Kelly Mueller

Kelly Mueller is a Ph.D. candidate in Ancient History with a minor in Religious Studies. Broadly speaking, she is interested in the social, religious, and political history of Rome and the ancient Mediterranean. Her research interests include the works of Josephus, the Flavian dynasty, early Christianity, and Roman religious practices. Her dissertation, “Between the Conquered and the Conquerors: Flavius Josephus and the Iconography of Flavian Rome”, explores the relationship between the built environment, imperial messaging, and the lived experience of conquered peoples in the city of Rome, focusing on Josephus and his involvement in and written history of the First Jewish War (66-73 CE). She is originally from Twinsburg, OH and earned her B.A. in History and Classics from Loyola University Maryland and her M.A. in History from Indiana University Bloomington.

Jakob Myers

Jakob Myers is a PhD student with a BA in History, Arabic, and GIS from Michigan State University. Jakob is studying the global moral, ecological, social, political, and economic implications of Zanzibar's integration into the global economic system of the 19th century. So far, this has involved conducting research in Spanish, English, German, Arabic, and Kiswahili. Their paper, "Mocking the Conquistadors: Transnational Satirical Responses to Germany's East African Empire," won Michigan State's LoRomer Prize for best undergraduate history essay and is pending publication. Before coming to grad school, Jakob worked on a congressional campaign in the Chicago area and coached Liberia's national quiz team in Monrovia. Jakob originally hails from Lisle, Illinois.

Grant Thomas Neal

I am a historian of the United States and the modern Atlantic world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am a third-year doctoral student, and a member of the PhD cluster in Histories of Slavery, Freedom and (Un)Freedom. I am chiefly focused on the transnational connections between slavery in the United States and the wider Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. My most recent research has dealt with the dimensions of the longstanding hemp trade between the Russian Empire and the United States in the decades prior to the American Civil War, with a particular focus on how slaveholding hemp planters in Kentucky attempted to utilize Whig state-protectionist policies to keep higher-quality imported Russian hemp from drowning out a nascent American domestic market that could not match its sister crop cotton in terms of global trade preponderance. My further historical interests include American empire in a global context, comparative developmental histories of global capitalism and socialism, and American culture and labor in the context of slave and free labor. I have been previously published with ABC-Clio. Before coming to IU, I attended Loyola University Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Uzoamaka Nwachukwu

Uzoamaka Nwachukwu is a PhD candidate at Indiana University. Her research focus is to interrogate how taxation restructured the social, economic and political system of South-East Nigeria. Uzoamaka obtained her Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Art Degree from the Department of History, University Of Ibadan. Her research on taxation will evaluate the transition of slave labor to wage labor, the dynamics of freedom and the practice of (UN) freedom.

Meghan Paradis

Meghan Paradis is a PhD student in Modern European History with an outside minor in Jewish Studies. She is interested in German and Austrian women’s social and cultural history, the history of emotions, motherhood and girlhood, and the cultural construction of gendered adolescence, delinquency, and crisis. Her dissertation is provisionally entitled “Imagining Jewish Mothers, Raising Jewish Girls: A Cultural History of German-Jewish Girlhood, 1871-1933.” She has also worked on the construction of lesbian identity and Jewish lesbian subjectivity in women’s periodicals in the Weimar Republic. Before coming to Indiana University, she studied the history of women and gender and contemporary German film and literature at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Sydney-Paige Patterson

Sydney-Paige Patterson received her B.A. in African American and African Diaspora Studies and English from Indiana University-Bloomington. She is also a graduate of the. John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program at New York University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D at Indiana University in African Diasporic History with a minor in India Studies. Her research examines transnational social movements throughout the twentieth century, focusing primarily on how Black Americans have inspired or contributed to the formation of radical movements for freedom around the world. Her dissertation research utilizes ethnographic and archival methods to interrogate how Black and Dalit women contributed vital intellectual labor to the Black and Dalit Panther Parties during the late twentieth century.

Monika Pendurkova

Monika Pendurkova is a doctoral student in Modern European History. Originally from Bulgaria, she received her B.S. in Political Science and Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduating Summa Cum Laude, she completed her M.A. in Interdisciplinary Research and Studies on Eastern Europe at the University of Bologna. Her M.A. thesis examined the differences between judicial reforms, the roles of the general prosecutor, and social movements in Romania in relation to those in Bulgaria. Monika’s research interests lie in the development of capitalism, socialism, gender history, ethnographic studies, and youth culture. Her geographical interests include the entirety of the Balkans, with a specific interest on Bulgaria and North Macedonia.

Ashtyn Porter

Ashtyn Porter is a PhD candidate who specializes in comparative U.S. history, with an emphasis on the histories of race, the environment, and colonialism. Before joining IU Bloomington, she attended Roanoke College, where she received a BA in international relations and creative writing, and acted as a co-founding member of the Center for Studying Structures of Race. As part of the CSSR, she helped develop a database collecting genealogical information on people enslaved in the Roanoke area during the 19th century, with the goal of providing more robust ancestry information and familial connections where previously such data was kept disorganized in local archives. She also studied the history of environmental racism and redlining in Roanoke, analyzing the city’s history through the lens of colonialism’s impact on race and environment in the United States. She hopes to continue this study of the cross-section between colonialism and the environment in the U.S. in her dissertation.

Brian Quinn

Brian Quinn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern European History with a Minor in Jewish Studies. His research focuses on twentieth-century Germany, European imperialism, and the Holocaust. He earned his B.A. in History and International Relations at Oakland University (Rochester, MI) in the spring of 2019. Brian is broadly interested in the political and cultural history of modern Europe and its global entanglements. His dissertation investigates the relationship between European colonialism and National Socialism through the history of the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum (today’s Museum am Rothenbaum or MARKK) during the Third Reich. In the 2023-2024 academic year, he further developed this project as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg. From 2021 to 2023, Brian was an Editorial Assistant for the American Historical Review. Before attending Indiana University, he worked as a legal assistant at an immigration law firm in Troy, Michigan. Brian can be reached at briquin@iu.edu.

Alex Ranc

Alex Ranc, originally from Huntington, IN, completed his BA in History at IU in 2023 and is enrolled in the MA in US History. His research has primarily focused on US foreign relations and international politics in the 20th century, ranging from the buildup to the First World War to various events and incidents throughout the Cold War. His background extends throughout history, and he has experience with a variety of source material. Other interests in his field include the developments made due to political events, such as developments in technology and overall focuses due to various decisions made by parties over the course of an event or conflict as well as the socio-economic factors at play. He has worked as an intern at The History Center in Fort Wayne, IN, a local museum focusing on Allen County.

Noah Render

Noah Render grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana before earning their bachelor’s degree in History at Salem State University in 2016. They completed their master’s degree in History at North Carolina State University in 2019. Noah has a background in late medieval and early modern historical subjects with a focus on cultural history. Their doctoral research concerns resurrection miracles in canonization dossiers and miracle collections from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries.

Meghan Riley

A proud Coloradan, Meghan Riley is an historian of Europe, Jewish Europe, France, the Holocaust, the Second World War, and humanitarianism. She graduated with bachelor degrees in English Writing and in History from the University of Oklahoma, where she was a National Merit Scholar. She is interested in the relationship between the Holocaust and humanitarianism, and her dissertation explores the work of American humanitarian organizations in French concentration camps during the Second World War. During the 2017-2018 academic year she was a Fulbright Fellow in France, and from 2017 to 2019 she was a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies. She has participated in the Global Humanitarianism Research Academy and the Auschwitz Jewish Studies Fellows Program. Her doctoral work has spanned twelve archives in four countries and has been supported by the American Academy of Jewish Research as well by IU’s Office of the Vice President for International Affairs; College Arts and Humanities Institute; Institute for European Studies; Borns Jewish Studies Program; and the Department of History. During the 2020-2021 academic year she will serve as a Future Faculty Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at Indiana University Northwest.

Macailin Rodriguez

Macailin graduated from Maryville University in 2022 with a Bachelor of Arts in History with a double minor in Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is a first-year Ph.D. student studying American history at Indiana University. Her research interests include studying the history of twentieth-century U.S. social movements concentrating on race, gender, and class. During Macailin’s undergraduate studies she created the History and Law Club at Maryville University and interned at the Missouri History Museum. She is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Laura Smith

Laura is a doctoral student focusing on ancient history. She studies socioeconomics in the Hellenistic and Roman periods with an emphasis on interregional trade, identity, and cross-cultural exchange. She received her BA and MA in history from North Carolina State University, where she studied interactions between the Jewish people and the Romans. Her master’s thesis focused on the acculturation of merchant diaspora communities at Roman port cities. Laura is from Wilmington, North Carolina.

Elizabeth Spaeth

Lizzy is a Ph.D. student in United States History researching international students, migration, and social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally from Philadelphia, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs and Anthropology at The George Washington University. She taught abroad for several years in the Federated States of Micronesia, Mexico, and the Philippines. In 2017, she received her M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Program in the Social Sciences with a thesis centered on the visual representation of race and violence in the Philippine-American War. She then taught special education in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood for two years while studying for a Master of Arts in Teaching Special Education. She is in her third year of IU’s Ph.D. program in U.S. History. She has assisted in teaching courses related to U.S. and the world and introduction to U.S. history at IU. She is currently an editorial assistant at the Journal of American History.

Tommy Stephens

Thomas (Tommy) Stephens (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington. He earned his MA from Durham University and his undergraduate degree from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. His research interests center on the cultural and social history of war in Britain and its empire in the 20th century. His dissertation is titled “All the Work Without the Excitement of War,” Age, Gender, and Race in the Royal Army Service Corps, 1888–1965.” The project analyzes the regimental culture and experiences of the soldier-workers in the British Army’s main logistical regiment. In addition to his teaching experience, Thomas has served as an Editorial Assistant for the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History, as well as an editor for Process, a blog for american history. Thomas enjoys hiking, board games, and roleplaying games. He lives in Bloomington with his partner and two cats. 

Andrea Stokes

Andrea Stokes is a first-year Ph.D student whose research interests include twentieth-century Black women and youth social activism practices, labor movements, and film studies. Before pursuing her doctoral studies, she was an Indiana youth worker who provided basic needs assistance to young adults transitioning out of foster care. She’s motivated to memorialize and create spaces for marginalized Black folks across the diaspora. Moreover, she hopes that her work in the field can build collective understanding, healing, and community amongst Black women in the diaspora. Raised in Indianapolis, she left the Midwest to pursue her B.S. in History from Tuskegee University and an M.S. in Nonprofit Management from Columbia University. 

Olivia Streett

Olivia Streett is a Ph.D. student in Modern European History and a Ph.D. minor in African Studies. Her current research centers on German colonialism, particularly the history of colonial Tanzania before the end of World War I. She is broadly interested in studying constructs of nationalism, as well as histories of land use, settler colonialism, and agricultural labor schemes. In her first two years at IU, she was able to give quite a lot of thought to the history of coffee as she worked as a local barista. In addition to her current graduate studies, Olivia now serves as coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Workshop at IU. Recently, she was fortunate to conduct archival research on German settlement schemes at the Tanzania National Archives following her participation in a Fulbright-Hays GPA intensive Kiswahili program hosted by University of Nairobi and Pwani University in Kenya. Originally from Bel Air, Maryland, she received her BA in history from Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, where she graduated with honors. Before graduate school, Olivia taught high school history and German to a group of exceptional learners in Raleigh, North Carolina. She intends to continue a career in teaching where her dog, Blueregard, may continue in his role as guest lecturer.

Madeline Stull

Madeline Stull, from Phoenix, Arizona, received her Bachelor’s degree in History and Arabic Studies from Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University (ASU). As an undergraduate, Madeline was fortunate to receive numerous research grants from ASU research centers, allowing her to spend extended time in Israel/Palestine and south eastern Europe. Traveling between the regions, she became interested in the use of the built environment as a medium to establish a collective narrative of the past. As a life-long language learner, Madeline began studying Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian and became further fascinated with the culture and history of the Balkans, ultimately leading to the completion of a honors undergraduate thesis entitled, “Physical Landscapes as Living Memories: A Case Study of Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb.” Shortly after, Madeline earned a Master’s degree in European History from (ASU) with a thesis entitled, “Mut(e)able Landscapes: Collective Memory, Identity, and the Built Environment of Belgrade.” The study was supported by a Fulbright Research grant to Serbia and a partnership with faculty at the University of Belgrade. At Indiana University, Madeline intends to continue studying south Eastern Europe through the lens of material culture and collective memory.

Victoria Sutherland

Originally from Winchester, Indiana, Victoria Sutherland graduated with distinction from Indiana University Bloomington. She earned two undergraduate degrees, a B.A. in Classical Civilization, with a focus on literature and culture, and a B.A. in English. She is continuing her studies at IUB in the Master’s of Ancient History and Language Acquisition (MAHLA) program. Victoria is primarily interested in studying how the transformation of the Roman state from a Republic to an Empire impacted different aspects of the Roman state, especially changes in the political, social, and cultural spheres. She also has an interest in analyzing how Roman influence continues to show itself in the literature, art, and television of the modern world. Victoria hopes to complete her masters and then continue with a Ph.D. in Ancient History. Although she loves history, Victoria also plans to utilize her English degree, and eventually write a book or two (maybe three). Additionally, she is interested in making the study of ancient history more accessible, and is interested in creating resources to that end.

M. Fatih Torun

Fatih Torun is a historian specializing in early modern Europe and the Middle East, with a broad focus on princely courts, high and non-elite cultures, and power dynamics. His academic interests center on the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth century, incorporating perspectives such as cultural history, transcultural studies, material culture studies, race theory, and queer theory. In his dissertational research, he aims to situate the Ottoman experience within a broader global context, revealing transcultural connections and cultural communications with early modern courts in both the East and West. Fatih completed his undergraduate education at Yildiz Technical University and earned his master’s degree at Istanbul Bilgi University, where he worked closely with Prof. Suraiya Faroqhi on Ottoman dynastic festivals. Fatih is originally from Istanbul, Turkey, and is an avid coffee drinker, traveler, and museum lover. His publications include “The Role of Artisans in the Circumcision Festival of 1675 during the Reign of Sultan Mehmed IV,” in Belleten 88, no. 311 (2024): 111-146, and “The 1675 Imperial Festival and Firework Makers in an Ottoman Register,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 8, no. 2 (2021): 147-176. His next publication, “Beyond Borders and Beasts: Exploring an Ottoman Traveler’s Colonial Discourse and His Contribution to the Formation of Race in the Early Modern Period” is forthcoming in Comitatus. Visit his online profile indiana.academia.edu/torunfatihh for more information.

Dominic Treadwell

Dominic Treadwell is a PhD student in American History at Indiana University, specializing in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism and labor. His research focuses on how the working class mobilized trade unions to respond to changes in the economic system and, in turn, how capital reacted to working-class organization. He holds a master's degree from the University of New Mexico where his thesis examined the impact of post-World War II economic and social developments on organized labor. With a particular interest in working-class radicalism, Dominic’s research explores the continuity and discontinuity of the American radical tradition.

Bobby Tull

Bobby Tull is a current MA student focusing on ancient history, specifically ancient philosophers. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University in South Bend with a major in History and a minor in philosophy. While originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Bobby moved to South Bend in 2018 where he finished his bachelor's degree and coached high school football and unified track (similar to Special Olympics). While spending the 2021-2022 school year as a high school math teacher, he will be furthering his studies in history with the hopes of one day getting back into education.

Eric Ware

Born and raised in Davison, Michigan, Eric Ware graduated from high school in 2007. He then went to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, whence, in 2011, he graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History (minor in Political Science) and a B.A. in Latin. Eric subsequently earned his M.A. in Medieval History from Western Michigan University in 2014 after writing a thesis entitled The Social and Cultural Meanings of Names in Late Antique Italy, 313-604. He was then accepted into IU’s History Department as a doctoral student in 2014 and has studied there since. Eric is currently A.B.D. and is working on his yet-untitled dissertation, which explores the political networks and geographies of the later Carolingian popes. More broadly, Eric considers himself an Early Medievalist, and his interests include political culture in the Early Middle Ages, the memory of Ancient Rome, network analysis, the politics of religion in Early Medieval Europe, and relationships between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

Kate Wilson

Kate Wilson is PhD student studying British and British imperial history. In 2021 she earned her BA from Skidmore College with a double major in History and English. She then went to London, where she completed her MA in History at UCL. Her undergraduate thesis explored British women’s travel writing and West Africa at the end of the nineteenth century while her master's thesis explored women’s travel writing and collecting during EIC rule in India. More recently, she has examined the writings of “English governesses” working abroad in the nineteenth century to consider the intersections between informal empire, literary genre, education, and gender. 

Andrew Woodworth

Andrew Woodworth is a PhD candidate in Medieval History, with a secondary focus on the Roman era. His chief research interests include legitimacy, political myth, ethnic identity, and especially ideas of the “barbarian” in the Late Antique and Early Medieval periods. His dissertation work focuses on the audiences toward whom ethnic rhetoric was directed in the sixth-century Latin West. Prior to studying at Indiana University, Andrew received his undergraduate degree in History and English Literature from Baker University (Baldwin, KS) and his Masters’ Degree in Medieval History from King’s College (London, UK). Andrew also spent several years working in the private sector as a research worker in the hybrid crop industry.

Yuyuan Zhang

Yuyuan Zhang is a dual PhD student in the Department of History and the Department of Religious Studies. Born and raised in Tianjin, a municipality in North China, he earned his bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature in Zhejiang University located in the Yangtze River Delta, South China. He then went to UK and completed his master’s degree in Transnational Studies in the History Department, University College London. Yuyuan’s research focuses on the French Enlightenment philosophes’ reception and appropriation of Chinese thoughts (especially Confucian ethics) in the eighteenth century from the lens of global intellectual history and comparative religious ethics. His other interests include modern Chinese history and comparative philosophy (between ancient Greece and ancient China). He believes in the importance of cross-cultural understanding and aspires to bridge the gap between the fields of history and religious ethics. Yuyuan likes the outside world. He has travelled to more than twenty centuries. Now he likes to travel around the lakes in Bloomington with his young black Labrador.

Zhanhao Zhang

Zhanhao Zhang is a Ph.D. student specializing in modern East Asian history. He holds a B.A. in History from the University of Washington and a M.A. in History from Georgetown University. Zhanhao is particularly interested in how East Asian intellectuals re-conceptualized and reproduced a system of knowledge on Western ideologies and cultures, such as feminism and Christianity. Currently, he is working on how East Asian intellectuals engaged in the knowledge production of the western liberal thinking in the 1980s and what impacts did they bring to the ultimate outcomes of the social and political movements. He can be contacted at zhangzha@iu.edu.

Kudzai Zinyemba

Kudzai Zinyemba is a dual master’s student in History and Library Science, with a focus on US History. She was born and raised in Avon, Indiana and graduated from Indiana University with B.A. degrees in History and Linguistics. Her senior paper discussed arson and insurance fraud in urban black communities in the 1980s and interrogated how media shaped narratives of who is and isn’t allowed to be victims of crime. Her research interests involve contemporary financial fraud, public media coverage of crime, and how white-collar crime affects middle- and low-income communities.