Placements

Your Success Story Is Waiting. The Department of History is a close-knit community that combines deep archival research with new theoretical and methodological perspectives. Featuring an outstanding faculty and a busy calendar of guest lectures and seminars, the Ph.D. program offers a wide variety of formal coursework, guided study, and immersive experiences. The department takes great pride in mentoring students as they develop into scholars, teachers, and researchers.

Alumni Spotlight

Caroline Johnston ’25

Assistant Professor in US History since 1920 – Cambridge University

Caroline is a political, environmental, and economic historian of the modern United States. Her research examines modern right-wing movements and fossil fuel economies in the late twentieth century.

Her first book project, tentatively titled “Carbon Cowboys,” examines how the Rocky Mountain energy boom between 1973 and 1982 fostered powerful conservative organizations and ideas. Caroline trace’s the energy executives in the Rocky Mountains as they established important tenets of modern right-wing ideologies that mirrored their industries’ extractive methods.

Caroline graduated from Vanderbilt in 2025 and has recently stepped into a new role as ‘Assistant Professor, History of the United States since 1920 (US Political History)’ at Cambridge University.

ALexandre pelegrino ’23

Assistant Professor, Department of History – University of Toronto

Alexandre Pelegrino is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is a historian of Latin America with a focus on the history of slavery, Indigenous history, and race formation, Pelegrino’s research considers how Indigenous enslavement persisted in 18th-century northern Brazil and how it connects to the enslavement of people of African descent.

He is currently working on his first book project based on his dissertation, Bonds of Belonging: Slaving, Indigeneity, and Race in Amazonia (1688-1798). Pelegrino’s research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Luso-American Development Foundation, and the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH).

Abena Bokayewa-ANsah ’22

Assistant Research Professor of History, Executive Director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center

Dr. Abena Boakyewa-Ansah is a historian of US history with a specialized interest in Black women’s worlds, lives, and ideas of freedom in the Civil War era. A first-generation Afro-Caribbean and Black British scholar, Abena attended Vanderbilt University, where she completed her doctorate in history as the last student of Professor Richard Blackett in 2022. Her first manuscript, “Freedom Was Their North Star: Formerly Enslaved Women’s Efforts to Secure and Define Freedom During the American Civil War,” places enslaved women at the forefront of the battle for Black freedom, seeking to recast them as freedom makers rather than passive recipients of freedom. Abena developed her research interests in African-American religious history, Black women’s intellectual landscape and feminist ideas, and innovative research methods for diving deeper into the interiority of the enslaved.

Taryn marashi ’21

Assistant Professor – Augsburg University 

Taryn Marashi specializes in conflict studies, social power, criminality, urban architecture and design, and law in medieval Islamic societies.  Fascinated by the interrelationship of urban space and violence, Taryn focuses on the broader processes of social change in medieval Islam.  She has received several fellowships from Washington University in St. Louis, Vanderbilt University, and the US Department of State for language studies.

Currently, Taryn is turning her dissertation titled, Terrains of Tension: Mapping Violence in Medieval Islamic Society, into a monograph.  Terrains of Tension reconsiders the topography of Middle Eastern cities, and the way violence impacted different forms of urban architecture in the years between 850 and 950 CE.  She has also published in prestigious international journals and participated in various scholarly collaborations with Vanderbilt University and the University of Leiden.

Tiago Fernandes Maranhão ’20

Assistant Professor at Loyola University New Orleans

Dr. Tiago Fernandes Maranhão is a Brazilian historian working on the social, political, and racial aspects of Modern Latin America, public health, and the history of physical education and sports. Before earning a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Dr. Maranhão worked as a college professor in Brazil for several years. After concluding his doctorate, he worked as a postdoctoral faculty fellow at the Tougaloo College (HBCU), in Mississippi, and as a Lecturer at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Maranhão is currently working on his book manuscript, tentatively titled Molding the Body, Forging the Nation: Race, Physical Culture, and the Shaping of Brazil (1822-1930), where he examines how nineteenth and twentieth-century Brazilian policy makers and scientists understood that the discipline of body through physical education could be a key tool in their efforts to build a new, “modern” nation. His work intends to analyze the key role played by eugenics and biotypology as well as their mechanisms of cohesion with political projects and the impact physical culture had on the debates that sought to construct the Brazilian body politic. Dr. Maranhão also co-coordinates the Transatlantic Bodies Project, a Digital Humanities initiative connecting the histories of the human body with the political, cultural, and intellectual knowledge developed in Brazil within the Atlantic World during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Fernanda Bretones Lane ’19

Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida

She is a historian of the colonial Caribbean, Afro-Latin America, and the Atlantic World. Prior to moving to the United States, she earned a B.A. in history from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (2009) and a master’s in social history from the University of São Paulo (2013), in her native Brazil. At present, she is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida, where she is also an affiliate faculty in the Center for Latin American Studies. Her research has been supported by Fundación Carolina (Spain), the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Germany), the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Lapidus-Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Conference on Latin American History, among others. Her 2019 co-authored article in the Journal of Global Slavery won the 2020 Sturgis Leavitt Award for Best Article from the Southeastern Conference in Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), and she has also published in The Americas (2018) and Slavery & Abolition (2021). Dr. Bretones Lane will join the Omohundro Institute in January 2023 as an OI-NEH Fellow to complete her first monograph, Shores of Asylum: Fugitivity, Empire, and Slavery in the Caribbean, ca.1656-1791.

Aileen Teague ’18

Assistant Professor in the Bush School’s Department of International Affairs at Texas A&M University

She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Born in Colon, Panama, she traveled the world as part of a military family and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2006 to 2014. Dr. Teague enjoys providing a voice on how history has shaped current social and political issues. Her opinion pieces have appeared in venues including Time and The Washington Post. Her research focuses broadly on issues of interventionism, militarization, and incorporating top-down and bottom-up perspectives to understand the effects of U.S. policies on foreign societies. She is working on a book entitled, Americanizing Mexican Drug Enforcement: The War on Drugs in Mexican Politics and Society, 1964–1982, which examines the effects of United States drug policies and policing efforts on 1970s and 1980s Mexican politics and society. She has published articles in Diplomatic History and the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. She has received support from organizations that include Fulbright (García Robles); the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR); the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College; and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she served as a visiting fellow.

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