Predoctoral Fellows, History of the Civil War Era

The Richards Civil War Era Center, in the College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State, is currently not accepting applications for  predoctoral dissertation fellowships in the history of the Civil War Era. Please check back in the fall for the call for applications.

Current Fellows

Taylor Black is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on religion, race, and U.S. imperialism and colonialism in 19th century America. His dissertation, “Between Faith and Force: Black U.S. Army Chaplains in the Age of Empire, 1865-1915,” recasts Reconstruction as a struggle over religious sovereignty that, for many African Americans, became entangled within larger processes of U.S. imperialism. The project centers the stories of the first five Black Christians to serve as Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal chaplains in the U.S. Regular Army from 1884 to 1920. After liberating themselves from slavery, they embarked on a mission to remake the world as Black religious agents of the U.S. imperial state in the South, the Caribbean, the trans-Mississippi West, and the Pacific world. Their story further reveals the complicated stakes of making modern, racialized subjectivities beyond the borders of former slave states in the long Civil War Era. Taylor’s work has been supported by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Reed-Smith Travel Research Fund.

Isaac J. Guzmán is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His dissertation, “Slavery and Power: Slave Drivers in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina,” is a history of power in South Carolina slavery that spans the late seventeenth century up to the Civil War. Centering the experiences of slave drivers, enslaved Black men responsible for managing plantations alongside white slaveowners, overseers, and white mistresses, Guzmán examines how power was organized, negotiated, and reproduced under slavery. By reconceptualizing the driver as a slave with power, his scholarship complicates the themes of agency and resistance that shape studies of U.S. slavery, revealing how drivers both refused and reproduced the structures of bondage. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the South Caroliniana Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Social Science Research Council.