Meet our New Persun Fellow and Postdoctoral Scholars!
Ryan Quintana, Mark and Ann Persun Visiting Scholar
Ryan Quintana is an associate professor of Nineteenth Century American History at Wellesley College with specialties in the history of political development and the state, slavery and emancipation, and the production of space. He is the author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). He is currently working on his second book project, “We Do Not Want to Be Slaves”: Empire and Expansion in the Age of Emancipation, which examines the everyday labors and governing practices of empire and infrastructural development in the North American West during the Civil War Era. When he’s not in the archives or the classroom, he enjoys working in his garden, riding his bike, and hoping that Manchester United will somehow turn it all around.
Halee Robinson, 2025–2026 Postdoctoral Fellow
Halee Robinson received her doctoral degree in history and a graduate certificate in African American studies from Princeton University, and she specializes in the histories of race, punishment, and freedom in the United States. Her dissertation, “‘They taken him away from us’: Race, Punishment, and the Intimate Histories of the Texas Prison System, 1865–1912” explores the effects and consequences of the Texas prison system on the intimate lives of Black, ethnic Mexican, Indigenous, and white people in Texas after the Civil War. In particular, her project illuminates the central role that family and community played not only in the punitive aims of the state, but also in the ways that incarcerated and free people alike resisted state violence and punishment and articulated their own conceptions of justice. Halee received her Master of Arts degree in history from Princeton University and her Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science from Vanderbilt University.
Joshua Strayhorn, 2025–2026 Postdoctoral Fellow
Joshua Strayhorn is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history. His book project, Freedom’s Promise: Black Mobility and Migration in North Carolina, 1860–1898, chronicles the history of enslaved and freed people’s communities and cultures in Eastern North Carolina, where its topography, ecology, and local people’s spirituality, helped shape the course of freed people’s migration to the U.S. Midwest, Deep South, and abroad. His work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the North Caroliniana Society, and the Kenan School of Ethics at Duke University. In 2022, he was awarded the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation fellowship from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars to complete his dissertation. Strayhorn earned his master’s degree and doctoral degree in history from Duke University and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history from North Carolina Central University.
Welcome Hope and Sheena to the Richards Center Team!
Hope McCaffrey, Assistant Program Director, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and Assistant Research Professor, Department of History
Hope McCaffrey joins the Richards Center for the 2025–2026 academic year as the Assistant Program Director. She also holds an appointment as assistant research professor in the Department of History at Penn State. McCaffrey was previously a predoctoral fellow at the Richards Center in 2024–2025 and earned her doctoral degree in history from Northwestern University in 2025. She is a historian of gender and politics in the nineteenth-century United States, and her current book project focuses on white women’s partisan activism in the Democratic Party during the antebellum and Civil War eras. Her research has been supported by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the New York Public Library, and the American Association of University Women.
Sheena Carroll, Communications Manager, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and Production Manager, Journal of the Civil War Era
Sheena Carroll is a writer, graphic designer, and marketing expert with experience across the publishing, non-profit, and tech industries. She has a particular passion for academic publishing, holding a Master of Arts degree in English from Slippery Rock University. Her past roles include positions at the University of Pittsburgh Press and Write Pittsburgh.
Latest News
Congratulations to Guy Emerson Mount, who has won the George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2024!
Congratulations to J. Jacob Calhoun has been selected as the recipient of the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award for 2025!
UNC Press has published The Second Manassas Campaign, co-edited by 2024–2025 Richards Center Persun Visiting Scholar Kathryn J. Shively.
2022 Brose lecturer Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s book, Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War, was published by UNC Press in September.
More News:
- Dara Walker received the 2025 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for her project “High School Rebels: Black Power, Education, and Youth Politics in the Motor City, 1966–1973.”
- Matthew Restall published The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus with W. W. Norton and On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide with Oxford University Press in 2025.
- A.K. Sandoval-Strausz edited Metropolitan Latinidad: Transforming American Urban History with University of Chicago Press, a collection of twelve essays examining the rich and multifaceted Latino experience in cities and suburbs throughout the United States.
- Cathleen D. Cahill has become a co-host to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era podcast.
- Amy S. Greenberg’s publications this year include an essay in Spanish on the U.S.-Mexican War (published in Spain), a think piece on teaching foreign relations history in the Trump Era, and a review of Rick Atkinson’s latest Revolutionary War history in The New York Times. She also gave invited lectures to the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Cushwa Center for the study of Catholicism at Notre Dame, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, and the Milton Historical Society.
- Christina Snyder won a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to work on her current book project American Abolitions: The Slow Death and Many Afterlives of Slavery. She is also currently serving as president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. In 2025, the fifth edition of her co-authored textbook, American Horizons: US History in a Global Context, was published by Oxford University Press.
- Mary E. Mendoza’s anthology, Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History was published by University of Nebraska Press in spring 2025.
- Sasha Coles published the essay “Mormon Women, Mulberry Trees, and Environmental Transformation in the American West” in the edited volume Branching Out, released by University of Massachusetts Press in spring 2025.
- Jessica Wicks-Allen had an article, “Child Apprenticeship and Black Maternal Authority following the Civil War,” published in September issue of The Journal of American History.
Job Announcements:
Former Postdoctoral Fellows
- Allison Mitchell accepted a position as assistant professor of civil rights studies in Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.
- Nicole Viglini accepted a position as assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Former Predoctoral Fellows
- Adam Xavier McNeil, 2024–2025 Predoctoral Fellow, received a postdoctoral research associate in The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia (July 2025). After his postdoctoral fellowship, McNeil will be an assistant professor of Africana studies and history at the University of Rhode Island. Adam also won the SHEAR Dissertation Prize in July.
- Cooper Wingert, 2023–2024 Predoctoral Fellow, received a tenure track job at Fordham University.
Former Affiliated Graduate Students
Courtney Murray Ross (Penn State Ph.D. 2025) received an assistant professor position at James Madison University.
Rachel Louise Moran (Penn State Ph.D. 2013) accepted a position as professor of history at Texas A&M. Moran also recently won the Teacher Scholar Award during The University of North Texas Salute to Faculty Excellence Awards Ceremony in April.
Paulina Serrano (Penn State Ph.D. 2023) won a North American Society for Sport History’s 2025 Dissertation Prize. The Dissertation Prize is awarded on an annual basis and recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of sport history. Serrano is a Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Heather Carlquist Walser (Penn State Ph.D. 2024), received a tenure track job at Mississippi State University.
Cecily Zander (Penn State Ph.D. 2021) accepted a position as assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. Zander won the Wiley-Silver Prize for the best first book in Civil War History and was also named the series editor for new “History in an Afternoon” series, published by LSU Press.