Interview with Professor Jonathan Jones, former Richards Center Postdoctoral Scholar
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.
Past Events
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!
Latest News
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.”
Publication News
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.