Graduate Student News

The Department congratulates Drs. Anna Bennett, Nelson Marques, and Dale Pappas on earning the Ph.D. at the 2021 commencement ceremony! 

Congratulations to Alum Danielle Boaz on publishing her new book, Banning Black Gods. It is a global examination of the legal challenges faced by adherents of the most widely practiced African-derived religions in the twenty-first century, including Santeria/Lucumi, Haitian Vodou, Candomblé, Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, Islam, Rastafari, Obeah, and Voodoo. Examining court cases, laws, human rights reports, and related materials, Danielle N. Boaz argues that restrictions on African diaspora religious freedom constitute a unique and pervasive form of anti-Black discrimination.

The department congratulates Dr. Dale Pappas on defending his dissertation in Spring 2021.  "Partners in Pleasure: State and Private Capital in the Making of Modern Mediterranean Tourism" is an ambitious analysis of how tourism in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean was conceived as a project to promote commerce, cultural modernization, and political appeasement within three different state systems. Using archival materials collected in the United States, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, and Cyprus and written in four different languages and two different alphabets, Pappas investigates the commonalities and differences between how initiatives in Italian-fascist-controlled Rhodes, British-imperial-controlled Cyprus, and Greek-nationalist controlled Corfu and Athens fared at luring international tourists and investments during the hungry years of Europe’s interwar after the Treaty of Lausanne. Engagingly written and filled with insights into the different public-private initiatives that helped set the stage for the Greek tourist explosion to come, Pappas argues that the origins of our Club Med visions of the Mediterranean were born in imperial rivalries after World War One, not Marshall-Plan dollar diplomacy after World War Two.

The department congratulates Dr. Nelson Marques on defending his dissertation in Spring 2021. “A League of their Own examines the soldiers of Portuguese Atlantic empire, rethinking the ways in which soldiers shaped how empires are stitched together by various subject populations. By examining soldiers’ archival material, and wider printed literature, A League of their Own argues that soldiers created a collective identity for themselves in the seventeenth century and in the process drove key debates about belonging to an empire forward.”

The department congratulates Dr. Anna Bennett on defending her dissertation in Spring 2021. “The Magic of Things: Matter, Spirit, and Power in Venice, 1580-1730,” analyzes how material objects and spaces account for the continued vitality of popular spiritual practices in the long seventeenth century, a period of intellectual upheaval and cultural change. It demonstrates how elements of material culture associated with magical practices at once gave ordinary Venetians, especially women and immigrants, a tangible source of empowerment and fostered a range of experiential practices fueled by an informal economy of the spiritual that actually fit in well with more experimental and commodity-oriented emphases of the period often associated with the “scientific revolution.” Ultimately, “The Magic of Things” brings the history of witchcraft into dialogue with the history of daily life in the premodern world, arguing that material objects and spaces gave tangible contours to otherwise abstract spiritual beliefs, and that, through their study, we can perceive and better understand the richly complex cosmic worlds and lived experiences of ordinary people in the past.

Congratulations to Tim Martin (Ph.D., Thomas) for winning the been awarded the 2019-2020 Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award from St. Cloud State University! His thesis "Miter and Sword: Fighting Norman Bishops and Clergy" was selected from across the University. 

Erica Heinsen-Roach (Ph.D. 2012), author of Consuls and Captives: North African Diplomacy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (University of Rochester Press, 2019), has received a German Academic Exchange (DAAD) summer stipend (2021) for her new book project that questions how human bondage challenged and redefined the liberties, privileges, and obligations of captured and sometimes enslaved citizens from Amsterdam, Hamburg, and other cities in early modern Europe. She will be doing research in libraries and archives in Hamburg

Congratulations to Matt Davidson on being awarded an AMS History of Medicine and Healthcare Doctoral Completion Award! The award is for scholarship that will help understand medical history by studying, analyzing, and interpreting past practices, philosophies and epistemologies related to human health, healthcare, and disease. He will use the year long funding to work on his dissertation: “Health Under Occupation: Haitian Encounters with U.S. Imperial Medicine, 1915-1934.”

Congratulations to Cat M. Ariail on publication of her book Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Starts and American Identity (Illinois, 2020)

Monique Bedasse (Ph.D. 2010) and Danielle Boaz (Ph.D., 2014) have been appointed to the editoral board of the Journal of Africana Religions. 

Hadassah St. Hubert (Ph.D., 2018) was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Advancement Grant for the Digital Library of the Caribbean for her proposal "Documenting Haiti's Forts." The grant, which she directs, will support the creation of the first detailed map of Haitian patrimonial structures.

Erica Heinsen-Roach (Ph.D., 2012) was awarded the annual best article prize for "Restoring Holland's Household: Women, Captivity, and Redemption in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean" which appeared in volume 14 of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 

Drew Wofford (Ph.D. '20) has won the 2020 David John Ruggiero Dissertation Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities!

The committee included this commendation: 

Drew Wofford’s, “History at the Speed of Sound: A Transnational Case Study of the Concorde Supersonic Transport as a Reflection of Critical Issues in Postwar Europe,” embodies an ideal dissertation. It is well-written, highly analytical, deeply researched, and creates new inroads of knowledge and questions. Examining how and why the first supersonic plane was produced in Europe through British and French partnership, Wofford shows that Western Europe’s post-WWII response to US aid and leadership was not passive or fawning, but rather, competitive far earlier than we have come to expect. In reconstituting the business and political history that brought the Concorde to life and ushered in its demise, Wofford introduces his readers to UK attempts to become part of Europe, French assertions that European membership could only be had on its terms, and US strategies to promote European revitalization while protecting its own economic hegemony. This history of aviation is gorgeously knowledgeable about details connected to flying while simultaneously weaving in big politics, big finance, and big continents. Firmly rooted in archival research in three countries and the historiographies of the European Union, France, the UK, and the US, Wofford’s transnational history fascinates as much as it satisfies. It tells the history of the rise and fall of the Concorde and explains why, even today, European aviation remains competitive with its US forerunner. The 2020 Ruggiero Committee is pleased to award Drewry Frye Wofford II this year’s dissertation prize and hopes to see the fruits of this labor published soon.

Monique Bedasse (Ph.D. '10) took part in a virtual roundtable on Walter Rodney in "Africa is a Country." The forum marked the  50th anniversary of Walter Rodney's Groundings with My Brothers. 

Learn about Ph.D. Candidate Matthew Davidson's research on "The Medical Journals of U.S.-Occupied Haiti" in his recent post for the New York Academy of Medicine's "Books, Health, and History" blog.  Davidson is a 2019 Paul Klemperer Fellow at the NYAM.

Congratulations to Ph.D. Candidate Gaby Faundez who has been awarded a Visiting Fellowship in affiliation with the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University.

Read about the important preservation work that Dr. Jennifer Garcon (Ph.D. '18) is doing as the Bollinger Fellow in Public and Community Data Curation at the University of Pennsylvania.

Congratulations to Erica Heinsen-Roach (Ph.D., ’12) on publication of her  book Consuls and Captives: Dutch-North African Diplomacy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2019).

Dr. Jacqueline Grant (Ph.D. '12) has just published an essay on "Leopard Men: Manhood and Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba" in Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing (eds.), Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912 (LSU Press, 2019). She currently teaches in the Department of History at Palmer Trinity School in Palmetto Bay, FL.

Dr. Stephen Lazer (Ph.D. '14) has published his first book, State Formation in Early Modern Alsace, 1648-1789 (Boydell & Brewer, 2019).  Lazer is currently a Lecturer in  the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.  

Dr. Silvia Z. Mitchell (Ph. D. '13) has published her first book Queen, Mother, Stateswoman: Mariana of Austra and the Government of Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019). Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University. 

Congratulations to Ph.D. Candidate Nelson Marques, who has received a 2019-20 Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Miami Center for the Humanities.

Congratulations to Ph.D. Candidate Stephanie Skenyon, who has received the 2019 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, a university-wide honor given by the Graduate School to "one graduate student for enhancing undergraduate education at UM."

Three History Ph.D. students have won Tinker Field Research Grants from the University of Miami's Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas.

• Eric Griffin: "A Nation from the Ashes: Paraguay in the Early Twentieth Century"
• Dieyun Song: "Politics of Partnership: Colombian Engagement with the Ford Foundation, 1962-1972”

• J. Camilo Vera: "Expeditions Re-Imagined: Community and Communication in the Time of Science, 1783-1816"

Congratulations to all three!