Research Activities

Rosalind Beiler, Ph.D.

Rosalind J. Beiler's research focuses on migration in the early modern Atlantic world. Her forthcoming book, The Transatlantic World of Caspar Wistar, examines the process of cultural adaptation and change through the lens of one eighteenth-century German immigrant to the British colonies. Her current book project explores the ways British colonizers used religious communication networks to shift migration patterns in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries. Beiler has conducted research as a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Berlin Germany. She has presented her work at conferences in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Robert Cassanello, Ph.D.

Robert Cassanello has published articles in the Journal of Urban History, Florida Historical Quarterly and 49th Parallel. He is researching the social construction of public space in the urban New South. He is also researching the racial integration and segregation of omnibuses, horsecars and streetcars in the United States during the 19th century.He has co-edited two books Florida's Working-Class Past: Current Perspectives on Labor, Race, and Gender from Spanish Florida to the New Immigration with Melanie Shell-Weiss and Migration and the Transformation of the Southern Workplace since 1945 with Colin J. Davis.

Richard Crepeau, Ph.D.

Richard Crepeau is continuing to work in the area of American Sport History. His most recent work has been in Sport and Film and Sport and Relgion. Intercollegiate Athletics is a major interest and the role of athletics in Catholic Higher education is currently under study. He is also interested in Sports and Drugs, Sport and Law, and Sport's Business. Dr. Crepeau writes an on-line column for the Sport Literature Association. The column focuses on current sporting issues and brings a historical perspective to these issues. The columns are used by many university professors of Sport History in classrooms around the world and many have been published in a wide variety of venues.

Spencer Downing, Ph.D.

Spencer Downing's research focuses on US cultural history since World War II. His current monograph project is tentatively titled, "Selling Stuff to Kids . . . With TV!: Children's Television and Consumer Culture from Howdy Doody to Sesame Street." The book centers on the evolution of marketing in children's programming. He has also published and given talks on topics ranging from Norman Rockwell's Civic Sense to hotels at Walt Disney World to the history of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the works of writers Aaron Sorkin and Tom Clancy.

Amy Foster, Ph.D.

Amy Foster is a historian of technology and gender. She has published a book chapter on American women in aviation in the 1990s in American Women and Flight Since 1994 (University of Kentucky Press, 2004) and has presented work on women astronauts and women in engineering. Her research interests include the U.S. space program, gender and the space program, gender issues in engineering, aviation history, and the history of technology. She has been a recent Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum and held a fellowship sponsored jointly by NASA and the American Historical Association. She is currently editing her manuscript on the political and logistical issues associated with the introduction of women into America's astronaut corps.

Fon Gordon, Ph.D.

Fon L. Gordon is working on the intersection of medicine and race and studies of literacy in the New South.

Edmund Kallina, Ph.D.

Edmund F. Kallina's chief research interests center on American politics in the 1950s and 1960s. He has written two books, Courthouse Over White House: Chicago and the Presidential Election of 1960 and Claude Kirk and the Politics of Confrontation. He is currently working on a general history of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential election of 1960.

Peter Larson, Ph.D.

Peter L. Larson's research focuses on the social and legal history of pre-modern Britain at the local level. His book Conflict and Compromise in the Late Medieval Countryside: Lords and Peasants in Durham, 1348 to 1400 is a study of the reactions of lords and peasants in County Durham as they struggled to put their lives and society back together in the half-century following the Black Death. His new project examines the clash of elite and popular attitudes to sports in medieval and early modern Britain, from real and perceived threats to law and order, to the divide between older popular culture and new religious ideas. He also is interested in ideas of freedom and subjection from the classical period to the present, and in comparative history.

Connie Lester, Ph.D.

Connie L. Lester is the author of Up From the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers' Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870-1915 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006) and several articles and essays including: "Lucille Thornburgh: I had to be right pushy'" in Tennessee Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, ed. Beverly Bond and Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009). "Populist Scholarship as a Survey of American Political and Social Change," essay for "Agricultural History Roundtable on Populism" with Robert C. McMath, Jr., Peter H. Argersinger, Connie L. Lester, Michael F. Magliari, and Walter Nugent Agricultural History Volume 82, No. 1 (Winter 2008): 10-16."Balancing Agriculture with Industry: Capital, Labor and the Public Good in Mississippi's Home-Grown New Deal," Journal of Mississippi History. Volume 70, no. 3 (fall, 2008). She has been editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly since 2005. She is editing the Civil War diaries of Lucy Virginia French and is working on a book-length manuscript on Mississippi economic development in the twentieth century.

Amelia Lyons, Ph.D.

Her research focuses on the origins of Algerian migration to France at the height of decolonization, i.e. during the War for Algerian Independence (1954-1962). She is particularly interested in the originsof Algerian family settlement and the development of government sponsored social welfare for Algerians and other immigrant communities in France. She is currently preparing two articles for publication and working on her manuscript, Invisible Immigrants: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State, 1947-1974.

Luis Martínez-Fernández, Ph.D.

Luis Martínez-Fernández is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. His research and writing focuses on the histories of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. He is currently working on a survey history of the Cuban Revolution for the University of North Carolina Press and on a general history of Cuba.

Hakan Özoglu, Ph.D.

Hakan Özoglu's previous research focuses on Kurdish Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire. His book was titled Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State. The Turkish edition of the book came out in 2004. Özoglu's main aim in this project was to understand the process of identity formation and emergence of nationalism. His current research interests include the power struggle in modern Turkish Republic after WWI and US involvement of the Middle East through Turkey after the Great War. His current book project deals with the tension between the secularists and the Islamists and with the Kemalist project to tame the political opposition in an attempt to westernize the remnant of the last "Islamic Empire."

John Sacher, Ph.D.

John M. Sacher's research focuses on politics and society in the nineteenth-century South, particularly during the Civil War era. His book, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824-1861, examines antebellum politics and secession in Louisiana. He is currently working on a book on conscription in the Confederacy. This study will use conscription as a lens to view both Confederate identity and the internal strains within the South during the Civil War.

Vladimir Solonari, Ph.D.

Vladimir Solonari's research focuses on the policy of ethnic cleansing in World War II Romania. The book he is currently writing will show how various factors led to the steep radicalization of Romanian policy towards its national minorities during World War II, first of all Jews. It will argue that the Romanian government's avowed policy aim in the first phase of the war was complete "purification" of the country from all ethnic non-Romanians and will explain why this aim was never achieved. The book will trace reactions of various social groups to the government's measures and will explain how those reactions in turn impacted actual policy pursued by the government. Vladimir Solonari was a Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of a number of articles on the history of Romania and Moldova, as well as on Moldovan politics.

Ezekiel Walker, Ph.D.

Ezekiel Walker's articles have been published in reputable scholarly journals including Journal of Modern African Studies, African Economic History and Africa Today. His book-length manuscript Growth, Crisis and Transformation in the Cocoa-Farming Economy of Southwestern Nigeria, 1900-2000 is under contract with Africa World Press and will be published in 2006. Dr. Walker is currently working on the history of Agribusiness in Nigeria. His research interests include African slavery and the Atlantic World, the impact of globalization on Africa, and labor relations in the cocoa-farming economy of Nigeria.

Hong Zhang, Ph.D.

Hong Zhang has published journal articles and a book on US-China relations. The focus of her current research is on women in rural North China. She is especially interested in examining the ways in which the economic reforms, initiated by the Chinese government in the late 1970s, have forced changes in the lives of Chinese farmwomen. She has conducted fieldwork, presented papers, and published articles on the topic, and is now working on a book manuscript.