Current Graduate Students

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.

George Andrei

George is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the environmental history of Romania. Originally from Sibiu, Romania, his dissertation locates the transnational and colonial origins of modern forestry in Romania and investigates the degree to which forests, resource access, and forest management shaped understandings of modern political, economic, and environmental citizenship from the perspective of forestry specialists and rural peoples of the Carpathian mountains in the early twentieth century. George holds an MA in History from Indiana University-Bloomington and a BA in History and Russian from Ohio State University. He is currently the Future Faculty Teaching Fellow in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Classics at Butler University and has received the Walter S. Rosenberry Fellowship from the Forest History Society. In 2021-2022, he was Fulbright Student Research Fellow affiliated with the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy. George has also held various service positions as a graduate student at IU and is currently treasurer of the Society for Romanian Studies.

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.

Clintin Austin

Clintin Austin completed a BA with a double major in History and Geography with a minor in Political Science from Texas Christian University. He graduated Suma Cum Laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Before university, he worked as a counterintelligence agent with the US Army. Since graduation, he worked as a civilian contractor vetting locals and other country nationals in Afghanistan. Clintin’s historical interests lay in the usage of Greek mercenary forces during classical history, the diffusion of Hellenistic cultural throughout the expeditions of Alexander the Great, and the establishment of the successor kingdoms in Bactria and northern India.

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.

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 Biesecker-Mast is a master’s student in the history program at Indiana University with a focus on US history. At IU she hopes to build upon her undergraduate Honors thesis that endeavored to read against the silences of the archives in order to make audible/visible the voices and experiences of Black women even in primary sources that sought to erase their stories. Her thesis looked at Black women’s daily radical resistance from the early Atlantic period through the antebellum era of slavery in the US especially as that resistance was made manifest in acts of maternalism. Anna found this project to be fascinating from the perspective of filling in gaps of US history and from a social justice perspective that seeks to uplift Black women’s voices that have been silenced and/or distorted in order to perpetuate White supremacy and patriarchy. Anna earned her B.A. at the University of Dayton (UD) with a double major in History and English and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. Through her coursework at UD, she was privileged to encounter feminist and queer theory that inform her current research in US history. Anna is from Dayton, OH and loves running, trying new recipes, scoping out local restaurants, and sipping good coffee.

Kelly Bosworth

Kelly Bosworth is a dual Ph.D. student in the Department of History and the Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Kelly holds a B.A. in political science from Grinnell College and an M.A. in ethnomusicology from IU. Her research focuses on vernacular music, race-making, and migration in the twentieth-century United States. Her dissertation on music/sound/noise in a flooded World War II worker housing project in the Pacific Northwest engages academic and public work on disaster, housing, the environment, sound, and mobilities. Previously presented research includes topics such as river management policies along the Columbia River (1930s-1950s), Woody Guthrie in the Pacific Northwest (1941), and expressive cultural practices of Dust Bowl migrants in Farm Security Administration camps (1930s-1940s). In 2018, Kelly joined the inaugural cohort of the Making American Music program at the Smithsonian Institution and in 2019-2020, she was a HASTAC Scholar with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. She previously worked as a program coordinator for an affordable housing nonprofit (REACH Community Development) and as a musician and music educator. In 2013, she founded a nonprofit to support low-income adults and families on weeklong bicycle trips around the state of Oregon.

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.

Finch Collins

Finch Collins is a dual degree master’s student in History and Library Science and the Assistant Curator of Rare Books at the Linda Hall Library, the world’s foremost independent research library devoted to science, engineering, and technology. His historical research focuses on early modern science and natural knowledge, critical bibliography, and queer and trans pasts; he’s currently writing a history of the alchemical hermaphrodite. His undergraduate degree is from Brown University, with concentrations in Modern Culture and Media and American Studies. Before starting at the Linda Hall Library in July 2023, Finch worked as a History course assistant, as a curatorial assistant at the Lilly Library, and as a text encoding and bibliographic assistant at the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project.

Miguel Cruz-Díaz

Miguel A. Cruz Díaz was born and raised in the city of Arecibo, on the northern coast of the island of Puerto Rico. He earned a bachelor’s degree in European History from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus, and a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies from New York University. Miguel has taught as an assistant instructor at Indiana University and has worked as an assistant editor for the Diplomatic History journal and as a graduate assistant/outreach coordinator for the Institute for European Studies. Miguel will be serving as an assistant editor for the American Historical Review journal starting this coming fall semester. A doctoral candidate, Miguel is currently in the process of writing his dissertation on anarchist anti-fascist international networks.

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.

João Pedro Corrêa da Silva

João Pedro Corrêa da Silva is Ph.D student from southern Brazil. He earned his BA in History in 2020 at the International University of Parana. He focuses his research on African slavery, resistance, identity, race, memory, and oral history. He works with Quilombos, communities founded by escaped slaves, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. His most recent research sought to show how a small quilombo struggles with prejudice, white supremacism, and racist politics in Brazil's very south. He also worked on heritage and identity regarding German colonization in the State of Rio Grande do Sul and the African community. He is the creator of a website called memory and prejudice. On that website, he deals with racial and sexist issues from the beginning of the '40s in Cachoeira do Sul, a small city in southern Brazil.

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.

Brock DeMark

Brock DeMark is a historian of urban space, imperial ideologies, and material culture in colonial-era India and the wider British Empire. Having completed his first year of coursework in the Ph.D. program, his research interests center on the production of colonial, hybrid spaces, and the role of such spaces in facilitating uniquely modern anxieties, desires, and social imaginaries. Active in IU’s Dhar India Studies and Victorian Studies programs, Brock is pursuing Ph.D. minors in India Studies and Cultural Studies. Before moving to Bloomington in the fall of 2020, Brock graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arkansas in 2019 with a B.A. in History and English Literature. He also worked for one year as a recruiter and advising assistant for the University of Arkansas Honors College, as well as an archival assistant for the Ozark Literacy Council in Fayetteville, Arkansas. When he is not reading or writing about history, Brock enjoys hiking with his partner, Savannah, reading popular astronomy articles, and watching/playing basketball.

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.

Tom Driver

Tom Driver graduated from IU Bloomington in 2019, receiving a bachelor's degree in English with a double minor in History and Medieval Studies. This particular melting pot of liberal arts led to a fascination for the historiography of medieval literature as it relates to issues of gender and sexuality. In his undergraduate thesis, he endeavored to place the courtly romance fiction of the 12th century within the larger context of literary eroticism. He is currently studying female authorship in post plague London, while exploring the curation and preservation of digital history.

Ufuk Erol

Originally from Turkey, Ufuk earned his BA in History and Sociology from Bogazici University in Istanbul. He entered the MA/PhD program in History at IU in 2016 and completed his master’s degree in 2018. As a PhD candidate in Middle Eastern history, Ufuk focuses on the social and religious history of the early modern Ottoman and Safavid Empires. His dissertation project examines the historical development of Qizilbash Sufi religiosity and Qizilbash-Alevi communities in early modern Anatolia and Iran from the 1450s to the 1600s. His research explores how Qizilbash Sufism gave rise to new formulations of power, religion and identity through discursive traditions and rituals; what kind of role Qizilbash communities played in the Safavid Empire; how we can situate Qizilbash movement in the context of early modern Ottoman empire-building. Ufuk has conducted archival and library research in Turkey and Iran. In terms of research languages, he has studied Persian in Iran and Classical Arabic in Jordan.

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 summa cum laude 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 Durban, South Africa. Her dissertation research focuses on the history of an arts and literary magazine titled Staffrider, and incorporates oral history. Maggie’s research makes a vital intervention in the historiography of “struggle” by untangling intellectual projects and cultural forms of expression in Durban from the dominant dialogue of labor strikes and organized resistance. Maggie additionally has work experience teaching both history and isiZulu, and has held a position as editorial assistant at the American Historical Review.

Carrie Fudickar

Carrie Fudickar is a PhD Candidate writing about Afro-Creek Property in the early nineteenth century. Before studying US History at IU, Carrie earned a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media from the University of Oklahoma.

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."

K. Ermelinda García

K. Ermelinda García is a second year Ph.D. student studying Mexican History at Indiana University. As an undergraduate, they were involved as a Ronald E. McNair scholar at Grand Valley State University. They were 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. As a Grand Rapids native, they also worked within the Grand Rapids Public Library Archives. Ermelinda is broadly interested in questions of identity, they have previously studied race, masculinity, and homosexuality in Mexico. Seeking to continue exploring who is excluded from national identity, their doctoral research will focus on themes of gender, sexuality, and citizenship during late twentieth century Mexico.

Annewsa Ghosh

Annewsa Ghosh is a first-year graduate student researching on the maritime labour history of the Early Modern Indian Ocean World. She hails from the suburbs of Chandannagar by the river Hooghly where they have grown up for the most part of their life. Apart from research, Annewsa is keenly interested in archival conservation and has worked on two government funded archiving projects during her time as an M. Phil. research scholar at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Annewsa aims to build upon his M.Phil. dissertation, particularly how structures of colonial power were sustained through convict labour, transoceanic carceral networks, and punitive discipline in 18th-century South Asia. In her free time, Annewsa can almost always be found watching a movie, befriending a cat, or ambling along an art museum.

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.

Justin Hawkins

Justin Hawkins is a PhD student studying nineteenth century American history and is an editorial assistant at the American Historical Review. 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. 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 also 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 from Plainwell, Michigan. Before coming to Bloomington for his Ph.D., he received an M.A. in history from the University of Cincinnati and his B.A. in history from Western Michigan University. His M.A. thesis at Cincinnati explored some of the ways in which elite, eighteenth-century Anglo-American women in old and New England navigated the patriarchal social structure of their society. In particular, he examined how some women were able to use their influence and power as mothers, sisters, and wives to encourage the men in their lives to embody ideals of masculinity which would foster a more benevolent patriarchy. This research was meant to be both a departure from male-centric studies of masculinity and to add nuance to our understandings of the ways which patriarchy shaped the lives of women in the past. Archival research for this project was carried out at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Houghton Library at Harvard. At Indiana University, Conor plans to consider similar topics related to the history of masculinity in the Era of the American Revolution, expanding the scope of his research both geographically and to include a wider range of experiences and perspectives among his subjects.

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.

Chris Jillson

Chris originally comes from Essex, Vermont, but completed his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His interest in Latin America emerged when he worked as a tour guide in Central America for three years prior to beginning graduate school. He completed his M.A. in World History at New York University and produced a Master’s Essay on the Puerto Rican radical organization Young Lords. Since 2016 he has been working on his Ph.D. in Latin American History at Indiana University. Chris’ dissertation analyzes political and economic change in Nicaragua after the electoral defeat of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional in 1990, with a particular focus on labor organizing in maquilas and other urban workspaces. He has done archival and oral history research in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the United States. His research interests include social movements, labor history, neoliberalism, US-Latin American relations, and the history of travel and tourism. He looks forward to returning to Nicaragua soon in order to finish the research and writing of his dissertation.

Liam Kingsley

Liam James Kingsley is a Ph.D. student in African History with minors in World History and African Studies. Born and raised in southern New York, he graduated from the State University of New York at Potsdam with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a Bachelor of Music in Musical Studies—Composition. His research interests include postcolonialism, state formation, queerness, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa. He has a guest lecturer affiliation with the University of Namibia and has traveled to the capital city of Windhoek on multiple occasions to engage in research. His dissertation will address the Namibian government’s response to HIV/AIDS, arguing that the plan to deal with the epidemic served as a state-legitimating tool that shaped the logics, rationalities, and modes of governance the fledgling nation would come to assume at independence in 1990. He has also written for Africa Is a Country about how the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic helps us to better understand the COVID-19 pandemic.

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. The resulting course utilizes Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Johnathan Safran-Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, to explore how the changing memory of the bombing of Dresden during World War II has been used. 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 Jewish History, and the Holocaust. He is a fifth-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. In the past academic year, Jonathan was a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies (Claims Conference) and a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. In 2023-2024, Jonathan will begin a Gerda Henkel PhD Scholarship and has received support for his research from the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. He has presented his research at over a dozen domestic and international gatherings and is organizing an upcoming workshop on Carceral Spaces in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester. Jonathan 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.

Kathryn Lehman

Kathryn Lehman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received a BA in history and philosophy from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2010 and an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Indiana University in 2015. Her dissertation, titled Life, Labor, and Violence in the Transnational Amazon is a social and environmental history of deforestation, labor movements, political violence in the border region of Bolivia and Brazil in Western Amazonia. Her dissertation research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation, and Indiana University.

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.

Hannah Malcolm

Hannah N. Malcolm is a historian of the Age of Revolutions, particularly the French Revolution. She is a PhD Candidate in the History Department at IU and is also affiliated with the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Hannah worked as a Book Reviews Editorial Assistant for the American Anthropologist and is currently the Senior Editorial Assistant for the American Historical Review. While earning her B.A. in History at Appalachian State University, she wrote her honors thesis on the failures of public instruction during the French Revolution. Her dissertation is a labor history of French archives from the eighteenth to twenty-first century. Studying labor brings the history of archival institutions to life, and it provides a way to explain for the vast differences between archives despite state pressures to standardize. Human error, the inherent messiness of archives, and the myriad obstacles that archival workers faced all contribute to institutional specificity. Uncovering and recreating those practices, she argues, is crucial to better understand the French Revolution as it is primarily through those practices that we are able to learn about it at all. More details on her research can be found on her website www.hannahnmalcolm.com.

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. In 2014, she earned a B.A. in Philosophy and in 2015 a B.A. in History from Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá. Since 2020, she holds an M.A. degree in History from Indiana University, Bloomington. Before starting her studies at IU, Margarita worked as a researcher in the Colombian based think-tank of human rights, Dejusticia, studying gender inequalities in Colombia, sexual and reproductive rights, and the gender impacts of the Colombian peace process. Since 2014, she also served as a lecturer at the School of Human Sciences at Universidad del Rosario where she taught classes on modern Colombia’s history, ethics, and historical memory. In 2018, she started her doctoral studies in Latin American History at Indiana University sponsored by the Fulbright-Colciencias scholarship. Her current research focuses on the intersections between gender and citizenship in rural Colombia during the 20th century.

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. student of Eastern European history, interested primarily in studies of identities, nationalism, and memory in the lands of former Yugoslavia. At the moment, he is in the developing stages of a dissertation dealing with the official commemorations and the celebrations of national holidays in Yugoslavia and the independent republics after the country's dissolution. Before coming to Bloomington, Filip obtained his BA and MA degrees in history from the University of Novi Sad, in Serbia. Filip is the co-founder of a non-profit civic association based in Serbia, called The Remembrance Society – focused towards the promotion of culture of remembrance and public history. On a fateful June evening in 2018, Filip discovered baseball and fell in love with the Chicago White Sox.

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.

Alan Morris

Alan Morris is a master’s candidate who studies a broad range of historical topics, with special interest in American and British history. Prior to coming to Bloomington, he lived in Indianapolis, where he received a BA in history from the University of Indianapolis. His capstone project focused on the political and social history of the United States’ manned space program. He was fortunate to intern at the Indiana Historical Society. After taking some time off from education to figure out his next steps in life, he has come to Indiana University to pursue a double masters in History and Library Science.

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

Grant Thomas (Tom) Neal is from Peoria, Illinois, and came of age in the threshold between urban and rural America in the midwestern Rust Belt. Tom respectively completed his B.A and M.A degrees in history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Loyola University Chicago. Tom has done archival work at both UIUC and Loyola, most recently as a research assistant for Prof. Emeritus Lewis Erenberg for his forthcoming monograph on the mid twentieth century Chicago club scene.Tom's primary area of interest includes the histories of slavery and emancipation in the United States, along with the accompanying politics of war and Reconstruction in the wake of Southern slavery's systemic collapse. His preliminary dissertation topic seeks to examine the phenomenon of slave revolt panic in the immediate antebellum South, with a particular focus on how the violent and chaotic repression of 1856-57 helped to crystallize a unifying ideology of secession and socialized fear in the slave states. Tom's further interests include immigration and ethnicity in the United States, intellectual and religious history, American labor and capitalism, Western ideas of modernity and postmodernity, and a methodology involving transatlantic and transnational exchanges.

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. Student in Modern European History, with a focus 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. He is broadly interested in the political and cultural history of modern Europe and its global entanglements. Brian’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Ports of Call, Ports of Memory: Maritime Germany, the Interwar World, and the Colonial Past,” considers the global history of German port cities, interwar colonial revanchism, and persisting memories of colonialism in northern Germany. During the 2023-2024 academic year, he will further develop his project as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) 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 found on Twitter @brianquinnMI.

Richard Raber

Richard Raber is a Ph.D Candidate in African History researching social memory, and the politics of belonging in southern Africa from the Cold War through to the present-day. His focus is on specialized South African counter-insurgency units primarily staffed by regional forces as well as the cultures and communities that emerged alongside them. Richard holds degrees from the University of Winnipeg as well as the Global Campus of Human Rights (formerly the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation). Richard’s dissertation research has received support from a Social Science Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship as well as a Fulbright award to South Africa. He has also held multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to study both isiZulu and Portuguese. Additionally, he has received funding support from both Indiana University’s Borns Jewish Studies Program and the College Arts and Humanities Institute. Previously, Richard was a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace hosted in the Portuguese School at Middlebury College. Richard’s work has been featured in journals such as Left History and Agenda as well as popular outlets such as the Mail & Guardian, Daily Maverick, and Open Democracy. Richard co-founded Affixed Productions, a non-profit organization that uses public art and art education to harness the power of inter-faith community towards human rights both in Sierra Leone and abroad. He is Associate Editor of Nokoko, an inter-disciplinary journal hosted by the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University. He can be found on Twitter @BushWarHistory.

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.

Hannah Render

Hannah Render grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana before earning her bachelor’s degree in History at Salem State University in 2016. She completed her master’s degree in History at North Carolina State University in 2019. Hannah has a background in later medieval and early modern historical subjects with a focus on cultural history. Much of her past writing involved medieval and early modern Scotland. In her master’s thesis she examined The Bruce, a fourteenth century Scottish romance, exploring how the author, John Barbour, used literary developments throughout high and later medieval Europe to create a Scottish founding epic. Hannah is currently interested in the relationship between history writing and the formation of community and identity.

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.

Avenel Rolfsen

Avenel Rolfsen is a PhD candidate in African History with a PhD minor in Gender Studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History from Westminster College of Salt Lake City, Utah, where she graduated Magna cum Laude with Honors. She also received her master’s degree from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2018. Avenel is broadly interested in social, cultural, and Islamic history. Her dissertation research examines the history of charity, humanitarianism and giving in Senegal from the late nineteenth century until 1980. Using a variety of archival documents and oral history interviews, her research focuses on the philanthropic practices of the French colonial State and Muslim Wolof communities in Senegal. In addition to studying French and Arabic, Avenel has held multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships to study Wolof and Sereer, languages indigenous to Senegal. Her research has also been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship.

Stepan Serdiukov

Born and raised in Vladimir, Russia, Stepan Serdiukov graduated with a BA in Journalism from Moscow State University in 2012 and followed up with an MA in American Studies from California State University, Fullerton in 2016. His dissertation, entitled “Identity, Citizenship, and the Modern State: Russian Sectarian Migrants in the United States, 1901-1930” explores the questions of citizenship, limits to religious freedom, and immigrant assimilation in the Russian Empire and the Progressive Era-United States through a case study of dissident Christian group active in both countries at the turn of the twentieth century. Stepan’s broader research interests include comparative study of modern empires, historical preservation, museum studies, and the lived experience of migration.

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

Tommy Stephens grew up outside Sewanee, Tennessee. He completed his B.A. at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Before graduate school, he worked as a veterinary software technician and as a state social services analyst. Tommy moved to the United Kingdom to complete his M.A. at Durham University. After an enjoyable year doing graduate work in history at the University of Mississippi, he moved to Bloomington to escape the heat. Tommy’s research interests focus on the ways war and mass-violence influence gender roles, concepts of age, and beliefs about race in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His previous research has covered a range of geographic areas in this field of interest, from analyzing political debates over unwed mothers in interwar England to researching perceptions of homesickness and masculinity in First World War German newspapers. For his dissertation, Tommy plans to investigate the cultural representations and experiences of older soldiers and civilian men in Britain and its Empire during and after the First World War. Tommy’s ever-patient partner and two impatient cats help support him through graduate life.

Micah Stevens

Micah Stevens is a student of the MAHLA program with an emphasis on Greco-Roman culture. Hailing from the mountains of Greenville, South Carolina, he fell in love with ancient history thanks to books of Greek mythology from his childhood, such as D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. He double majored in History and English at North Greenville University from 2018 to 2022, where he earned the Shirley A. Hickson History Award and graduated magna cum laude. He is also a member in both the Phi Alpha Theta National History Honors Society and the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honors Society. His main interest is in the stories people pass down from one generation to the next, in the theoretical values they present and how people try to enact those values in real life. He works to examine how Greek and Roman people lived their daily lives and how that was reflected in their writing, as well as how those practices and beliefs have been passed down to today in literature, religious practice, law, and more.

Samuel Stevens

Samuel Stevens is a PhD student studying the military history of the early modern Ottoman Empire with a focus on the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier in Hungary. He is also interested in exploring the lives and personalities of early modern Ottoman elites and their impact on military strategy and imperial policies, especially those that governed the borderlands. He received a B.A. and M.A. from Salisbury University. In 2021 he received a Fulbright fellowship and conducted research in Budapest with the support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eötvös Loránd University. From 2021 to 2023 he lived in Istanbul and completed a second M.A. at Koç University.

Olivia Streett

Olivia is a member of the Modern European history program and is broadly interested in studying constructs of gender, space, and nationalism. Her work centers on German colonialism and Germans living beyond Germany, particularly German East Africa. 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 to a group of exceptional and diverse learners in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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.

Ellen Taraskiewicz

Ellen Taraskiewicz is a third year PhD student in the History department with a concentration in twentieth century American Jewish History. Her research interests include Jewish youth culture, student organizations, American Zionism, and the digital preservation of student archival materials. Ellen received her BA in History from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent time cataloguing defunct synagogues in the Jewish Quarter of South Philadelphia. A former HASTAC scholar, Ellen continues to construct her own digital archive and is currently working on the digital preservation of the Bloomington Area Birthing Services (BABS) archive with the Kinsey Institute. When she is not doing research, you can find her at a coffee shop or at home with her spouse and two cats, Smokey and Nemi.

Ean Teague

Ean Teague is pursuing dual master’s degrees in Modern European History and Library Science. Originally from Grove City, Ohio, he earned a bachelor’s degree in History from The Ohio State University in 2019. Primarily, he enjoys studying the history of sports and the impact of sports on international relations. The history of the “Olympic Movement” intrigues him most, the Olympic Games being an early beacon for his interest in the subject. During his undergraduate, he often wrote on the role of sports during the Cold War, earning a departmental award for his final paper on the role of the Carter administration in planning the United States-led boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. In combination with an MLS degree, he hopes to spread a renewed understanding of the impacts of sport in society to greater audiences. Beyond modern Europe, Ean drifts into Latin American and ancient Greek history as much as he can. Outside of academia, he loves board games, playing miniature golf, and learning a new nugget of trivia every day.

M. Fatih Torun

Fatih Torun is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Indiana University, and is also affiliated with the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is broadly interested in digital humanities, queer theory, and cultural history of the early modern era. He is focused on Ottoman material culture, and the Ottoman court in particular. He developed his interest in computational thinking during his undergraduate education in Computer Education and Instructional Technologies at the Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul, and received his master’s degree in the Department of History at Istanbul Bilgi University. He closely examined the Ottoman imperial festival of 1675 in Edirne in his M.A. thesis. According to his analysis, ceremonial instruments such as cavalcades, banquets, gift-giving protocols, and firework displays in the sultan’s festival open up new terrain for discussion of the political image and power of early modern monarchs. Based on his previous studies, he aims to situate the Ottoman experience in a wider world context, and compare it with the early modern dynasties in both the West and the East. Fatih is originally from Istanbul, Turkey, and is an avid coffee drinker, traveler, and museum lover. Visit his online profile indiana.academia.edu/torunfatihh for the latest information about his studies.

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.

Robert Wells

Robert Wells is a historian of empire and the early modern world. He received his BA from Michigan State University and his MA from IU. His dissertation focuses on the Knights of Malta and their role in early French colonialism in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds.

Kate Wilson

Kate Wilson is a first-year 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. She continues to be interested in travel writing and its intersections with gender and empire. In her free time, Kate enjoys reading, baking, and hiking.

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.

Travis Wright

Travis Wright is a Ph.D. student studying modern U.S. history. His areas of research include 20th century African American history, social movements, community activism, and student protest. His work centers issues of race, culture, citizenship, and power – particularly during the Progressive Era and post-WWII period. Travis is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degree in History from Bowling Green State University. His M.A. thesis, “The Chicago Area Friends of SNCC, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations, and the Chicago Struggle for Freedom During the 1960s,” examined the role of SNCC and student activism in the Chicago Freedom Movement. His most recent publication “Social Media and Continuity in the Black Freedom Struggle,” analyzes the relationship between visual culture and Black protest. Travis has instructed courses in both modern U.S. and modern world history. He is currently an editorial assistant for the Journal of American History.

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.