A Special Letter from the Admin Team:
Dear RC Community,
As you may already know, beginning in January, Rachel is going on leave and Cathleen will be stepping in to run the Richards Center in her absence. Cathleen served as interim director of the Center during the 2022–2023 year, so she has the experience and she is also very grateful to have the help of our terrific administrative assistant Barby Singer as always. We are also thrilled to have Jacob Lee as our program director through spring 2027 and Hope McCaffrey continuing as our assistant program director this year.
During her time away, Rachel will be finishing up the copyediting and proofs of her forthcoming book, The Political Supreme Court: The Forgotten History of Justices, Parties, & the People’s Constitution, which will be published by the University of North Carolina Press W. Hodding Carter III imprint in fall of 2026, and starting on some new research. She looks forward to returning to the Center in fall 2027.
In the meantime, we are excited to continue the excellent work of the Center. As you will see in the rest of the newsletter, our fellows and former fellows are doing exciting things and there are many congratulations to be had. This fall we’ve had a terrific workshop series featuring our fellows and guests, including Rana Hogarth, associate professor in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Corey Brooks, professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania. In October, we hosted Laura Edwards of Princeton University as our 2025 Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecturer. She gave a fascinating trio of talks on the legal geography of the Civil War.
You’ll also see that this newsletter includes our current call for applicants for next year’s predoctoral and Persun fellowships. Please help us spread the word about these exciting opportunities.
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season!
Cathleen and Rachel
Meet our New Pre-Doctoral Fellows!
Alison McCann, 2025–2026 Pre-Doctoral Fellow
Alison McCann is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on nineteenth-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. By analyzing the transnational experiences of African American emigrants, Alison aims to reveal new insights into the colonization movement. The intricate lives of these Black settlers provide a nuanced and refreshing perspective on the implications of this migration movement and its broader impact on African diasporic movements. African American emigration to Liberia is a story of cultural hybridity that resided at the periphery of the American empire. Her work seeks to enrich our understanding of the United States’ empire, race, and citizenship, not only within the United States but also across the Atlantic World.
Learn more about Alison from her Q&A with Production and Communications Manager Sheena Carroll.
Michael Kaelin, 2025-2026 Pre-Doctoral Fellow
Michael Kaelin is a Ph.D. 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. Arguing that foreign-born actors centrally shaped the Board’s policies and procedures, it reveals that this system reflected German and Irish American conceptions of “worthiness” and proper behavior among new immigrants. Their ideologies and practices were embedded in the first federal system in 1882, for which the New York apparatus served as the primary model. His work has been supported by the German Historical Institute, the German Society of Pennsylvania, and the Peter Paul Miller Educational Travel Fund.
Learn more about Michael from his Q&A with Production and Communications Manager Sheena Carroll.
The Richards Center Is Excited to Welcome Back Abena Boakyewa-Ansah to the Administrative Team!
Abena Boakyewa-Ansah, Part-Time Educational Program Specialist
Abena Boakyewa-Ansah is an independent scholar, and a historian of U.S. history with a specialized interest in Black women’s worlds, lives, and ideas of freedom in the Civil War era. Specializing in Civil War history, Boakyewa-Ansah’s research interests in African-American religious history, Black women’s intellectual landscape and feminist ideas, and innovative research methods for diving deeper into the interiority of the enslaved. She is the author of “Crafted ‘By Their Own Hands:” The African American Religious Experience in Union-Occupied North Carolina, 1862-1865, in the North Carolina Historical Review. As an independent scholar passionate about fostering deep knowledge of Black history across culture, Boakyewa-Ansah has expanded her work outside of academia by continuing to write for public facing magazines and sharing her research and writing online.
As education specialist, Boakyewa-Ansah oversees the Catto Le Count program for emerging scholars interested in pursuing their Ph.D. in history. Outside of the annual program, she facilitates sustained alumni community, connection, and support.
Latest News
Faculty News
Richards Center Director Rachel Shelden was named the Edward J. And Eleanor Black Nichols University Endowed Fellow in History!
Cathleen Cahill was awarded a two-week Lois P. Rudnick Writing Residency at the Historic Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, NM, which she will be taking over part of winter break.
Tony Frazier won an Alumni Achievement Award from the College of Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University.
Post-Doctoral News
Hannah Katherine Hicks has been awarded a Cromwell Fellowship for her research “In Her Defense: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War U.S. South.”
Graduate Student News
Moyra Williams Eaton successfully defended her dissertation, “The State in Stone: The U.S. Naval Asylum, Governance, and Nation Building in the Early Republic.” Moyra also accepted a job at the Jack Miller Center in Philadelphia to be their Graduate Consortium Manager.
Jamie Henton defended her dissertation, “Assimilating the Masses: An Examination of Federal Indian Education from the Indian New Deal to the Era of Self-Determination, 1930–1970.”
Publication News
Former Post-Doctoral Fellows
Jessica Wicks-Allen’s article, “Child Apprenticeship and Black Maternal Authority following the Civil War,” was published in September issue of The Journal of American History.
Jonathan S. Jones’s book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis, was published by UNC Press in October.
Graduate Students
Antwain K. Hunter’s book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865, was published in by UNC Press in November.
Cameron Sauers published a book review essay entitled “Black Movement and Rebellion Across the Atlantic World” in the latest issue of Pennsylvania History. He also recently passed his comprehensive exams!
Affiliated Faculty
Keith Gilyard published four books in 2025!
Sherita L. Johnson’s (Africana Research Center Director and Associate Professor of English) co-edited book, Mixing: Race, Higher Education, and the Case of Clyde Kennard, will be released in January from the University Press of Mississippi.
Prakash Kumar published his new book, A History of India’s Green Revolution, with Cambridge University Press.
Matthew Restall’s (Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Anthropology, and director of Latin American Studies) new book, The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, was published in October by W.W. Norton.
Also, check out this article and this Q&A about his two recently published books of pop music scholarship, On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide and Ghosts: Journeys to Post-Pop.
Recent Events
Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lectures Series
Thank you to everyone who attended this year’s Brose Lectures: “The Legal Geography of the Civil War Era and Its Lasting Legacy,” with Laura F. Edwards!
Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University. She is prize-winning author who focuses on the legal history of the nineteenth-century United States, with an emphasis on federalism, the history of legal institutions, and people’s interactions with the law.
Central Pennsylvania Civil War Round Table
Persun Visiting Scholar Ryan Quintana made his presentation, “Westward How?! The Politics and Practice of Trans-Continental Travel in the Civil War Era” and assistant professor of history, Lucien Holness made his presentation, “Juneteenth: The Commemoration and Celebration of Emancipation and the Making of Freedom,” at the Central Pennsylvania Civil War Round Table.