Recent PhD recipients
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Mario Rewers - PhD September 2020 Dissertation title: "American Studies: Knowledge, Nation, and the Academy, 1937-2001" |
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Mary Bridges - PhD August 2020 Dissertation title: "Branching Out: Banking, Credit, and the Globalizing US Economy, 1900s–1930s" Henry Chauncey Jr. '57 Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale University |
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Lisa Lackney - PhD August 2020 Dissertation title: "Ero-Guro-Nansensu: Modernity and its Discontents in Taishō and Early Shōwa Japan"
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Tiago Jorge Fernandes Albuquerque Maranhao - PhD August 2020 Dissertation title: "Molding the Body, Forging the Nation: Race, Physical Culture, and the Shaping of Brazil (1822-1930)" Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Humanities Education and Visiting Professor of History, Tougaloo College, Jackson, Mississippi |
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Kyle Romero - PhD June 2020 Dissertation title: "Moving People: Refugee Politics, Foreign Aid, and the Emergence of American Humanitarianism" Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire |
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Carolyn Taratko - PhD September 2019 Dissertation title: ""Feeding Germany: Food, Land, and the Social Question in Modern Germany, 1871–1923." Postdoctoral fellow, Max Kade postdoctoral fellow at the Free University, Berlin |
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Danyelle Valentine - PhD August 2019 Dissertation title: "An Alternative Diaspora: African American 'Out' Migration to Trinidad and the British West Indies, 1783-1865" Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Vanderbilt University, 2019-2020 |
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Henry Gorman - PhD August 2019 Dissertation title: "American Ottomans: Protestant Missionaries in the Service of an Islamic Empire" Rotational Associate at D.E. Shaw and Co., New York City |
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Zoe LeBlanc - PhD August 2019 Dissertation title: "Circulating Anti-Colonial Cairo: Decolonizing News Media and the Making of the Third World in Egypt: 1952-1978" Postdoctoral Research Associate and Weld Fellow in the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, 2019-2021 |
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Justin Hubbard - PhD August 2019 Dissertation title: "'Can't Fool the P Test': American Science, the Department of Defense, and the Unlikely Invention of the War on Drugs, 1945-1980"
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Juliet Larkin-Gilmore - PhD August 2019 Dissertation title: "Native Health on the Move: Public Health and Assimilation on the Lower Colorado River, 1890–1934" Chancellor's Postdoctoral fellow, Center for American Indian Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2019-20 |
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Katherine McKenna - PhD August 2019 Dissertation title: "Fashioning Adria, Fashioning Femininity: Venetian Women and the Radicalization of the Querelle des Femmes 1550-1635" Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital and Public Humanities, Vanderbilt University, 2019-20 |
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Fernanda Bretones Lane - PhD June 2019 Dissertation title: "Spain, the Caribbean, and the Making of Religious Sanctuary" Assistant Professor, tenure-track, University of Florida, 2019- |
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Sarah Holliday - PhD August 2019 Dissertation title: "A Bitter Legacy: Coffee, Identity, and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth-Century Britain" Manager, independent bookstore, Waco, Texas |
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Patrick Rasico - PhD June 2019 Dissertation title: "Arenas of Display and Debate: Britishness, Exotica, and the Material Counterflows of Empire in India, 1750—1825" Mellon Partners in Education Postdoctoral fellow, Fisk University, 2019-2021 |
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Shawn Mosher - PhD December 2018 Dissertation title: "Competing Ideals: How Commerce, Christianity and Civilization Shaped Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Liberia" Teams Operation Manager and Training Specialist, Alorica, Omaha, Nebraska, 2016- |
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Katherine Lazo - PhD September 2018 Dissertation title: 'Rigour upon men's consciences': National Identity, Religion, and English Catholics during the Interregnum"
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Sean Bortz - PhD September 2018 Dissertation title: "Thinking with Jews: Jews and Judaism and the Struggle for Orthodoxy in late Medieval and Reformation England" Assistant Professor of History, Cumberland University, 2019- |
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Christopher Mapes - PhD August 2018 Dissertation title: "Germany's Slavery Problem during the Sattelzeit, 1750-1850" Post-doctoral fellow, Digital Humanities Center, Vanderbilt University |
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Dean Bruno - PhD August 2018 Dissertation title: "A Place Called Home: Dispossession and Remembrance of a Central New York Landscape" Teaching Assistant Professor, Director of Undergraduate Advising, North Carolina State University |
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Danielle Picard - PhD August 2018 Dissertation title: "Analyzing the Human Factor in British Industrial Psychology, 1919-1939" Senior Lecturer and Assistant Director of Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society, 2019- |
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J'Nese Williams - PhD August 2018 Dissertation title: "Imperial Intervention: Botanic Gardens, Science, and Colonial Administration in the British Empire, Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries" Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University, 2018-20 |
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Cassandra Painter - PhD August 2018 Dissertation title: "The Life and Afterlife of Anna Katharina Emmerick: Reimagining Catholicism in Modern Germany" Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History, Valparaiso University |
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Daniel Genkins - PhD August 2018 Dissertation title: "Entangled Empires: Anglo-Spanish Competition in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean" Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Humanities Center and Executive Director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive, Vanderbilt University, 2019-2020 |
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Aileen Teague - PhD June 2018 Dissertation title: "Americanizing Mexican Drug Enforcement: The War on Drugs in Mexican Politics and Society, 1964-1982" Postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service, starting in the Fall of 2020 |
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William Murrell - PhD June 2018 Dissertation title: "Dragomans and Crusaders: the Role of Translators and Translation in the Eastern Mediterranean" Launch Director and Lecturer in Church History, Every Nation Theological Seminary |
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Marjorie Brown - PhD August 2017 Dissertation title: "Diplomatic Ties: Slavery and Diplomacy in the Gulf Coast Region, 1836-1845" Professor, History, Houston Community College |
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Anthony C. Siracusa - PhD August 2017 Dissertation title: "A More Durable Weapon: Religion and Nonviolence in the Black Freedom Struggle, 1918-1960" Director of Community Engagement in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, The University of Mississippi |
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Kelly O'Reilly - PhD August 2017 Dissertation title: "Of the Poor, By the Poor, or For the Poor": Community Health Centers and the War on Poverty" Student at Yale Law School, J.D. expected in 2020 |
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Lance Ingwersen - PhD August 2017 Dissertation title: "Mexico City in the Age of Theater, 1830-1901" Assistant Professor of History, Jacksonville State University, tenure-track, 2019-
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Ashish Koul - PhD August 2017 Dissertation title: "Making New Muslim Arains: Reform, Law and Politics in Colonial Punjab, 1890's-1940s" Assistant Professor of History, Northwestern University, tenure-track, 2018- |
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Sonja Ostrow - PhD August 2017 Dissertation title: "Polling after Fascism: Opinion Research, Mass Society, and Democratic Fragility in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1960" Assistant Professor of Arts and Humanities, the Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) |
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Lu Sun - PhD May 2017 Dissertation title: "Prisoners, Saboteurs, and Diplomats: An International History of the Diplomacy of Captivity During and Following the Korean War" Assistant Professor of History, Bryant University's China campus; Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, China |
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Alex Jacobs - PhD December 2016 Dissertation title: ""After the Enlightenment: Progress, Tradition, and the Foundations of Democracy in Modern American Thought" Senior Lecturer, Program of American Studies, Vanderbilt University |
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Jason Bates - PhD December 2016 Dissertation title: "An Opium-Consuming Nation: Race, Government Power, and the American Penal State, 1870-1930" |
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Kara Schultz - PhD December 2016 Dissertation title: "An African South Atlantic: La Plata, Brazil, and Angola, 1580-1680" Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Manager, Slave Societies Digital Archive, run by Professor Jane Landers |
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Tizoc Chavez - PhD August 2016 Dissertation title: "Presidential Parley: Personal Diplomacy and the Modern Presidency" DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Fall 2019 |
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Jenifer Dodd - PhD August 2016 Dissertation title: "'Compulsive Rapism': Psychiatric Approaches to Sexual Violence in the 1980s" Mellon Fellow at Tennessee State University, Nashville |
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Michell Chresfield - PhD August 2016 Dissertation title: "Problem and Promise: 'Scientific Experts and the Mixed-Blood',1870-1970" Lecturer of African-American History, tenure-track, University of Birmingham-UK |
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Paula Gajewski - PhD May 2016 Dissertation title: "The New York Stock Exchange and the Transformation of Retirement in America" |
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Jessica Burch - PhD August 2015 Dissertation title: "Soap and Hope": Direct Sales and the Culture of Work and Capitalism in Postwar America" Assistant Professor, tenure track, in the Global Commerce program, Denison University, August 2019 |
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Miriam Martin Erickson - PhD August 2015 Dissertation title: "The Black Auxiliary Troops of King Carlos IV: African Diaspora in the Entangled Spanish Atlantic World, 1791-1818" Academic Services Coordinator, Writing Studio/Tutoring Services, Vanderbilt University |
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Amy Gant Tan - PhD August 2015 Dissertation title: "Richard Bernard and His Publics: A Puritan Minister as Author" Independent Researcher, Nashville |
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Jonathan Hansen - PhD May 2015 Dissertation title: "Development at the Margins: Missionaries, the State, and the Transformation of Marsabit, Kenya in the Twentieth Century" |
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Nicolette Kostiw - PhD May 2015 Dissertation title: "Child and Citizen" The Tutelage of Minors, Slavery, and Transition in Rio de Janeiro, 1871-1900" Assistant Director, Center for Latin American Studies, Vanderbilt University |
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Matthew Owen - PhD December 2014 Dissertation title: "For the Progress of Man: The TVA, Electric Power, and the Environment,1939-1969"' Research Associate, Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations |
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Ansley Quiros - PhD December 2014 Dissertation title: "'The Devil and Jesus in Americus, Georgia': Lived Theology in the Civil Rights Movement in Americus, GA, 1942-1978" Assistant Professor, tenure track, University of North Alabama |
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Courtney Campbell - PhD August 2014 Dissertation title: "The Brazilian Northeast, Inside Out: Region, Nation, and Globalization (1926-1968)" Lecturer of Latin American History at the University of Birmingham, England |
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Jeremy DeWaal - PhD August 2014 Dissertation title: "Redemptive Geographies: The Turn to Local Heimat in Early Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965" Lecturer in History, University of Exeter, Germany |
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Frances Kolb - PhD August 2014 Dissertation title: "Contesting Borderlands: Policy and Practice in Spanish Louisiana, 1765-1800" Instructor in the History Department at Western Kentucky University, 2016-2017 |
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Angela Sutton - PhD August 2014 Dissertation title: "Mercantile Culture of the Gold Coast Slave Trade in the Atlantic World, 1621-1720" Mellon Partners for Humanities Education Fellowship in partnership with Vanderbilt University, post-doctoral fellow, Slave Societies Digital Archive, 2018-2020 |
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Erin Woodruff Stone - PhD May 2014 Dissertation title: "Indian Harvest: The Rise of the Indigenous Slave Trade and Diaspora from Espanola to the Circum-Caribbean, 1492-1542" Associate Professor of Latin American History, University of West Florida |
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Adam Richard Wilsman - PhD May 2014 Dissertation title: "Our Enemy's Enemy: Human Rights and the U.S. Intervention in El Salvador, 1977-1992" Upper School History Teacher and Assistant Dean of Academic Advising, Harpeth Hall, Nashville, Tennessee |
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Nicholas Villanueva - PhD December 2013 Dissertation title: "No Place of Refuge: Mexicans, Anglos, and Violence in the Texas Borderland, 1900-1920" Assistant Professor, Tenure Track, Ethnic Studies Department, University of Colorado at Boulder |
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Caree Banton - PhD August 2013 Dissertation title: " 'More Auspicious Shores": Post-Emancipation Barbadian Emigrants in Pursuit of Freedom, Citizenship, and Nationhood in Liberia, 1834-1912" Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville |
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Stephen Kennedy Harrison - PhD August 2013 Dissertation title: "Communism and Christianity: Missionaries and The Communist Seizure of Power In China" Lecturer at Wenzhou-Kean University, 2014-2015. |
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Joanna Mazurska - PhD August 2013 Dissertation title: "Making Sense of Czeslaw Milosz: A Poet's Formative Dialogue with his Transnational Audiences" Consultant at the Institute for Polish Literature Studies, United Kingdom |
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Kevin Vanzant - PhD August 2013 Dissertation title: " 'We Sweat and Toil": Self-Interest, Labor, and the Power of "The People" in Early America Politics, 1607-1692" Visiting Professor, Tennessee State University and Visiting Scholar in History, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN through the Mellon Partners Postdoctoral Fellowship |
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William Hardin - PhD May 2013 Dissertation title: "Litigating the Lash: Quaker Emancipator Robert Pleasants, the Law of Slavery and the Meaning of Manumission in Revolutionary and Early National Virginia” Upper School History Teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy, Nashville TN |
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Erica Hayden - PhD May 2013 Dissertation title: "Plunged into a Vortex of Iniquity”: Female Criminality and Punishment in Pennsylvania, 1820-1860” Associate Professor in History, tenure track, Trevecca Nazarene University, Nashville, TN |
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Deanna Matheuszik - PhD May 2013 Dissertation title: "The Angel Paradox: Elizabeth Fry and the Role of Gender and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Britain” Visiting Assistant Professor, Modern European History, University of Mississippi, 2014-15 |
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Patrick Jackson - PhD December 2012 Dissertation title: "Lost: American Evangelicals in the Public Square, 1925-1955" Nationally Competitive Fellowship Advisor, and Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies at Allegheny College, PA |
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William Bishop - PhD August 2012 Dissertation title: "Diplomacy in Black and White: America’s Contribution to the Search for Zimbabwean Independence, 1965-1980" Upper Division History Teacher, Casady School, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma |
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Cheryl A. Hudson - PhD December 2011 Dissertation title: "Making Modern Citizens: Political Culture in Chicago, 1890-1930" Lecturer in American History at the University of Liverpool, England |
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Crystal A. deGregory – PhD May 2011 Dissertation title: “Raising a Nonviolent Army: Four Nashville Black Colleges and the Century-Long Struggle for Civil Rights, 1830s-1930s |
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Christina Dickerson Cousin – PhD May 2011 Dissertation title: “Diplomats, Soldiers, and Slaveholders: The Coulon de Villiers Family in New France, 1700-1763” Assistant Professor of African American History (tenure track) at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT |
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Rachel Donaldson – PhD May 2011 Dissertation title: “Music for the People: The Folk Music Revival and American Identity, 1930-1970” Assistant Professor in Public History, tenure track, College of Charleston |
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David C. LaFevor - May 2011 Dissertation title: “Forging the Masculine and Modern Nation: Race, Identity and the Public Sphere in Cuba and Mexico, 1890s – 1930s” Associate Professor of Latin American History and Digital Humanities, tenure track, University of Texas, Arlington |
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Michael Boden – December 2010 Dissertation title: “The First Red Clausewitz: Friedrich Engels and Nineteenth-Century Socialist Military Thought” Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, Retired. Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Dutchess Community College, Poughkeepsie, NY |
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Natalie Inman – December 2010 Dissertation title: “Networks in Negotiation: The Role of Family and Kinship in Intercultural Diplomacy on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 1680-1849” Assistant Professor, Cumberland University, Lebanon, TN |
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Kurt Johnson – December 2010 Dissertation title: “The Re-enchanted Body in fin de siècle German Culture" Term Instructor - History, University of Alaska, Anchorage |
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Pablo Gomez – August 2010 Dissertation title: “Bodies of Encounter: Health, Illness and Death in the Early Modern African-Spanish Caribbean” Associate Professor of Medical History and Bioethics, and History, University of Wisconsin, Madison |
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Larry Rivers – August 2010 Dissertation title: “‘Our God is Marching On’: James Hudson and the Theological Foundation of the Civil Rights Movement” Assistant Professor, tenure track, University of West Georgia |
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Selena Sanderfer – August 2010 Dissertation title: “For Land and Liberty: Black Territorial Separatism in the South, 1776-1904” Associate Professor, Western Kentucky University |
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Mary Sanderson – May 2010 Dissertation title: “ ‘Our Own Catholic Countrymen’: Religion, Loyalism, and Subjecthood in Britain and its Empire, 1775-1829” Lecturer, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH |
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David Wheat – August 2009 Dissertation title: “The Afro-Portuguese Maritime World and the Foundations of Spanish Caribbean Society, 1570-1640” Associate Professor (tenured), Michigan State University |
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Michael Crane – May 2009 Dissertation title: “Slavery on the Edge of Freedom: The Lower Ohio River Valley in the Antebellum and Civil War Era” Associate Professor of History, University of Arkansas - Fort Smith |
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Robert Hutton – May 2009 Dissertation title: “‘Bloody Breathitt’: Power and Violence in the Mountain South” Senior Lecturer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville |
Director of Community Engagement in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement |