Honors Students Explore Tennessee and Beyond
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.