Current PhD Students by Primary Field of Study
Ancient | Africa | Atlantic World | East Asia | Europe (Medieval, Early Modern, Modern) | Latin America | Middle East | South Asia | History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine (STEaM) | United States
Ancient
Qizhen Xie
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Graham Oliver
Research Interests: Development of administration and bureaucracy in the Hellenistic world.
Atlantic World
Imen Boussayoud
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Emily A Owens
Research Interests: Iberian Atlantic world; Intersections of gender/sexuality and race; Libidinal economies; Transmuting of cultural practices across the Atlantic.
Sherri Cummings
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor:
Research Interests: African Atlantic, early African American History, and Africana intellectual thought.
(Anne) Brooke Grasberger
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Linford Fisher
Research Interests: The spiritual lives of sailors as an insight into exploring what the sea does to people and what people see in it.
Phoebe Labat
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Linford Fisher
Research Interests: Native American history, British and French Atlantic World, colonial America, environmental history, Indigenous knowledge, religious history.
Marley-Vincent Lindsey
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor:
Research Interests: Transformation of class consciousness among the Nahua in sixteenth-century New Spain, and the effects of fifteenth-century Iberia on Spanish colonial society.
East Asia
Yu-chi Chang
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Rebecca Nedostup
Research Interests: State-building and Nationalism in Modern China, Political Culture, Knowledge Production, Intellectual and Cultural History, History of Maps.
Dissertation: "Imagining the Loss: Maps, Geographic Knowledge, and the Formation of Modern Chinese Nation-State"
Keegan Cothern
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Kerry Smith
Research Interests: Modern Japan and East Asia as a whole; environmental history and natural disasters; science and technology; urbanization; GIS.
Yu-cheng Shih
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Rebecca Nedostup
Research Interests: Modern East Asia, maritime communities, immigration, historical memory, folk religion, cold war, and legacies of Japanese colonization in China and Taiwan.
Aaron Stark
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Kerry Smith
Research Interests: Modern Japan and East Asia, empire and colonialism, environmental history, mobility studies.
Lillian Tsay
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Kerry Smith
Research Interests: Modern Japan and East Asia, history of food, history of the body, business and commercial history, material culture.
Daisy Wan Yuk Ping
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Brian G Lander
Research Interests: Ancient China, bamboo and wooden manuscripts, historical geography and environmental history, history of warfare and frontier formation, urban history, material culture.
Medieval Europe
Paul Aste
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Jonathan Conant
Research interests: Early Medieval monasticism; local priests; popular belief; identity and belonging.
Juila Balakrishnan
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Amy Remensnyder
Research Interests: Interreligious interactions; the High Medieval Mediterranean; the Islamic World; pluralistic identities.
Sarah Christensen
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Jonathan Conant
Research Interests: Gender and migration in the Viking diaspora; the Viking slave trade.
Stacey Murrell
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Amy Remensnyder
Research Interests: gender/sexuality, power, medievalism, the intersection(s) of race and gender, the history of the family, burials, and memory.
Ayse Topaloglu
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Amy Remensnyder
Research Interests: The history of violence and crime with a focus on Italy.
Dillon Webster
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor:
Research Interests: The ethno-religious make up of the western Mediterranean, specifically the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb.
Early Modern Europe
Tamar Golinsky
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Tara Nummedal
Mayer Juni
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Tara Nummedal
Research Interests: Early modern knowledge practices of Europe and the Atlantic World.
Elizabeth Nielsen
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Harold Cook
Research Interests: Early modern medicine and maritime culture, commerce, vernacular science and medicine, and the creation of expertise and cultural authority.
Jongook Yoon
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Tim Harris
Research Interests: British commercial expansion into the Atlantic the ushering in of modernity through domestic industries and colonial agriculture.
Yekai Zhang
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Tim Harris
Research Interests: Early modern British Isles; popular politics, rumours and revolts; memory; political culture; history of ideas in early modern Europe; Atlantic history comparative history between early modern Europe and Ming-Qing China; modernisation; historiography and historical theories.
Modern Europe
Norman Frazier
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Michael Steinberg
Research Interests: 19th-century Germany and the US; Urban history, national identity, migration, housing, folklore, theatre, film.
Jisoo Hong
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Ethan Pollock Research Interests: Oil in the former Soviet Union with a focus on the rise of oilmen and the reimagining of the political economy of the Soviet Union through oil.
Alexandra Morehead
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Omer Bartov
Research Interests: Genocide Studies; Modern Central & East European History; History of Energy and the Environment; Continental philosophy & critical theory; ecofeminism.
Emily Julia Roche
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Omer Bartov
Research Interests: Jewish history, memory and place, Polish-Soviet relations, communist aesthetics, theories of urbicide, and intellectual history.
Jorge Rosario
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Omer Bartov
Research Interests: History of the Holocaust, resistance movements, extreme violence, and history and memory.
Jenny Lhamo Tsundu
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisors: Holly Case and Bathsheba Demuth
Research Interests: 20th-century Russia; histories of planning; culture and economy; place and poetics.
James Wang
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Omer Bartov
Research Interests: The political and economic history of modern East Central Europe.
Latin America
Thamyris Almeida
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisors: James Green, Jennifer Lambe
Research Interests: Popular culture, national identity, and Cold War-era cultural politics.
Juan J. Bettancourt-García
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Jennifer Lambe
Research Interests: Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World, Indigenous history, trade, ecology, maritime labor communities, and the African diaspora in the early modern Caribbean.
René Cordero
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Jennifer Lambe
Research Interests: Dominican Republic, Latin American social movements and politics during the Cold War, racial consciousness, anti-imperialism and historical revisionism.
Augusta De Oliveira
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: James Green
Research interests: LGBTQ+ history; feminist theory; social movements; gender/sexuality in modern Latin America.
Marina Dias Lucena Adams
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: James Green
Research Interests: Gender History; Modern Latin America; Social and Political Movements; Political Subjectivity; Memory Studies; Public History.
Luiz Paulo Ferraz
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: James Green
Research Interests: Colonial and modern Latin America with a focus on Indigenous history, race, ethnicity, and the military dictatorship in Brazil.
Fernando Norat
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor:
Research Interests: Relationship between Communism, Nationalism and Anti-Imperialism in the Latin-American left of the 20th century.
Stephanie Wong
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Evelyn Hu-Dehart
Research Interests: Spanish Pacific, global empire, classical reception, material culture, engaged scholarship.
Middle East
Anil Askin
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Beshara Doumani
Research Interests: Environmental history, animal studies, history of capitalism, history of science, political economy, early modern and modern Ottoman empire and Middle East.
Kate Elizabeth Creasey
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Beshara Doumani
Research Interests: Politics of everyday life in the immediate aftermath of the 1980 military coup in Turkey.
Ebru Erginbas
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Beshara Doumani and Faiz Ahmed
Research Interests: U.S. History; Ottoman History; History of Medicine; Gender; Missiology.
Julia Gettle
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Beshara Doumani
Research Interests: Modern Middle East, 20th Century Levant, Arab Nationalism, Mediterranean History, Social and Cultural History, Political and Social Movements.
Maariyah Lateef
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Beshara Doumani
Research Interests: Late Ottoman history; interactions between muftis and their communities; Islamic legal and ethical norms.
Joseph Leidy
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Beshara Doumani
Research Interests: Social and cultural history of the modern Middle East, particularly Lebanon and Syria; youth and childhood; migration and diaspora; intellectual history; environmental history.
Nadia Tadros
Ph.D. Student
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Advisors: Beshara Doumani and Sreemati Mitter
Research Interests: Palestinian history, modern Middle East, spatial and economic history, urban politics, power structures.
South Asia
Osama Ahmad
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Research Interests: Modern South Asia, Colonial Punjab, Social history, Decolonization, Post-Colonial Theory.
Faraz Haider
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Research Interests: History of Modern South Asia, Marxism, Nationalism, Islam in South Asia, Critical Theory, Intellectual History of the Left, Urban History.
Devon Newhouse
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Research Interests: 20th century India, migration, gender.
Suvaid Yaseen
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
Research Interests: Modern South Asia, Islam, Intellectual History, Political and Religious Movements.
History of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine (STEaM)
Maximilian Conley
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Bathsheba Demuth
Research Interests: Nineteenth-century US History, Environmental History, Energy History, the Pacific World, Racial Capitalism and Extractivism, World-Ecology, Eco-Marxism.
Amanda Arceneaux
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Tara Nummedal
Research Interests: Early Modern Europe; History of Science; Book History; Natural History; Pre-Linnaean Botany; Early Modern Information Systems; Manuscript Culture; Materiality.
George Elliott
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Tara Nummedal
Research Interests: Anglo-American alchemy, early modern history of science, history of the laboratory, early modern medical practice, early colonial New England history, Atlantic world.
United States
Betsy Archelus
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Naoko Shibusawa
Research Interests: Modern U.S and the Pacific; colonialism and empire; military prostitution and gendered state violence; Blackness; race and race making.
Kimonee Burke
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Linford Fisher
Research Interests: Native American and Indigenous Studies, Northeastern Indigenous History, Federal Indian Policy, Federal Acknowledgment Policy.
Michael Dorney
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Naoko Shibusawa
Research Interests: Sites of Japanese American incarceration during World War II as material, social and imagined landscapes.
Taaja El-Shabazz
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Françoise Hamlin
Research Interests: Racial politics of citizenship and belonging, anti-black racism and the American political imagination, and racial capitalism.
Aaron Jacobs
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Robert Self
Research Interests: American politics and culture, interested in the relationship between race, nationalism, and the history of mass media.
Dissertation: “When Lightning Strikes Twice: Cinema, Race, Empire and the Re-Birth of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Takuya Maeda
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Naoko Shibusawa
Research Interests: Asian American identity and politics in the 20th century U.S. with a focus on Japanese American interment and redress, how traditional notions of communal history, group membership, ethnic identity, and political activism are being challenged by the influx of post-1965 Japanese immigrants.
Rebecca Marisseau
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Seth Rockman
Research Interests: Early American republic with a focus in statecraft, science and technology, capitalism, and material culture.
Dissertation: "A Well-Oiled Machine: New Bedford Whale Fishery and the Production of the Early American State"
Sarah Pearlman Shapiro
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Seth Rockman
Research Interests: The intersection of violence and intimacy in early America with a focus on the politics of death, medicine, and material culture.
Emily Pierson
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Linford Fisher
Research Interests: The use of cemeteries in the shaping of identity, especially regarding questions of inclusion and exclusion, and the relationship of the living and the dead.
Dissertation: "Living with the City of the Dead: Place and Community in Nineteenth-Century American Garden Cemeteries"
Leslie-William Robinson
Ph.D. Candidate
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Advisor: Robert Self
Research Interests: Twentieth-century US military, labor, and intellectual history.
Joseph Williams
Ph.D. Student
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Advisor: Françoise Hamlin
Research Interests: Twentieth century United States history, African American history, and the black freedom struggle.