As the academic year has come to a close, the Richards Center proudly congratulates our 2025-26 postdoctoral fellows as they begin exciting new chapters in their careers this fall! During their time at Penn State, they contributed significantly to the community through their research, collaboration, and mentorship.
Halee Robinson will join the University of Texas at San Antonio as Assistant Professor of History and Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Reflecting on her experience during the fellowship, Robinson said:
“My time at Penn State has been intellectually rich and rewarding because of the Richards Center. During my postdoc, I have had opportunities to attend workshops and professional development sessions, engage with senior scholars, connect with other brilliant fellows, and workshop my book manuscript. The latter was particularly fruitful because I received such helpful feedback and guidance from affiliates of the Richards Center and outside scholars. Above all, my time at Penn State has allowed me to write and revise my manuscript, which has been invaluable before starting a tenure-track position in the fall. I have enjoyed every moment of my time at the Richards Center, and I am grateful for the time and space to develop my ideas in this supportive intellectual community.”
Joshua Strayhorn will begin his new role as Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. Strayhorn described the importance of the fellowship in supporting his growth as a scholar:
“My year at the Richard’s Center and at Penn State more broadly has been integral to my development as a scholar and has allowed me to make great progress in my research project. Without the time and research support offered by the Richard’s Center, I would not have been able to enter the first year of my tenure track position with as much momentum as I have now. I will always cherish the intellectual community that was formed here and the generous and generative ideas that developed in the workshop. Bouncing ideas off my colleagues pushed me to think about things in ways I never would have. I will be forever grateful for the time spent at the Richard’s Center.”
After two years as a postdoctoral fellow, Hannah Katherine Hicks will join the University of Miami as Assistant Professor of History. Hicks described her fellowship as transformative:
“I so enjoyed and appreciated my two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Richards Center, which have been really life-changing! The Richards Center community of professors, postdocs, predocs, and graduate students are second-to-none in their support for one another’s work, their kindness, and their ability to offer incisive, helpful feedback. Having a manuscript workshop last year, benefiting from other opportunities to share my works-in-progress, and sage advice from Richards Center affiliated professors all helped me to revise my dissertation into a manuscript, find a tenure-track job, and finally move forward with publishing my book. Though I will miss being at the Richards Center, I am excited to be starting a new position at the University of Miami in August.”
We say thank you to and wish the best for Halee, Joshua, and Hannah! We look forward to following their continued success in the years ahead!
Hope McCaffrey: We are so excited to have Professor Jonathan Jones joining us today to talk about his book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis, published in 2025 by the University of North Carolina Press. The book was shortlisted for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln prize. Dr Jones is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University, and he was an inaugural postdoctoral scholar in Civil War history at the Richards Center from 2020 to 2021. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Jones
Jonathan S. Jones: Thanks for having me.
HM: We were wondering if you could start by talking about the origins of the project and what drew you to this subject.
JSJ: Absolutely. I’ve always been interested in the Civil War, particularly in what happens after the Civil War, kind of the post-Civil War period. And so I knew, from the deep origins of my career as a scholar, I knew I wanted to work on Civil War veterans. But the project that became my book, Opium Slavery, originally was my dissertation project, and it actually came about by accident. When I was working on a not totally unrelated project, about Civil War veterans but not on the topic of drugs and substance use, I kept finding in the primary sources these offhand references to things like “morphism” and the “morphine habit,” and I couldn’t get those out of my head.
So, I stepped away from that original project, and I spent a few years away from graduate school. When it came time to come back and pick a dissertation topic, those sources were still lodged in my brain, and I could not get them out of there. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis, the ongoing opioid epidemic that in our time, dates back to the 1990’s, really started to heat up in terms of media coverage. And so, putting the two together, I realized that a lot of what I was seeing on TV and hearing on the radio was strikingly, eerily similar to what I was seeing in the primary sources coming out of the 1860s and 70s and 80s. And so that’s what motivated me to really dive into this project. And from there, it spiraled out of control.
Erica Croft: Can you tell us a little bit more about the story you wanted to tell?
JSJ: Yeah, I wanted to tell two sort of narratives, right? And I wanted to blend them as seamlessly as possible. I wanted to tell a story about opium, the substance of opium from which opiates and opioids are originally derived. And so I knew that that was going to involve doing things like figuring out where opium came from in terms of the nineteenth-century U.S., how medical doctors prescribed opium, what they knew about the concept of addiction, and how those things evolved across the long civil war era. I also wanted to reconstruct addiction as an epidemic, right? So, I wanted to tell this big picture story of what I came to recognize as America’s earliest or first opioid crisis. But I didn’t want the people to get lost in that broader framework.
And so, I wanted to tell that big story, the history of the epidemic, but I also wanted to narrate the individual stories of civil war veterans. What I settled on was a methodology where I situated the story in a one-hundred-year window dating from the 1820s through the 1920s, and I did a lot of research into how people thought about substances, how people prescribed and also dealt with, opiates. But I decided to tell a human-centered story. I focused really closely on a data set. That’s a really unhuman way to describe them, but a sample of 200 Civil War veterans that I found over the years of doing the research. And so, I tell this broader story through the eyes of these individuals as much as I can. So I guess to put it all back into words, it’s a big story, it’s the epidemiological history, but it’s also, I hope, a human story too, so that the individual people whose lives are so affected by addiction in the 1800s don’t fall by the wayside in telling the bigger story.
HM: Thank you so much. So, on the topic of research and turning research into a story, we were wondering if you could talk a little bit about how your time at the Richards Center contributed to or ended up shaping the project.
JSJ: Yeah, my time at the Richard center honestly meant everything to me. I never imagined a scenario where in my career I would have an opportunity to do something like the Richards Center postdoc that I did in 2020 and 2021—to just dedicate myself to doing additional research and to refining a project. And so that chunk of time at the Richards Center came at a really crucial moment for me. I was about to step into, luckily, an academic position, but a rather teaching intensive position, and I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time over the subsequent couple years to work on my writing, and so I dived into the postdoc at the Richards Center, knowing that at the end of it, I wanted to have an early version of the book manuscript. I needed to go from dissertation to book, or at least a draft of the book, in the course of a year.
And so, having the chance to step away from teaching, to step mostly away from service, except for scholarly organizations and things like that, and really immerse myself in the research that I had already started doing, but also the chance to workshop pieces of the manuscript at the Richards Center, to interact with the faculty and staff and students at the Richards Center, and also outside scholars that generously donated their time to read really closely the early version of my manuscript, couldn’t have come at a better time. I think without the year at the Richards Center, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the book as quickly as I did.
But more importantly, I don’t think it would have been at the same scale that I was able to write. I think it would have been a much smaller, more narrowly focused story. In particular, when I came to the Richards Center, I thought of myself as a scholar of Civil War veterans, and I was thinking mostly along the lines of like manhood and gender and questions like that. But at the Richards Center, I was challenged to think more in terms of other questions, like race, for example. And so being able to workshop the material that I had found and see it through a new set of eyes and be asked new questions about it, I think made the story much more rich, and really did change my research findings as well.
EC: I’m really curious, in that research process, if there is anything particularly surprising or interesting that you found, a specific source or a particular insight?
JSJ: Definitely. Yeah, wow. Where to begin? I guess the thing that most immediately comes to mind is when I was working on this project as a dissertation, I was not so much focused on specifically the question of Chinese immigrants and opium smoking. My frame of reference for this is going to get a little bit deep in the weeds here, apologies, but my frame of reference was Civil War veterans. They were mostly white, mostly born in the United States. Of course, about ten percent of the Union army is Black. But in my sources, I found that the topic of Black soldiers and opioid use was really under covered by the sources. In the earlier phase of my research, I was mostly focused on a particular set of white male Civil War veterans, and I had detached the story that I was thinking about and telling from the broader Gilded Age context after the Civil War, where you have these really heated debates over immigration and race, and, of course, the racial upheaval coming out of Reconstruction.
And so, I believe it might have been Cathleen Cahill, who first prodded me, and encouraged me to think about Chinese opium smoking on the West Coast in relation to Civil War veterans further east in the north and the south in the 1870s and the 1880s. I dived into a set of primary sources, these legislative debates in California about drug use and immigration, things that I would have never even thought to question and to try to relate back to the story that I told. And what I ended up finding is that the “problem,” right, the perceived problem of opioid use, those Civil War veterans and other native-born, particularly white Americans, were the overwhelming majority of opioid users. They did not surface as much in the kind of public debates about opioid use as Chinese opium smokers did, even though they had very different ways of consuming. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, but there are almost two parallel ways of consuming the drug. But yet, Chinese immigrants got scapegoated, and that affected the way that people talked about Civil War veterans as well. None of that would be in the book without having been asked those questions during some of the workshops that I did at the Richards Center. And so those kinds of sources were super, super powerful.
HM: It’s fantastic to hear you talk about how the exciting things you found were maybe due to the time at the Richards Center, as well! That’s great. So, because the Richards Center is a center for the study of the Civil War era, we’d love to hear what your thoughts are on how your book changes the way we think about or consider the Civil War era broadly?
JSJ: Yeah, I appreciate this question. I’ve had to give this a lot of thought lately. One of the things that comes front of mind to me is that I think still, it’s the case, that a lot of times when we think about the Civil War, as traumatic as it was, as bloody as it was, I mean, America’s bloodiest conflict, more people died during the civil war than all of America’s other wars kind of combined. Even still, I think we tend to sanitize the conflict. I think that we tend to have a narrative around the conflict, with things like reenacting and movies, makes it seem, to a certain extent, like it was fun and games. And I also tend to think that when we, in an academic sense, focus on the Civil War, we’re a lot of the time inadvertently telling what scholars call a freedom narrative—a narrative that focuses on the abolition of slavery, and rightly so. But I think in these twin ways of thinking about the Civil War, a lot of the drama and the bloodshed can be sanitized.
And so, the first thing that I wanted to do with this book, besides uncover this history that had been largely forgotten and had never really been taken seriously, I wanted to bring back. I wanted to take a hard look at kind of the traumatic aftershocks of the Civil War in a way that I thought would bring a more realistic reconstruction of the conflict. Yes, we should, of course, talk about abolition. Yes, we should talk about all the other kind of changes, you know, politically, that come out of the Civil War, right? But also, at the same time, it’s really difficult to celebrate a war that was so catastrophic. I wanted to remind people of that broader point.
Certainly, I’m not the only scholar to make that point. Over the last ten or fifteen years, a number of scholars have written books that critics sort of laugh off as the dark side of the Civil War. But I think it’s really important to think about the cost of all the changes that are brought about by the Civil War in order to understand the conflict with a more wholesome accounting of the costs.
The other thing that I wanted to do was to take the medical history of the Civil War very seriously. A lot of the time when we think about books about the Civil War era, medicine maybe gets a few lines or maybe a chapter. But the most universal experience of the Civil War was getting sick and suffering, right? And so, I think for me, the Civil War is medical history. I wanted to tell a story about the Civil War and the aftershocks of the Civil War, but have medicine surfaced to the front of that. In doing so, what I point out, what the research shows, is that the Civil War really changed American medicine in ways that are pretty unexpected. Some of the earliest iterations of drug addiction therapy, for example, in the U.S., we can trace those right back to the late 1860s when Civil War veterans were returning home addicted to drugs like opium and morphine. And that’s just scratching the surface. So, to sum it up, I wanted to reconstruct a more realistic, more harrowing, version of the Civil War, and I wanted to do so through the lens of medical history. And so, I hope those are the kinds of contributions that the book will make.
HM: Thank you so much. We, again, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.
JSJ: Thank you for having me.
Richards Center assistant program director, Hope McCaffrey, and graduate research assistant Erica Croft recently interviewed Jonathan Jones, Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University, about his new book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis, published in 2025 by the University of North Carolina Press. The book was shortlisted for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln prize. Jones was the inaugural postdoctoral scholar in Civil War history at the Richards Center from 2020 to 2021.
Jones explained that his fellowship at the Richards Center came at a crucial moment in his career: “I was about to step into, luckily, an academic position, but a rather teaching intensive position, and I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time over the subsequent couple years to work on my writing.” He dove into the postdoc, knowing that at the end of it, he hoped to have a book manuscript. “I needed to go from dissertation to book, or at least a draft of the book, in the course of a year.”
The Richards Center gave Jones the time to immerse himself in his completed research, the chance to workshop his writing, and the opportunity “to interact with the faculty and staff and students at the Richards Center, and also outside scholars that generously donated their time to read really closely the early version of my manuscript.” Without the year at the Richards Center, he said, he would not have “been able to finish the book as quickly as I did.”
At the Richards Center, Jones felt that he “was challenged to think more in terms of other questions.” Seeing his research “through a new set of eyes and be asked new questions about it, … made the story much more rich.”
Read the complete interview with Jonathan Jones on the Richards Center’s website.
The Richards Center hosted two manuscript workshops in the past few months for the current postdoctoral scholars. These workshops are a central component of the Richards Center’s postdoctoral program, designed to support postdocs as they prepare their manuscripts for publication with an academic press. The Center invites leading scholars in the field to read the full manuscripts and offer substantive feedback. In addition to strengthening the manuscripts themselves, these workshops provide postdocs with valuable opportunities to expand their professional networks. Each postdoc also invites interested members of the Penn State community to participate in the discussion.
These workshops have helped scholars in their early careers launch successful book projects. Most recently, former postdoctoral scholar Jonathan Jones published the book he workshopped during his time at the Richards Center.
For the first workshop, held in December of 2025, postdoctoral scholar Joshua Strayhorn presented his in-progress manuscript, “Freedom’s Promise: Black Mobility, Migration, and Freedom Dreams in Eastern North Carolina, 1862-1898.” Invited senior scholars Professor Tera Hunter, Princeton University, and Professor Dylan Penningroth, The University of California, Berkeley, joined the Richards Center community to review and offer comment on Joshua’s book manuscript. Participants enjoyed a community lunch following the workshop to celebrate Joshua’s book project and the end of the 2025 year.
The second manuscript workshop was held in early March for postdoctoral scholar Halee Robinson, who presented her book manuscript entitled, “They Taken Him Away: Race, Punishment, and the Intimate Histories of the Texas Prison System, 1865–1912.” Professor Brandi Brimmer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Professor Martha Escobar, California State University – Northridge, were the senior scholars invited to join the Richards Center community to review and offer comment on Halee’s manuscript. This generative workshop was a fantastic way for the community to come together before heading out for spring break!
Faculty News
Cathleen D. Cahill recently hosted Hilary N. Green on The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast to discuss Green’s most recent book, Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War, which was published by Fordham University Press in 2025.
Martha Few and Lucien Holness have both been accepted into Under the Big Sky: The Montana Writers Retreat in Bozeman, Montana this June. This retreat provides authors with a unique opportunity to focus on their writing, share their ideas with fellow writers, and immerse themselves in their creative work. Set on B Bar Ranch, a working cattle ranch in Paradise Valley sharing a six-mile border with Yellowstone National Park, this retreat will offer writers space to think deeply, work intentionally, gain insight from colleagues and facilitators, and move their writing project forward.
Gabrielle Foreman has been selected as a Humanities Institute Resident Scholar for spring 2027. Foreman will devote the spring to her new book project, Founding Families: The Colored Convention Movement and the Long Fight for Equal Rights.
Christopher Heaney was awarded a $25,000 Engaged Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation! The grant will support Proyecto Huayo, a community-guided collaboration with San Mateo de Huánchor, Peru, focused on the recontextualization of a pre-Hispanic ritual cranial mask now held in the Smithsonian. The project combines archival research, community education, archaeology led by Peruvian partners, and structured dialogue between communities and museums, with an emphasis on ethical research and local priorities.
Lucien Holness has been selected as a Humanities Institute Resident Scholar for spring 2027. Holness will be revising his book manuscript, The Making of a Free State: Free Soil, Free Labor, and Black Freedom in the Borderland of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
Mary E. Mendoza recently presented on a panel, “Is There A Border Crisis?” at The Albert LePage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University.
Greg Peek was awarded $3,500 from the Clinton County Community Foundation for a grant he submitted on behalf of the Piper Aviation Museum in Lock Haven, PA. The funds are designed to be used to upgrade overhead and display lighting fixtures in the museum’s second floor gallery. Peek also was awarded a teaching Faculty Development from from CLASS Teaching Faculty Advisory Committee.
Former Postdoctoral News
Jessica Wicks-Allen, former postdoctoral fellow, recent interviewed on The Journal of the American History podcast to discuss her new journal article “Child Apprenticeship and Black Maternal Authority following the Civil War.”
Former Predoctoral News
Adam McNeil has accepted a tenure track position in the Department of African Studies, University of Notre Dame.
Graduate Student News
Morgan Haller presented her research at the Newberry Consortium on American Indian Studies (NCAIS) graduate student conference at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Her talk was titled “The “Brave-Hearted Women”: Intersectional Political Activism through the Feminine Narrative in Akwesasne Notes.”
Morgan Haller
Annelise Walker received a 2026–27 short-term research fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library! They will be using it to consult Aymara-language materials and documents about colonial mining for their dissertation “Collecting the Subterranean: Mining and Minerals between Alto Perú and Spain, 1749–1809.”
Norman Watson has been awarded a postdoctoral teaching fellowship from the History Department at Penn State.
Former Graduate Student News
William Cossen’s (Ph.D. 2016) book, Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has been awarded the American Catholic Historical Association’s inaugural Christopher J. Kauffman Prize in U.S. Catholic History for “the best monograph published from 2022 to 2024 that provides new and/or challenging insight to the study of U.S. Catholic history.”
Faculty Publications
Martha Few’s chapter, “Gender, Colonialism, and Disability in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters: Medicalized Trauma and the 1773 Guatemala Earthquake,” just appeared in in Heather Vrana and David Carey, Jr.’s Histories of Disability in Latin America.
Sherita Johnson was recently interviewed for a Penn State story on her co-authored new book, Mixing: Race, Higher Education, and the Case of Clyde Kennard, published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Jacob Lee’s chapter, “Alliances,” was published in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution, Volume II, Revolution, edited by Marjoleine Kars, Michael A. McDonnell, and Andrew M. Schocket.
Mary E. Mendoza had her first book, Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico, published by the University of North Carolina Press this spring.
Christina Snyder published an article in The Economist as part of their America at 250 series, “The Indian Removal Act: Unchecked Expansionism and Disregard for the Rule of Law”
Snyder also co-guest edited Native South, special issue, Choctaw National Records, featuring a project on Choctaw court records. Snyder and Edward Green contributed to the journal the article, “Angry in the House”: The Criminalization of Whooping in the Choctaw Nation.
Edward Green, Penn State Department of History Postdoctoral Fellow, also contributed, “Learn Your Laws and It Will Save You Many a Dollar”: Towards a Social History of the Choctaw Court System, to the journal special issue.
Former Graduate Student Publication
William Cossen (Ph.D. 2016) signed a contract with LSU Press for his second book, Soldiers and Sacraments: The Lived Catholic Civil War.
The Richards Center at Penn State and The Journal of the Civil War Era (JCWE) announce a journal article workshop for advanced graduate students, recent PhDs, assistant professors, and independent scholars. Selected scholars will be expected to attend an online orientation webinar in June, provide a draft journal article by August 15, 2026, and participate in an online workshop in September. The workshop will be facilitated by a senior historian in the field, and the aim is to assist scholars in crafting a publishable article. Although the workshop is cosponsored by the JCWE, participants are not obliged to submit articles there.
Deadline for applications: April 15, 2026
To apply for the program, please submit the following materials as one pdf file to the RichardsCenter@psu.edu.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Former Postdoctoral Fellows
Former Predoctoral Fellows
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.
The Journal of the Civil War Era is pleased to announce that Dr. J. Jacob Calhoun has been selected as the recipient of the Anthony E. Kaye Memorial Essay Award for 2025. His winning essay is titled, “‘Nothing was known of the dead’: Coroners and the Massacres of 1866.”
The prize committee, consisting of Paul Barba (chair), Erin Mauldin, and Whitney Stewart, praised the article as follows: “By closely and creatively interrogating the records of the coroner’s offices in Memphis and New Orleans in the aftermath of the 1866 massacres, Calhoun reveals the vast power and responsibility vested in these officials and their institutions. Significantly, Calhoun demonstrates in convincing fashion how these men shaped both the government’s investigations of mass racist violence and how historians have interpreted these pivotal moments in Civil War era history. Insightful and meticulous, Calhoun’s essay brings into relief the enduring methodological value of close readings and comparative lenses.”
Calhoun is a Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of History and the David A. Moore Chair in American History at Wabash College. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Nau Center for Civil War History 2024-2025, and he received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2024. His research focuses on the history of emancipation and Reconstruction, specifically the intersection between politics, race, and violence.
The Kaye Award is awarded every two years and is co-sponsored by the JCWE, the Society of Civil War Historians, the University of North Carolina Press, and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center.
Guy Emerson Mount has won the $1,000 George and Ann Richards Prize for the best article published in The Journal of the Civil War Era in 2024. The article, “Shall I Go? Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914” appeared in the December 2024 special issue, Black Internationalism in the Era of Emancipation, guest edited by Brandon R. Byrd.
The prize committee was impressed by the article’s “innovative approach and its illuminating insights” and praised it for creating “an innovative historical arc that illuminates how white state crafters sought to tackle the problem of emancipation through colonization.” The committee called the article “beautifully written” and predicted that it “will not only offer scholars of slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, and US imperialism a new way to think about the connections between these topics but also fuel further conversation about the place of the Pacific in the histories of nineteenth-century America.”
Mount is an Assistant Professor of History and an affiliate in African American Studies at Wake Forest University. He teaches courses in Atlantic History, Antebellum America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Global History of Reparations. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago under the direction of Tom Holt. While at Chicago, he co-founded the Reparations at UChicago Working Group which first uncovered the University’s historical ties to slavery while organizing alongside residents of the South Side of Chicago for reparations. Previously he held a Carter G. Woodson fellowship at the University of Virginia and a tenure-track position at Auburn University where he was granted the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in 2022. His current book project, from which the winning article is derived, is tentatively titled Black Elsewheres: Slavery, Empire, and Reconstruction in the Black Pacific.
Awarded annually, the Richards Prize celebrates the generosity of George and Ann Richards, who were instrumental in the growth of the Richards Civil War Era Center and in the founding of The Journal of the Civil War Era. The journal is grateful for the service of this year’s prize committee: Joanna Cohen, Queen Mary University of London (chair); Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Gabriel (Jack) Chin, University of California, Davis School of Law.
This is a one-year appointment with an excellent possibility of renewal for a second year. During their residency, the scholar will primarily perform their research. The scholar will have no teaching or administrative responsibilities. In addition, they will attend workshops, professional development sessions, and other relevant events, and will be expected to take an active part in Penn State’s community of researchers.
A Ph.D. in History or related field is required at time of appointment. Successful applicants must have completed all requirements for the Ph.D. within the previous four academic years.
To be considered for these positions, submit a complete application packet including a cover letter describing your research and goals for the scholarship year, a curriculum vitae, and a list of three references online at Penn State’s Job Posting Board. We will request writing samples and letters of recommendation from candidates who advance in the search process.
Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil War Era
The Richards Civil War Era Center, in conjunction with the Department of History and the College of the Liberal Arts, at The Pennsylvania State University invites applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar in the history of the Civil War Era, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2026.
All research interests spanning the pre-war period through Reconstruction will receive favorable consideration. Proposals that align with the Richards Center’s interests in slavery, abolition, and emancipation are especially welcome.
Postdoctoral Scholar, African American History
The Richards Civil War Era Center and the Africana Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, invite applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar in African American History, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2026.
All research interests spanning the origins of slavery through the Civil Rights movement will receive favorable consideration. Proposals that align with the Richards Center’s interests in slavery, abolition, and emancipation, as well as comparative or Atlantic history, are especially welcome.
