Current Students

Our current MA and PhD students are working on a range of exciting projects that span the globe! 

The students in Dr. Veldman's HIST 7957/7909 Research Seminar (Spring 2025) made progress on their thesis writing over the course of the academic year. 

 

Rickey Baisley
PhD student 
British history
Advisor: Dr. Stephen Prince
Rickey researches changing religious beliefs abotu death in the nineteenth-century South. His thesis examines the syncretism of Spiritualist practices of speaking with the dead and Anglo-Protestant beliefs. 

Michael Baranick
PhD student 
British history
Advisor: Dr. Victor Stater
Michael's research focuses on Jesuit activity in Elizabethan England. He is specifically interested in the 1580 plot by the Jesuits to remove Elizabeth I from the throne. Additionally, he focuses on the role that the Jesuit activity and influence played on future plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth and replace her with a Catholic monarch. 

Marie Blanquinque 
PhD student 
US History 
Advisor: Dr. John Bardes 
Marie’s areas of interest encompass Creole dances, performative politics, and resistance. Her current research explores Creole performances as arenas of resistance, negotiation, and revolutionary expression in the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She investigates Creole dances as political acts of defiance, examining how movement and embodied gestures served as vehicles for the circulation of revolutionary ideals in Louisiana and in the Caribbean. 

Noah Dubroff
MA student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Julia Irwin
Noah is currently researching the American federal attitude and approach toward "Don" Pedro Albizu Campos, one of the most significant forces for the Puerto Rican nationalist and independence movement. This leader is one of the most influential figures in solidifying and defining the Puerto Rican identity, and his position as an antithesis to American control of Puerto Rico, an island lying at the entrance to the Caribbean. American fears of an uprising led the FBI to constantly surveil Albizu Campos, keeping a close record of his movements as well as actively trying to undermine the Puerto RIcan Nationalist Party.

Logan Fontenot
PhD student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Zevi Gutfreund
Logan's current research explores the desegregation and integration of Louisiana's state universities. He examines the legal strategies taken by legal representatives in desegregating institutions of higher learning. He also explores the racism and resistance faced by black students after desegregation and highlights the actions they took toward integrating.

Emmitt Glynn, III
PhD student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. John Bardes
Emmitt's research focuses on how enslaved African Americans used hunting practices to assert and negotiate ownership of private property with slaveholders during the nineteenth century. His geographic region of study is the Mississippi Valley. During slavery, African Americans hunted wild game to provide sustenance for themselves. Emmitt's goal is to understand how wild game procurement produced avenues of agency for enslaved people as evidence through the accumulation of property and secruing additional personal freedoms from slaveholders. 

Logan Istre
PhD student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean 
Logan's research concentrates on social modernization during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His special focus is on political, economic, and environmental change in rural America. His dissertation is titled, "Plowman's Progress: The Rural Middle Class and the Reformation of American Agriculture, 1850-1920."

Ronnie D. Johnson
PhD student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Johnson researches the Civil War. His dissertation is titled "Generals Buell, Burnside and Bragg: Failures of Army Level Command in the Civil War." 

Rex Jones
PhD student 
US History 
Advisor: Dr. Alecia Long
Rex studies the origins and development of modern healthcare in Louisiana. Louisiana’s unique Charity Hospital System counted more than a dozen hospital facilities across the state and by the 1950s provided a degree of socialized medical care which exceeded almost any other state. By 1990, many in Louisiana described healthcare as a right. Changing economic organization, desegregation, and healthcare institutionalization altered the conceptions of charity and medical rights as Louisiana entered the twenty-first century and led to the end of the Charity System. 

Robert Leverett
PhD student 
British history
Advisor: Dr. Meredith Veldman
Robert studies 20th century South Asian migration into Britain. His dissertation is titled, "Punjabis in Britain: Postwar migration."

Akua Lewis
PhD student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Alecia Long
Akua's dissertation is an examination of the lives and experiences of Black women who interacted with the New Orleans Police Department, the Orleans Parish criminal courts, and the Orleans Parish civil courts. "How did class, race, and gender shape the lives of Black women living in Progressive Era New Orleans?” is the primary question Akua is seeking to answer through her research. 

Stephen Marsalis
PhD student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Stephen's research focuses on the life and political philosophy of US Supreme Court Justice James Wilson.

Charlie Miller
MA/PhD Student
US History
Advisor: K. Stephen Prince
Charles’ research examines how the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan used the memory and image of the original Reconstruction Klan in their recruiting and other activities to fit their white supremacist agenda. His project examines literature of the early 20th century regarding the old Klan’s violence and other activities in the South in the wake of Reconstruction, utilizing documents produced by the Klan, as well as newspapers and other accounts of Americans who were either victims of or participants in the second Klan movement. Charlie hopes to reveal more about race relations at the time, as well as the long term effects of Reconstruction and white resistance to black empowerment. 

Mónica Phillips
MA student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Zevi Gutfreund
Mónica's research focuses on how the United States' educational system played a significant role in Chicanos' decisions to stop passing along the Spanish language to future generations. Mexican Americans were targeted in the early twentieth century, along with other immigrant groups, by both state and federal governments in an effort to Americanize them and build a national identity. Mónica's goal is to show the origins of this movement and eventually connect it with the larger conversation of the importance of a bilingual worker in today's economy. 

Heather Redmon
PhD student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Julia Irwin
Heather studies the long durée of the flood of 1927.

Caleb Roark
MA student 
US history
Advisor: Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Caleb's research focuses on mechanics, or skilled laborers working for wages, who existed alongside slave labor in New Orleans. Through examining the New Orleans Mechanics’ Society and its members’ economic, political, and social activities in the city, Caleb has found that members adapted their predominantly non-Southern upbringings to prosper alongside (or on the backs of) enslaved labor and assimilate into the South’s largest commercial city. Caleb hopes to broaden the scope of my research to determine if other urban areas across the South experienced similar themes. His thesis is titled "By the sweat of his brow"?: Master Mechanics and Identity in Antebellum New Orleans

Alli Slowiak
MA student 
European history
Advisor: Dr. Maribel Dietz
Alli's research centers on rare books and manuscripts from across Medieval Europe. Her main focus is marginalia, illuminations, and illustrations (mostly grotesques, which are bizarre creatures or hybrids of humans, animals, or objects) that accompany texts within eleventh through fourteenth century Books of Hours. 

Hayden Strittmatter
PhD Student
US History
Advisor: Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Hayden researches the influence of the Crimean War on Civil War Americans. Wartime journalists and newspaper writers shaped the Union and Confederacy’s perceptions of the Crimean War through reporting on Florence Nightingale and her team of nurses, Captain George B. McClellan’s observations, and Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Hayden analyzes the degree to which these historical figures and events impacted the preparation, conduct, and perceptions of the American Civil War. 

Dylan White
MA student
US history
Advisor: Dr. Catherine Jacquet
Dylan’s research examines leftist activism at Louisiana State University (LSU) during the 1960s and 1970s. His research examines organizations and protest efforts centering feminist, black radical, queer liberationist, prison abolitionist, anti-imperalist, and anti-capitalist rhetoric throughout this tumultuous period. Through his focus on student activism in the U.S. South, Dylan illustrates the often forgotten efforts of progressive Southerners and their ability to generate change. Dylan’s interests are informed by an intersectional feminist framework.