Ranked among the nation's top graduate programs in history by U.S. News and World Report

GRADUATE STUDIES

Meet Our Graduate Students

At UNC Greensboro, our M.A. and Ph.D students are active in research and in the community. Here's a sampling of our students with their research interests.

	Colton Cheviron M.A. in History (graduated Spring 2023) Research Interests: Cultural and social history of Eastern Europe, sports history, and Cold War sports. Advisor: Dr. Jeff Jones
	Jacob Craddock M.A. in History Research Interests: American Indians of the Great Plains; American environmental history; the American West. Advisor: Dr. Greg O'Brien
	Jeanna DeVita Ph.D. in History Research Interests: Transcultural Lives on the Colonial Frontier Advisor: Dr. Greg O'Brien
	Felton Foushee Ph.D. in History Research Interests: Depictions of Black Americans in Media Advisor: Dr. Mark Elliott
	Mark Gibb M.A. in History My research focuses on the brewing industry in the late 19th century as a window on industrial consolidation and the rise of big business. This process is often viewed as the inevitable result of economic and technological forces. I examine the political, social, and cultural precursors to the process as a way to complicate and deepen economic and technical explanations. Advisor: Dr. Mark Elliott
	Ashley Gilbert Ph.D. in History Ashley Gilbert is a Ph.D. Candidate studying the southern mainland colonies during the Revolutionary Era. Her dissertation utilizes taverns as a window into eighteenth-century society, analyzing how they became a public stage upon which colonists debated, resisted, and initiated activism that addressed changes in their society. Employing an Atlantic and gendered approach, her research demonstrates how revolutionary ideas spread in the southern colonies and how they became a part of both men's and women’s everyday lives. Advisor: Dr. Greg O'Brien
	Zoey Hanson Ph.D. in History Research Interests: US Environmental History, National Parks and Public Lands, Womens and Gender History, US History post-1865, Historical Memory Advisor: Dr. Greg O'Brien
	Azariah Journey M.A. in History/Museum Studies Research Interests: The life and diaries of Anne Lister, US LGBTQ+ History, and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). Advisor: Dr. Anne Parsons
	Dr. Lynda Kellam Ph.D. in History (graduated Spring 2023) My dissertation traces the historical genealogy of the idea of sovereign responsibility as it developed in debates over humanitarianism, good government, and empire in the United States and Great Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and concurrent with the rise of America’s international empire. I study a network of reformers and anti-imperialists who respond to a series of events and atrocities from the mid-1890s to after WWI. Advisor: Dr. Mark Elliott
	Indira Lessington M.A. in History/Museum Studies Research Interests: The Influence of The Gullah Geechee Culture: Rooted in Resistance and Perseverance Advisor: Dr. Anne Parsons
	Ashley Loper-Nowak Ph.D. in History Research Interests: Southeast Asian Refugees to North Carolina. Advisor: Dr. Thomas Jackson
	Ashley LaRue Low Ph.D. in History My research focuses on American Jewish reactions and memory concerning Eastern European pogroms and antisemitic violence in the early 20th century. My other interests include Transatlantic History, Women's and Gender Studies, and Public History. Advisor: Dr. Anne Parsons
	Dr. Stuart Marshall Ph.D. in History (graduated Summer 2023) My dissertation, “The Age of Junaluska: Eastern Cherokee Sovereignty in the Long Civil War Era,” counters the “Age of Jackson” by focusing on political organization in the Cherokee homeland. Junaluska was famed for reportedly saving Andrew Jackson’s life in battle—an act of sacrifice he later regretted. This study restores Junaluska to his true historical significance: he was both a founding father of Eastern Cherokee sovereignty and an active political leader who claimed a unique precedent of citizenship rights. Junaluska’s experience is the key to understanding those that followed him—the Civil War generation of Eastern Cherokees who went on to form the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Advisor: Dr. Greg O'Brien
	Jewel Parker Ph.D. in History My dissertation project, “The Intercultural Origins of Health Care in the Antebellum South” analyzes how intercultural interactions between American Indians, Africans, and Europeans changed medical practice and contributed to the development of the U.S. pharmacopeia in the South from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Healing was a creative process of trial-and-error that Native Americans and Africans mastered over thousands of years. Even as healing processes evolved and were taught to Europeans, white physicians consciously reached out to other populations to find what worked best. By the early nineteenth century, medicine in the South, especially in more rural areas, reflected this intercultural origin, and thus this research exposes a largely forgotten aspect of southern culture and history. Understanding the multicultural roots of antebellum southern medicine helps to restore the place of American Indians and Africans in that history and suggests implications for investigating other aspects of a diverse southern culture and history in the pre-Civil War South. Advisor: Dr. Greg O'Brien
	Emilee N. K. Robbins Ph.D. in History My dissertation project analyzes the written narratives of aristocratic women during the Revolutionary Atlantic World. This research highlights the ways connections in the Atlantic World impacted women and their access to safety, mobility, and communication. My research contributes to scholarship on Republican Motherhood and New Domesticity. Advisor: Dr. Linda Rupert
	Abigail Shimer Ph.D. in History Research Interests: Homeschooling in the United States (1970-2000) Advisor: Dr. Thomas Jackson
	Robert Skelton Ph.D. in History My dissertation examines the collapse of Reconstruction in Florida and argues that this collapse occurred in a different manner and later than in other states that still had Republican-led governments in 1876. Unlike its counterparts, business-minded Florida Republicans appeasement of Democrats and voter suppression caused that collapse, not fraud or intimidation. The collusion of oligarchs stifled Black political power while preserving the illusions of democratic governance in order to maintain the presence of a cheap labor pool and white supremacy of the political and business leadership in the state. Advisor: Dr. Mark Elliott
	Richard Miles Smith Ph.D. in History My dissertation examines the role slavery played in determining the question of independence in Revolutionary Era Maryland. My research interests include slavery, Colonial and Revolutionary Era Politics, the relationship between slavery, politics, and capitalism in British North America and the early United States, The Maryland Colonization Society. Advisor: Dr. Greg O'Brien
	Erica Ragan Suits M.A. in History/Museum Studies (graduated Spring 2023) My research focuses on British women's political agency and civic engagement with a particular focus on Scottish and Irish women. My M.A. thesis is on the subject of Irish women's political violence in the early twentieth century. I am using Countess Markievicz as a case study to explore the ways in which Irish women reacted to and participated in state and individual violence, and the public personas crafted by Irish women nationalists in the press to legitimize their relationship to violence in spite of the constructive gendered social roles of the period. Advisors: Dr. Anne Parsons and Dr. Jill Bender
	Andrew Turner Ph.D. in History My research explores how youth soldiers of the American Civil War navigated coming of age during wartime and forged identities that they carried throughout their lives. I examine how these youth soldiers continued to impact public memory of the Civil War into the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Advisor: Dr. Mark Elliott
	Emma Lane Waldie Ph.D. in History My research centers around the experiences of individuals labeled 'insane' or 'mentally ill' throughout American history. Using disability studies and mad studies as a framework, I focus on state asylums and mental hospitals from the 19th century through the Progressive Era. Through this work, I highlight the ways that institutionalized people utilized handiwork and crafts to resist their confinement. Advisor: Dr. Anne Parsons