Meet our 2025-2026 pre-doctoral fellows, Alison McCann and Michael Kaelin! Both fellows recently conducted a Q&A with Production and Communications Manager Sheena Carroll, focusing on their dissertations, specialized interests, and fellowship goals.
Alison McCann
McCann is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on 19th-century American History, emphasizing African American migration, citizenship, and concepts of freedom. Her dissertation, titled “Until Freedom be Done: African American Place Making in Liberia, 1790-1880,” examines the experiences of African Americans who sought to establish lives in Liberia, Africa, as they reconfigured their existence abroad. She highlights specific families who migrated from Southern and Northern regions through her work, articulating a narrative essential to their aspirations and decisions regarding the African outpost.
Carroll: Tell us about your dissertation project and how you see it fitting into the Richards Center’s broad conception of the Civil War Era.
McCann: My dissertation project complements the Richards Center’s broad conception of the Civil War by taking an expansive long-nineteenth-century approach to the Black colonization movement and its Aftermath. In my work, the United States sits at the nexus of the Atlantic world, where many competing ideas of freedom and citizenship are being realized during the Civil War era. While colonization was partly a scheme initiated by the American Colonization Society in 1816, African Americans also harbored ambitions about resettlement in Liberia throughout the nineteenth century. My work focuses specifically on Black emigres from the North and South of the United States who, through direct and indirect ways, challenge the idea of American freedom, slavery, and democracy—but they take their mission abroad to Liberia, Africa. My goal is to show that colonization was an important part of American political and social life both before and after the Civil War, and to highlight how African Americans actively participated in this movement.
Carroll: What new insights or historiographical questions do you hope to explore during your time here?
McCann: During my time at the Richards Center, as I engage with colleagues and workshop ideas, I would like to explore the long-term effects of colonization, the ongoing debates about race, identity, and citizenship, and how these concepts have evolved as historians revisit these histories. Colonization appears to be a subtle aspect of the broader perspective on United States expansionist ambitions, yet it holds significant value for understanding concepts of citizenship and race. Historiographically, it will be interesting to discuss how US imperial histories have treated colonization and shaped how we view the experiences of African Americans abroad, and what that means for historians as we continue these narratives.
A significant portion of my dissertation project explores the refreshing perspective of people involved in this migration movement, namely, the under-documented black settler. Many historians have focused on the American Colonization Society, their agents, and the Black elites of the Liberian colony who have a wealth of sources and some biographies, but the majority left behind a few letters that offer us a glimpse into their experience. Fresh insights on colonization should focus on the everyday settler, those who sometimes got caught up in a colonizing scheme. My work seeks to situate the mass of poor disenfranchised Southern and some Northern African Americans who emigrated to Liberia to understand what colonization meant to them.
Carroll: How do you plan to engage with the Richards Center and the broader Penn State scholarly community during your fellowship year?
McCann: I have got my calendar marked with upcoming roundtables, lectures, book talks, workshops, brown bag lunches, and more. I hope these spaces will be opportunities for me to meet people and become acquainted with the community. I also plan to be present and engaging with colleagues in the history department—some of whose work I have read and am eager to meet. But I would love to interact across disciplines; I have learned so much from scholars in other areas like anthropology and English. I find that having a broad intellectual community not only informs your work but also your thought process, so I hope there are opportunities to meet with others in different departments.
Carroll: What resources are you most looking forward to using?
McCann: I am looking forward to mentorship and the series of professional development workshops. This is an amazing opportunity to get feedback and think through ideas with people who care and understand your work, and I am truly grateful for this experience. Aside from doing the work, being in dialogue about your work is crucial, and this is a significant step for me, being away from my home university, where I get to explore my work with others who do not know me or the research I have done.
Carroll: Looking beyond your dissertation year, how do you envision converting your research into future work?
McCann: I am looking forward to a future book project after the successful defense of the dissertation next year. These five chapters lay some groundwork as I want to explore further the lives of African American settlers in Liberia, and the aftermath of colonization; thus, the Liberian archives would be the next endeavor. I am also seeking more ways to make my work accessible beyond just readership and academic communities. I’m not quite sure if that means a podcast series or a digital humanities project, which I have some experience in, but I want to explore that option later.
Michael Kaelin
Michael Kaelin is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. His dissertation, “Selected Lives: Immigrant Community and the Origins of Federal Immigration Policy in New York, 1847-1882,” examines German and Irish American participation in New York State’s Board of Commissioners of Emigration, the body that regulated immigration into New York in the mid-nineteenth century. His work has been supported by the German Historical Institute, the German Society of Pennsylvania, and the Peter Paul Miller Educational Travel Fund.
Carroll: Tell us about your dissertation project and how you see it fitting into the Richards Center’s broad conception of the Civil War Era.
Kaelin: My dissertation [Selected Lives] argues that foreign-born actors centrally shaped the ideology, policies, and procedures of New York’s Board of Commissioners of Emigration, and by extension laid the groundwork for the first federal immigration system. Created in 1847 as a response to the Potato Famine, this ten-member Board was charged with regulating, processing, and aiding new arrivals. The law establishing it guaranteed representation to the presidents of New York’s Irish and German Societies, and a tradition of appointing additional at-large foreign-born members meant that over half of all commissioners during the Board’s existence were immigrants. My dissertation focuses on Irish and German American community advocates and commissioners of Irish and German origin in their negotiations with native-born colleagues, demonstrating that each group championed their own conceptions of “worthiness,” poverty, fitness, and proper comportment. Disagreements on these points led to a productive tension that ultimately resulted in a multiethnic consensus as to the proper standards by which to regulate new immigration. The federal government used the New York system as its institutional blueprint when it assumed control of immigration in 1882, and ensconced Irish and German regulatory priorities in the first national apparatus. Despite technically being a state-level organization, then, the Commissioners were operating what was functionally a national system, and their decisions were informed by their own life experiences that were both intensely local and necessarily transnational. Given that the eventual creation of a federal system was a significant long term outcome of the transformation of state power flowing out of the Civil War era, I consider this a story inextricable from Civil War and Reconstruction politics.
Carroll: What new insights or historiographical questions do you hope to explore during your time here?
Kaelin: In addition to recapturing foreign-born representatives’ roles in the transition to federal control, Selected Lives restores agency to all settled immigrants as potential regulators of further immigration, and challenges migration scholars to take this dynamic seriously as a force shaping individuals’ decisions to migrate, ethnic community life, and state action. Crucially, Irish- and German-born commissioners’ perceptions of worthiness were not merely elite constructions, but instead reflected ideas embraced by their respective communities at large. Using letters, journals, immigrant guidebooks, and transatlantic media located in the United States, Ireland, and Germany, Selected Lives demonstrates that the positions advanced by ethnic commissioners were an institutionalized manifestation of quotidian practices that immigrants from across the socioeconomic spectrum deployed to dissuade “unworthy” individuals from immigrating, and to police the behavior of community members after arrival.
Carroll: How do you plan to engage with the Richards Center and the broader Penn State scholarly community during your fellowship year?
Kaelin: I am particularly excited for the weekly workshops, in which I look forward to learning more about other scholars’ work on a wide range of nineteenth-century topics. I’m also really looking forward to Laura Edwards’s lecture series, as she is a scholar I greatly admire and was one of my favorite professors in undergrad. The professional development series also should be an excellent opportunity to prepare for the next steps in my academic career.
Carroll: What resources are you most looking forward to using?
Kaelin: My dissertation research was originally slated to begin in the summer of 2020, which obviously meant that it did not proceed according to plan. Although most of my research is completed, there are some spots to backfill with additional archival materials that I had to pass over due to logistical constraints. The most significant of those is the Archbishop John Hughes Papers, as well as some smaller collections at the German Society of Pennsylvania and some non-digitized newspaper collections located in archives in New York and Pennsylvania.
Carroll: Looking beyond your dissertation year, how do you envision converting your research into future work?
Kaelin: Materials I encountered while researching this dissertation may serve as the starting point for two potential future projects. The first I tentatively refer to as “ethnic settler colonialism.” My initial work on this topic suggests that rather than simply reinforcing a unified commitment to Manifest Destiny, foreign-born thinkers and politicians articulated different ideological justifications of and ideal practices for westward expansion. In addition to being an intellectual history, this divergence of contemporary opinion also suggests that scholars need to reexamine or qualify existing assumptions about Native-settler relations, whiteness studies, postbellum politics, and settlement and land use patterns. Differing approaches to American expansion created diverging and only partially reconcilable visions of the United States’ future following the Civil War among the country’s three largest white ethnic groups, the full implications of which require further investigation.
The second potential topic would be on the various schemes for settling European immigrants in the postbellum South. German American Commissioners of Emigration in the late 1860s, in particular, seriously explored trying to use their power to redirect immigrants to the South in order to form large free soil communities, believing that this would have a beneficial demographic, economic, and political influence on Reconstruction. Most of these schemes were never even attempted, much less carried out, but they provide an interesting glimpse into another aspect of Northern Reconstruction politics.
