Recent History PhD Graduates

2009-10

2008-09

Brooke Barbier

Dissertation: "Daughters of Liberty: Young Women's Culture in Early National Boston"

Advisor: Cynthia Lyerly

Position: Instructor, Stonehill College

Bethany Jay

Dissertation: "The Representation of Slavery at Historic House Museums: 1853-2000"

Advisor: James O'Toole

Position: Assistant Professor, Salem State College (tenure track)

Michael Mezzano

Dissertation: "'Not the race of Dante': Southern Italians as Undesirable Americans"

Advisor: James O'Toole

Position: Visiting Instructor, Wheaton College

Robert Niebuhr

Dissertation: "The Search for a Communist Legitimacy: Tito's Yugoslavia"

Advisor: Larry Wolff

Sarah Nytroe

Dissertation: "Religion and Memory in American Public Culture, 1890-1920"

Advisor: James O'Toole

Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston College

Sally Shockro

Dissertation: "Reading Bede as Bede Would Read"

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston College

Bethany Tanis Kilcrease

Dissertation: "The 'Great Church Crisis,' Public Life, and National Identity in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain"

Advisor: Peter Weiler

Position: Assistant Professor, Aquinas College (tenure track)

2007-08

Deirdre Bryan

Dissertation Title: "A 'Peculiarly Fitting' Institute: The Origins of Marie Martin's Medical Missionaries of Mary"

Advisor: Robert Savage

Adam Chill

Dissertation Title: "The Boundaries of Britishness: Boxing, Minorities, and Identity in Late-Georgian Britain"

Advisor: Kevin O'Neill

Position: Assistant Professor, Castleton State College (tenure track)

Jennifer Cote

Dissertation Title: “'Nobody Ever Paid Me for Anything:' Crafting a Professional Social Work Identity in Progressive-Era Boston"

Advisor: Cynthia Lyerly

Position: Assistant Professor, St. Joseph College (tenure track)

Ely Janis

Dissertation Title: "The Land League in the United States and Ireland: Nationalism, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Gilded Age"

Advisor: Kevin Kenny

Position: Visiting Assistant Professor, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

Mark Mullane

Dissertation Title: "The Function of 'Things Said' in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica and its Anglo-Norman 'Re-writings'"

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Visiting Assistant Professor, Connecticut College

Patricia Reeve

Dissertation Title: “Cultural and Legal Representations of Imperiled Workers and Their Political Significance, Massachusetts (1842-1910).” 

Advisor: Marilynn Johnson

Position: Assistant Professor, Suffolk University (tenure track)

2006-07 

Michael Chapman

Dissertation Title: “Arguing Americanism: John Eoghan Kelly’s Franco Lobby, 1936-46”

Advisor: Seth Jacobs

Position: Visiting Assistant Professor, Peking University

Anthony Daly

Dissertation Title: "“What We Strike Down There We Shake Here: Irish Issues and the Shaping of English Radical Politics, 1847-74”

Advisor: Kevin O'Neill

Position: Assistant Professor, Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts (tenure track)

Mark Doyle

Dissertation Title: “Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Belfast, 1850-1870”

Advisor: Kevin O'Neill

Position: Assistant Professor, Middle Tennessee State (tenure track)

Nicholas Germana

Dissertation Title: “The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity, 1760-1830”

Advisor: Paul Breines and Devin Pendas

Position: Assistant Professor, Keene State College (tenure track)

Joanne Lloyd

Dissertation Title: "Beneath the 'City on the Hill': The Lower Orders, 1700-1850"

Advisor: David Quigley

Position: Independent Scholar

Shawn Lynch

Dissertation Title: “In Defense of True Americanism: The Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Radical Free Speech, 1915-1945”

Advisor: Mark Gelfand

Position: Instructor, Assumption College

Christian Samito

Dissertation Title: “Proof of Loyalty: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Redefinition of Citizenship During the Civil War Era”

Advisors: David Quigley and Alan Rogers

Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Boston College

Published: Fear Was Not In Him: The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C. Barlow, U.S.A. (Fordham University Press, 2004) 

Commanding Boston's Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Fordham University Press, 1997)

2005-06 

Elizabeth MacDonald
Bischof 

Dissertation Title: “Against an Epoch: Boston Moderns, 1880-1905”

Advisor: David Quigley

Position: Assistant Professor, University of Southern Maine (tenure track)

Niamh Lynch

Dissertation Title: “Live Ireland, Perish the Empire: Irish Nationalist Anti-Imperialism, c. 1840-1900”

Advisors: Kevin Kenny and Kevin O'Neill

Position: Director of Irish Institute, Boston College

Tracey-Anne Cooper

Dissertation Title: “Reconstructing a Deconstructed Manuscript, Community, and Culture: London, BL MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Assistant Professor, Saint John’s University (tenure track)

Andrew Finstuen

Dissertation Title: “Hearts of Darkness: American Protestants and the Doctrine of Original Sin, 1945-65”

Advisor: James O’Toole

Position: Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Pacific Lutheran University

Irina Mukhina

Dissertation Title:  “Reshaping Lives, Reconstructing Identities: Ethnic Germans of the Soviet Union, 1941-46”

Advisor: Roberta Manning

Position: Assistant Professor, Assumption College (tenure track)

Published: The Germans of the Soviet Union (Routledge, 2007)

Cecilie Reid

Dissertation Title: “American Internationalism: Peace Advocacy and International Relations, 1895-1916”

Advisor: James Cronin

Position: Assistant Director, Connors Family Learning Center, Boston College

2004-05 

Dolita Cathcart

Dissertation Title: “White Gloves, Black Rebels: The Decline of Elite Black National Political Leadership in Boston, 1870-1920”

Advisor: Marilynn Johnson

Position: Assistant Professor, Wheaton College (tenure track)

Andrew Lowerre

Dissertation Title: “Placing Castles in the Conquest: Landscape, Lordship, and Local Politics in the South-Eastern Midlands, 1066-1100”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Archaeologist, English Heritage

Published: "Placing Castles in the Conquest: Landscape, Lordship and Local Politics in the South-Eastern Midlands, 1066-1100," British Archaeological Report, British Series, 385

Damien Murray

Dissertation Title: “Progressivism, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Emergence of Catholic Democratic Liberalism in Boston, 1900-24”

Advisor: Kevin Kenny

Position: Assistant Professor, College of the Elms (tenure track)

William Nancarrow

Dissertation Title: “Vox Populi: Democracy and the Progressive Era Judiciary, 1890–1916”

Advisor: Alan Rogers

Position: Assistant Professor, Curry College (tenure track)

Edward Rugemer

Dissertation Title: “The Problem of Emancipation: The United States and Britain's Abolition of Slavery”

Advisor: Cynthia Lynn Lyerly

Position: Assistant Professor, History and African American Studies, Yale University (tenure track)

Published: The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2008) 

Dolly Wilson

Dissertation Title: “'The True Sphere of Women'? Gender, Work, and Equal Pay in Britain, 1945-75”

Advisor: Peter Weiler

Position: Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University (tenure track)

2003-04 

John Bieter

Dissertation Title: “Showdown in the Owyhees: Land, Myth, and Identity in the American West”

Advisors: Marilynn Johnson and Kevin Kenny

Position: Assistant Professor and Director of Basque Studies, Boise State University (tenure track)

Published: An Enduring Legacy: The Story of Basques in the Idaho (co-author, University of Nevada Press, 2004)

Lawrence X. Clifford

Dissertation Title: “Tukhachevsky and Blitzkrieg”

Advisor: Roberta Manning

Dikran Kaligian

Dissertation Title: “The Armenian Revolutionary Federation under Ottoman Constitutional Rule, 1908-14”

Advisor: Benjamin Braude

Position: Chair, Eastern Regional Board, Armenian National Committee of America

R. Todd Romero

Dissertation Title: “Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early New England”

Advisor: Alan Rogers

Position: Assistant Professor, University of Houston (tenure track)

Published: Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early New England (University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming)

Sandra Sandiford Young

Dissertation Title: “A Different Journey: John Brown Russwurm, 1799-1851”

Advisor: Andrew Bunie

Position: Associate Director, African and African Diaspora Studies, Boston College

2002-03 

Stephanie Kermes

Dissertation Title: “New England’s America: Transatlantic Protestantism, Regionalism, and Nationalism in the Early Republic, 1789-1825”

Advisor: Alan Rogers

Position: Assistant Professor of Social Sciences, College of General Studies, Boston University

Published: Creating an American Identity: New England, 1789-1825 (Palgrave, forthcoming)

Krister Knapp

Dissertation Title: “To the Summerland: William James, Psychical Research, and Modernity”

Advisor: Alan Lawson

Position: Lecturer, Washington University

Lawrence Lamphere

Dissertation Title: “Paul Robeson, Freedom Newspaper, and the Black Press”

Advisor: Andrew Bunie

Nadia Smith

Dissertation Title: "A 'Manly Study’? Irish Women Historians as Public Intellectuals, 1868-1949”

Advisor: Kevin O’Neill

Position: Instructor, Boston College

Published: Dorothy Macardle: A Life (Dublin: Woodfield Press, 2007)

 A "Manly Study"?: Irish Women Historians, 1868-1949 (Palgrave, 2007)

2001-02

James Bidwell

Dissertation Title: “In the Service of the State: The Bavarian Volksschul and Nation Building, 1800-1870”

Advisor: John Heineman

Position: Assistant Professor, Anna Maria College, Worcester, MA (tenure track)

Michael Bonislawski

Dissertation Title: “Field Organizers and the United Electrical Workers: A Labor of Love Struggle, and Commitment, 1935-1960”

Advisor: Marilynn Johnson

Position: Visiting Assistant Professor, Salem State College

Daniel Breen

Dissertation Title: “Henry J. Friendly and the Pragmatic Tradition in American Law”

Advisor: Alan Lawson

Position: Assistant Professor, Newbury College (tenure track)

Heather Fryer

Dissertation Title: “Enclosed Worlds in Open Space: Federal Communities and Social Experience in the American West”

Advisor: Marilynn Johnson

Position: Assistant Professor, Creighton University (tenure track)

Laura McNeil

Dissertation Title: “Land, Labor, and Liberation: Michael Davitt and the Irish Question in the Era of British Democratic Land Reform, 1878-1906”

Advisor: Kevin O’Neill

Position: Assistant Professor, College of the Elms (tenure track)

John Mackey

Dissertation Title: “Producing the Christian Body in Victorian England”

Advisor: Paul Breines

Position: Assistant Professor of Social Sciences, College of General Studies, Boston University

Suzanne McCormack

Dissertation Title: “'These Are Our Demands': Independent Diplomats and Antiwar Activists in the Vietnam-Era Peace Movement”

Advisor: Carol Petillo

Position: Assistant Professor, Community College of Rhode Island (tenure track)

Published: Suzanne Kelley McCormack and Elizabeth R. Mock, editors.  Hanoi Journal 1967 by Carol Cohen McEldowney (Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).

Bridgette Sheridan

Dissertation Title: “Childbirth, Midwifery, and Science: The Life and Work of the French Royal Midwife Louis Bourgeois (1563-1636)”

Advisor: Virginia Reinburg

Position: Assistant Professor, Wheelock College (tenure track)

Mark Stansbury

Dissertation Title: “Collected Works. Spolia and Latin Textual Culture, 500-900”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Foundations of Irish Culture Project, Centre for the Study of Human Settlement and Historical Change, National University of Ireland, Galway

Co-Author of Servius’ Commentary on Book Four of Virgil’s Aeneid: An Annotated Translation (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2004) with Christopher McDonough and Richard E. Prior

Thomas Wheatland

Dissertation Title: “Isolation, Assimilation and Opposition: A Reception History of the Horkheimer Circle in the United States, 1934-1979”

Advisor: Paul Breines

Position: Assistant Professor, Assumption College (tenure track)

2000-01 

R. Bentley Anderson, SJ

Dissertation Title: “'Norman Francis is a Negro': Race, Religion, and Catholic Higher Education in New Orleans, 1947-1957”

Advisor: Andrew Bunie

Position: Associate Professor, Saint Louis University

Published: Black, White, and Catholic: New Orleans Interracialism, 1947-1956 (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005) 

Robert Bellinger

Dissertation Title: “The Hope of the Race: African Americans at White Colleges and Universities, 1890-1915”

Advisor: Andrew Bunie

Position: Associate Professor and Director of Black Studies, Suffolk University

Bernard Carpenter

Dissertation Title: “A Punishment in Search of a Crime: Murder and the Death Penalty in Postwar Britain, 1945-1970”

Advisor: James Cronin

Position: History Teacher, Providence Academy (Minnesota)

Mary Conley

Dissertation Title: “From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Images and Identities of British Naval Men, 1870-1918”

Advisor: Peter Weiler

Position: Assistant Professor, College of the Holy Cross (tenure track)

Doreen Drury

Dissertation Title: “'Experimentation on the Male Side': Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Pauli Murray's Quest for Love and Identity, 1910-1960”

Advisor: Carol Petillo

Position: Women’s Studies, University of Massachusetts at Boston

Leeann Lane

Dissertation Title: “George William Russell (AE): Anglo-Irish Spokesman”

Advisor: Kevin O’Neill

Position: Lecturer in History, Dublin City University

Kathryn Mapstone

Dissertation Title: “Anglo-Saxons in the Print and Polemic of Tudor England”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Assistant Professor, Bunker Hill Community College (tenure track)

Mike Roberto

Dissertation Title: “Paradox and Practice: Karl Marx's Concept of Progress”

Advisor: Paul Breines

Position: Assistant Professor, North Carolina A&T State University (tenure track)

Daniella Sarnoff

Dissertation Title: “In the Cervix of the Nation: Women in French Fascism, 1919-1939”

Advisor: Paul Breines

Position: Visiting Faculty, Fordham University

Michael Sullivan

Dissertation Title: “Cultural Medievalism: the Image of the Middle Ages in Modern French Thought, 1750-1870”

Advisor: Paul Breines

1999-2000 

Patricia Halpin

Dissertation Title: “The Religious Experience of Women in Anglo-Saxon England”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: History Teacher, Wayland High School (Massachusetts)

Lynn Hartnett

Dissertation Title: “Perpetual Exile: The Dynamics of Gender, Protest and Violence in the Revolutionary Life of Vera Figner (1852-1917)”

Advisor: Roberta Manning

Position: Adjunct Faculty, Villanova University

Ann Holder

Dissertation Title: “Making the Body Politic: Narratives of Race, Sexuality and Citizenship in the United States, 1864-1909”

Advisor: Judith Smith

Position: Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute (tenure track)

Tim Kenslea

Dissertation Title: “No Small Surrender: The Courtship and Engagement of Harry Sedgwick and Jane Minot”

Advisor: Alan Rogers

Position: History Teacher, Xaverian High School (Massachusetts)

Published: The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic (University Press of New England, 2006)

William Leonard

Dissertation Title: “Vigor in Arduis: A History of Boston’s African-American Catholic Community, 1788-1988”

Advisor: Andrew Bunie

Position: Associate Professor, Emmanuel College

Michael Paul

Dissertation Title: “A Complicated Business: The Pentagon Talks, 1947--A Case Study in Anglo-American Cooperation in the Early Cold War”

Advisor: Peter Weiler and Carol Petillo

Christine Senecal

Dissertation Title: “The Regional Aristocracy of Late Anglo-Saxon England”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Associate Professor, Shippensburg University

Kevin Spicer, CSC

Dissertation Title: “Choosing between God and Satan: The German Catholic Clergy of Berlin and the Third Reich”

Advisor: John Heineman

Position: Visiting Professor of German History, University of Notre Dame

Published: Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler's Berlin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004)

Karine Uge

Dissertation Title: “Politics of Narrative Production: Monastic Historiography in Flanders, Ninth-Eleventh Century”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Free University of Brussels

Published: Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders (York, 2005)

John White

Dissertation Title: “The Knock Apparitions and Pilgrimage: Popular Piety and the Irish Land War”

1998-99 

Dora Dumont

Dissertation Title: “Politics and the Popolo Minuto: Collective Action in Bologna, 1796-1860”

Advisor: James Cronin

Position: Associate Professor & Chair of History Department, State University of New York at Oneonta

Peter Fraunholtz

Dissertation Title: “Senate Intervention and Local Control in Russia, 1917-1921: Grain Procurement Politics in Penza Province”

Advisor: Roberta Manning

Position: Librarian, Harvard University, and Lecturer, Northeastern University

Christopher Hannan

Dissertation Title: “'After This Time of Trouble and War?’ Crisis and Continuity in the New England Anglo-Indian Community, 1660-1725”

Advisor: Alan Rogers

Scott McGee

Dissertation Title: “'Land in the Enlightened Imagination': From Astrobiology to Commodification--Agrarian Debates in 18th-Century Italy”

Steven O’Brien

Dissertation Title: “Blackrobe in Blue: The Naval Chaplaincy of John P. Foley, S.J., 1942-1946”

Advisor: Thomas O’Connor

Position: Instructor, Bridgewater State College

Wendy Pojmann

Dissertation Title: “Autonomy, Authority and the Politics of Parity: Women’s Associations in Post-War Italy”

Advisor: James Cronin

Position: Assistant Professor, Siena College (tenure track)

Published: Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy (Ashgate, 2006)

Margaret Preston

Dissertation Title: “The Unobtrusive Classes of the Meritorious Poor: Gentlewomen, Social Control and the Language of Charity in 19th-Century Dublin”

Advisor: Kevin O’Neill

Position: Assistant Professor, Augustana College (tenure track)

Published: Charitable Words: Women, Philanthropy, and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth-Century Dublin (Praeger, 2004)

Elizabeth Wengler

Dissertation Title: “Women, Religion, and Reform in 16th-Century Geneva”

Advisor: Virginia Reinburg

Position: Associate Professor, College of Saint Benedict

Thomas Whalen

Dissertation Title: “Evening the Score: John F. Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and the 1952 Massachusetts Senate Race”

Advisor: Thomas O’Connor

Position: Associate Professor of Social Sciences, College of General Studies, Boston University

Published: A Higher Purpose: Profiles in Presidential Courage (Ivan R. Dee, 2007)

Dynasty’s End: Bill Russell and the1968-69 World Champion Boston Celtics (Northeastern University Press, 2005)

Kennedy Versus Lodge: The 1952 Massachusetts Senate Race (Northeastern University Press, 2000)

1997-98 

John Ellis

Dissertation Title: “Unity and Diversity: Ethnicity and British National Identity, 1899-1918”

Advisor: Peter Weiler

Position: Assistant Professor, University of Michigan at Flint (tenure track)

Published: Investiture: Royal Ceremony and National Identity in Wales, 1911-1969 (University of Wales Press, 2007)

Jack Every

Dissertation Title: “'In the Name of our Fathers': Abraham Lincoln and the Renaissance of America’s Founding Fathers”

Advisor: Thomas O'Connor

Position: Associate Professor, Community College of Rhode Island

Barry Knowlton

Dissertation Title: “The Linguistic Turn and the Discipline of History”

Advisor: Paul Breines

Erin O’Connor

Dissertation Title: “Dueling Patriarchies: Gender, Indians and State Formation in the Ecuadorian Sierra, 1860-1925”

Advisor: Kevin O'Neill

Position: Associate Professor, Bridgewater State College

Published: Gender, Indian, Nation: The Contradictions of Making Ecuador, 1830–1925 (University of Arizona Press, 2007)

Ronald Patkus

Dissertation Title: “A Community in Transition: Boston Catholics, 1815-1845”

Advisor: Thomas O’Connor

Position: Associate Director of the Libraries for Special Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of History, Vassar College

1996-97 

Andrew Altman

Dissertation Title: “Motoring for the Masses? Cars and Class in Pre-1950 Britain”

Advisor: Peter Weiler

Position: Founder, Andrew Altman Web Design

Anni Baker

Dissertation Title: “Unsere Amerikanischen Freude? Wiesbaden and the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam Era”

Advisor: Carol Petillo

Position: Associate Professor, Wheaton College

Published: Life in the U.S. Armed Forces: (Not) Just Another Job (Praeger, forthcoming)

American Soldiers Overseas: The Global Military Presence (Praeger, 2004)

Mary Frances (Smith) Giandrea

Dissertation Title: “Episcopal landholding, lordship and culture in late Anglo-Saxon England”

Advisor: Robin Fleming

Position: Assistant Professor, American University (tenure track)

Published Episcopal Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England (York, 2006)

Judith Giesberg

Dissertation Title: “‘The truest patriots’: the United States sanitary commission and women’s reform in transition, 1861-1865”

Advisor: Cynthia Lyerly

Position: Assistant Professor, Villanova University (tenure track)

Published: Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women 's Politics in Transition (Northeastern University Press, 2000)

Judith S. Graham

Dissertation Title: “Domestic Duty: The Family Life of Samuel Sewall, 1675-1729”

Advisor: Alan Rogers

Position: Assistant Editor at the Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Published: Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall (Northeastern University Press, 2000)

Dissertation Title: “Romans and Carthaginians in the eighteenth century: imperial ideology and national identity in Britain and France during the Seven Years’ War”

Advisor: Larry Wolff

Position: Special Assistant to the President, Gordon College

Selected earlier graduates: