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Newsletter

Newsletter

Innovative Theses, Dissertations Earn Recognition

Many of our MA and PhD students have achieved professional milestones in the past year. Here are some highlights:

Stacie Beach

Premodern PhD candidate Stacie Beach formally accepted an offer to join Emmanuel University in Franklin Springs, Georgia, as an assistant professor of history.

Headshot photo of Camren Lewin

American history PhD candidate Camren Lewin was awarded a summer residency at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, during July 2025. Lewin will spend a week in hands-on workshops that explore innovative research methodologies, effective teaching strategies, and the intricacies of securing grant funding.

Photo of Nick Strasser

Nick Strasser, PhD candidate in European history, was selected as an Emerging Scholars Fellow at the National WWII Museum’s Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. He presented research on science fiction in Nazi Germany at the institute’s annual conference in New Orleans, with all expenses paid by the museum.

Strasser was selected as a graduate fellow at the Denbo Center for Humanities and Arts, where he will be in residence during the 2025-2026 academic year, completing his dissertation on German science fiction literature. He also had a paper accepted to present at the prestigious German Studies Association conference in September in Arlington, Virginia.

Roraig Finney

American history PhD candidate Roraig Finney won third place in the UT Graduate School’s Three-Minute Thesis competition, out of many dozens of competitors. This is the second year in a row that the history department has had a university finalist in this contest. He also organized a panel that has been accepted to the annual conference of the American Historical Association in January 2026, no small feat for a PhD student. Finney’s panel, “Seeking People, Keeping People: Migration Policy as Political-Economic Strategy” will explore the interplay of migration policy and political-economic strategy across the modern era. Panelists will examine how elites in the Habsburg Empire, United States, and British Kenya sought to use migration to pursue their political and economic goals, and how subalterns perceived and resisted these efforts.

Kyle Vratarich

Kyle Vratarich, PhD candidate in 19th century US history, presented at Virginia Tech’s Brian Bertoti Innovative Perspectives in History Symposium, and his paper, “The Safe Burglary Conspiracy: General Orville Babcock and the ‘District Ring,’” won the symposium’s Best Paper Prize. 

Jeffrey Saba

Modern European history PhD candidate Jeff Saba was selected to participate in the 30th Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC, in June 2025. He will be among a group of eight doctoral researchers from the US and Germany, and will present work-in-progress from his dissertation. 

Saba also won second prize in the Adams Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis’ annual essay contest, hosted at the Virginia Military Institute. His paper was titled “Merging Worlds: The Soviet Military around Wittstock: 1945-1994.”

Morgan Hardy

Early American history PhD student Morgan Hardy was awarded a two-month residential fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Mary B. Wright Environmental History Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society to complete research on “Fish and Sustainability: How Nature Shaped Sustainability in the Early American Cod Fisheries.” 

Visiting Scholars, Alumni, and Students Present

Keeley Wade presents her research as part of the Blount Mansion Visitors Center lecture series.

On March 6, in honor of the 10th year of the Fleming-Morrow Distinguished Lecture, the history department hosted a full-day symposium of panel sessions and discussions. The day culminated with a keynote lecture by Crystal R. Sanders titled, “Pursuing ‘Their Highest Potential’: Black Southerners and Graduate Education During the Era of Legal Segregation.” 

The Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African American History was established in 2015 by faculty members to honor the distinguished careers of Professors Cynthia Griggs Fleming and John H. Morrow Jr. as pioneering African American faculty members at the University of Tennessee. 

The symposium included engaging talks by Assistant Professor Anthony M. Donaldson Jr. (Sewanee: University of the South), Assistant Professor Le’Trice Donaldson (Auburn University), Associate Professor LaShawn Harris (Michigan State University), Professor Learotha Williams Jr. (Tennessee State University), and Associate Professor Shannen Dee Williams (University of Dayton).

The department also hosted a public workshop in March on “Career Diversity for Historians,” where six alumni spoke to students and faculty about how they make use of their graduate degrees in a wide variety of professional arenas. 

Speaking at the workshop were Brittany Poe, marketing and communications specialist at Nisus Corporation; Katie Hodges-Kluck, assistant director of communications at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School; Stefan Hodges-Kluck, software engineer at Very Good Ventures; Claire Mayo, manager of research development at UT’s Office of Research and Creative Activity in the College of Arts and Sciences; Lisa Oakley, vice president and curator of education at the East Tennessee Historical Society; and Pat Ezzell, senior specialist in history and communications, Tennessee Valley Authority.

In April, UT history honors student Keeley Wade presented her thesis research as part of the Blount Mansion Visitors Center lecture series. Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment in the summer of 1920 came as a shock to many. Wade’s presentation focused on Josephine Pearson, the formal leader of the anti-suffrage movement in Tennessee. Pearson serves as a fascinating case study of the circumstances that created anti-suffragists, the rhetoric and strategies they employed, and their ultimate failure at stopping the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

At the Americanists’ SoTA (Seminar on Thursday Afternoons), three graduate students presented their research to the faculty and student participants: Kyle Vratarich, Rachel Wiedman, and Stu Vanderkooi.

During the department’s annual awards ceremony, we recognized a number of students for excellence in research and teaching. These include: Patrick Ramey (Bryon-Groce Award for Public History), Roraig Finney (Charles Jackson Award for American History), Kyle Vratarich (Lee Verstandig Award for Nineteenth Century American History), Allie Richardson (Susan Becker Award for Excellence in Teaching), Stacie Beach (Claude Robertson Award for European History), Rachel Wiedman (Award for Excellence in Gender Studies), Casey Price (Josh Hodge Award for the Recovery of Lost Voices), Aimee Hunt-Beasley (Walkup-Thurman Award for the Best Paper on the Civil War Era), Annamaria Haden (Thomas and Kathryn Shelton Award for Best Dissertation Prospectus), and Stuart Vanderkooi and Nick Strasser, co-winners of the William B. Anderson Award for Military History. Congratulations to our winners!

UT History Alumni Advancing in Careers

Alyssa Culp (PhD ’22) accepted an offer to join the faculty of Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) as an assistant professor of history. She had previously been working at IWU as a lecturer. Culp teaches modern European history, with a focus on Germany.

Ryan Gesme (PhD ’23) has begun work as a civic program instructor for Close Up Foundation, where he leads experiential workshops on civic and historical education for middle and high schoolers utilizing the memorials and museums of Washington, DC.

Kaitlin Simpson (PhD ’24), currently an assistant professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, had her dissertation selected as a finalist for the 2025 Allan Nevins Prize, granted by the Society of American Historians for the best-written dissertation in American history. This award is arguably the most prestigious prize for a US history dissertation. Simpson’s dissertation was titled “The Flowers of El Dorado: Gender, Production, and the Cut Flower Industry in the United States and Colombia, 1908-Present.”

Please share your alumni news online at history.utk.edu/share-your-news. 

Honors Students Explore Tennessee and Beyond

Wolfgang Sulk won an award at the UT Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research Symposium for his presentation titled “The Parasitic Tennessee Turnpike System 1830-1845”

While deeply exploring topics that they are passionate about, history Honors students develop high-level problem-solving, research, and communication skills that will help them navigate whatever is to come. They each complete a large-scale independent research project of their own design and execution. 

This year’s cohort of 12 students clearly has a passion for history, particularly Tennessee history. Fully half of this hard-working, fun-loving group has tackled key questions in the history of the Volunteer state.

Here are this year’s Honors concentrators, their advisors, and their thesis titles.

Gracie Amburn
Advisor: Chris Magra
Title: “‘The Man Who Never Knew’: The Life, Crime, and Trial of Halder Perry, Telling Rural Histories”

Drew Batey
Advisor: Tore Olsson
Title: “Tobacco Farming and Politics in Tennessee From the New Deal to the New Millennium” 

Tristan Brown
Advisor: Tore Olsson
Title: “Southern Perspectives on Italian Fascism, 1922-1939” 

Jacob Craig
Advisor: Vejas Liulevicius
Title: “Schooling, Secularism, and Socialism: Educational Policy in Politics and Religion From Imperial Germany to East Germany” 

Etienne Grobelaar
Advisor: Guy Sechrist
Title: “Blood and Guts: The Fighting Surgeons and Their Quest for Legitimacy”

Jase Pipes
Advisor: Matthew Gillis
Title: “‘Against Prince Charles and Against Christianity’: The Theology of Politics and the Enemies of God in Carolingian Francia” 

Wolfgang Sulk
Advisor: Michael Wood
Title: “The Parasitic Tennessee Turnpike System 1830-1845”

Isaac Tucker
Advisor: Rob Bland
Title: “Sword and Suffrage: Justifying Radicalism in William G. Brownlow’s Tennessee.”

Isabella “Bella” Vozza
Advisor: Bob Bast
Title: “The Saint That Never Was: Margery Kempe and the Manipulation of Medieval Feminine Piety”

Keeley Ward
Advisor: Ernie Freeberg
Title: “Josephine Pearson and the Unexpected Failure of the Tennessee Anti-Suffrage Movement” 

Elijah Welton
Advisor: Brandon Winford
Title: “Rexford Tugwell and Community Planning in the New Deal” 

Finn Wheeler
Advisor: Luke Harlow
Title: “The Fort Pillow Massacre: The American Civil War in Public Memory”

Lucas Murdock ( ’24)
Advisor: Vejas Liulevicius
Thesis: “Dogwoods & Sakuras: An Academic Investigation of the History of the Diplomatic, Economic and Educational Partnership between Japan and the United States”

Congratulations History Honors Cohort of 2025.

US History Scholars Join Department

The Department of History is excited to announce two new faculty joining us in fall 2025. 

Headshot photo of a woman with a brick building behind her

Jessie Wilkerson is a historian of the modern United States whose research and teaching explores questions of political economy and social change in the 20th-century South and Appalachia through the histories of women, gender, and labor. Her writing engages a range of topics, from women in country music and sports to histories of labor organizing in Appalachia. 

She also fosters public history in the classroom and beyond, by collaborating with museums, organizations, and community partners, and will be leading the department’s efforts at expanding public history. 
Wilkerson has deep family roots in East Tennessee and joins the department after positions at the University of Mississippi and West Virginia University.

Headshot photo of a woman with a blurred background

Megan Birk is a historian of the modern United States whose research and teaching investigates agricultural, childhood and family, and social histories of the late 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of multiple monographs on the intersections of agriculture, social welfare, and the family, including fascinating new work on so-called “campus babies,” children who were raised for training purposes in home economics departments at land-grant universities like the University of Tennessee in the 20th century. 

Birk joins the department as the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence, after positions at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the University of Texas Pan-American.

Students Explore the History and Legacy of Samurai 

Symbols of samurai are all around us, whether in the recent Emmy-winning historical drama Shōgun (2024), blockbuster video games such as Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch, 2020), or even the appearance of Ohtani Shōhei’s samurai “home run” helmet in Major League Baseball. However, what a samurai was and what samurai symbolize have changed dramatically across the course of Japanese history. 

During the spring 2025 semester, students in Assistant Professor Natalia Doan’s upper-level course The Samurai: Fact, Fiction, Fantasy explored that history. 

Headshot photo of a woman

“Samurai are one of the most iconic symbols of Japan, but there has never been one monolithic meaning of samurai or the values they have represented to different people and across different periods in history,” said Doan, whose research discloses the influence of samurai on antebellum American culture. “I wanted this class to share with students the historical origins and powerful legacy of samurai in Japanese history and popular culture.” 

As part of this class, students analyzed a variety of primary sources across multiple centuries, as well as historical and contemporary representations of samurai in woodblock prints, literature, video games, television, and other media to uncover how and why facts, fictions, and fantasies surrounding samurai have played and continue to play a role in Japanese history, culture, and perceptions of Japan around the world. 

Understanding the history of samurai is essential not just to understanding the history of Japan or early US-Japan encounters, but also to understanding the ways in which nations and people construct and revise ideas and symbols surrounding national and cultural identity, both domestically and on the global stage. 


Decennial Review Points to Strengths, Opportunity

Susan Lawrence

Hot on the heels of our move in January 2024, we began to work on our next challenge. Every 10 years, each department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, must undergo a serious review. This begins with a self-study that asks us to detail what we have accomplished and how we have changed over the past decade. We were given plenty of institutional data about our enrollments, generation of student credit hours, faculty numbers, and student evaluation scores. We divided the faculty into subcommittees to work on such exciting sections as “alignment with UT’s strategic vision” and “resources and infrastructure,” and everyone chipped in to write the report during fall semester 2024. The result was 77 pages long, a testament to the faculty’s dedication to understanding our department’s strengths and weaknesses. 

Among our strengths—28 great books! Among our weaknesses—a small decline in the number of history majors graduating. In this we follow national trends, unfortunately, as students have moved away from history, and the humanities more generally, for their undergraduate degrees. Compared with other history departments, however, we are doing quite well, having stabilized the number of majors and maintained the high numbers of students taking our courses since Covid-19. 

The next step was the visit of external reviewers. Professor Jennifer Hart, who chairs the history department at Virginia Tech, and Sean Adams, a history professor at the University of Florida, were with us February 23-26. Together with Professor Aleydis Van de Moortel, head of UT’s classics department, they had a grueling schedule of meetings with department constituents—

junior faculty, staff, all faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students—and many senior administrators. 

We are delighted to say that in their final report the reviewers described us as “an incredibly strong and vibrant department that has a strong sense of its own identity.” We have “an exceptionally strong research record and a strong graduate program.” 

They encouraged us to increase our outreach to local and regional communities and to seek more career-oriented opportunities for our undergraduate majors. We already had that in our self-study as one of our goals for the next five years. Indeed, we are making fundraising to support paid summer internship opportunities one of our top advancement priorities. 

On the whole, history at UT is doing well. We are proud of our accomplishments and our students, although sad to have said goodbye to Sara Ritchey last summer and, now, to Ernie Freeberg, the department’s mainstay for so many years. Read on to discover other selected highlights of 2024-2025!

Susan Lawrence
Professor and Head
Department of History

UT History Department Documents Key Year in Andrew Jackson’s Presidency

Cover image of volume 12 of The Papers of Andrew Jackson

In partnership with UT Press, the UT history department published the 1834 volume of The Papers of Andrew Jackson in December 2023. Documenting in rich detail one of the most important years of Jackson’s presidency, the volume covers Jackson’s “war” against the Bank of the United States, as well as his administration’s infamous program to force the removal of Native Americans from their homelands in the Southeast.

In 1834 Jackson continued his longstanding effort to pry the province of Texas loose from Mexico. Other matters engaging Jackson included corruption scandals in the Post Office and at Mississippi land offices, fractious disputes over rank and seniority among Army and Navy officers, and a fire that gutted Jackson’s home in Tennessee, the Hermitage.

These stories and many more are told in The Papers of Andrew Jackson: Volume XII, 1834. Presenting more than 500 original documents—public and private letters, memoranda, and official papers—in full annotated text, the volume is the latest installment in an ongoing series that has been called “the gold standard of historical documentary editing.”

Volume XII is the sixth and last produced under the editorship of Daniel Feller, now a UT Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Associate editors Thomas Coens and Laura-Eve Moss are UT research faculty in history. The index was completed under Michael Woods, Feller’s successor as UT history professor and Jackson editor. Financial support was provided by the UT College of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Tennessee Historical Commission, and the Watson-Brown Foundation.


Remembering Professor Bruce Wheeler (1939-2023)

Bruce Wheeler headshot photo

On Tuesday, April 9, the UT Department of History and the Knoxville History Project collaborated on an event to honor the late Professor Bruce Wheeler. Wheeler joined the department in 1970 and served the UT Knoxville campus and community for over four decades.

“No list of accomplishments can fully convey all that Bruce Wheeler meant to the UT campus and the history department,” colleague Ernest Freeberg wrote in a memorial tribute. “He will be remembered for his ability to share his love of history with a wide audience, his never-failing curiosity and good humor, and his generous support of his younger colleagues and our students.”

The program’s speakers recognized Wheeler’s many and varied accomplishments. He was a distinguished historian who wrote an important history of Knoxville; he was an engaging and innovative teacher beloved by a generation of UT students; and he generously contributed his time to help improve history education in East Tennessee public schools. During his long career, he was recognized with numerous teaching awards, and served as the head of the University’s Honors Program before his retirement in 2003.

As Aaron Purcell, one of his last doctoral students, noted, “Wheeler made a difference in the lives of countless students and I’m proud to say that I was one of them.”


Professor Jeff Norrell Retires

Jeff Norrell headshot photo

Professor Jeff Norrell retired in January 2024 after holding the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence since joining the department in 1998. He is the author of more than a dozen books, primarily on American race relations and Southern history.

These include Alex Haley and the Books that Changed a Nation (2015), which covers Haley’s rise to national celebrity and great literary influence in the mid-20th century. In 2009, the Washington Post called his revisionist biography, Up from History: the Life of Booker T. Washington, one of the best books published that year, “in all respects an exemplary book, scrupulously fair to its subject and thus to the reader as well.”

His 1985 book, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for outstanding work on human rights and social justice. In addition to his many works of history, he published Eden Rise (2012), a novel about the civil rights movement.

In addition to courses on Southern history, Norrell taught undergraduate and graduate classes on environmental history, the history of the American West, and American foreign policy. He recently published How History Was Used in the Wars of the Twentieth Century: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Lexington, 2023).

In 2010 he was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies in Germany, and in 2015 the College of Arts and Sciences presented him with a Senior Research Award.