Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2022-2023
Olamide Adeyeri
Addressing Coloniality in Historical Knowledge Production: A Study of the Early Annales School’s Underemphasized Relations to the Colonial World (1929-1939)
(Advisor: Charlotte Kiechel)
Isabel Frey Ribeiro
The Desert Island Discriminant: Audience, Purpose, and Programming at the BBC, 1942-1959
(Advisor: Maud Mandel)
Eleonora Chisholm Grenfell
From the Parlor to the Editor’s Desk: How New Women Made the New Shakespeare
(Advisor: Karen Merrill)
Jackson Hartigan
“There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days:” The Natural History of the Human Body in the British Enlightenment
(Advisor: Alexander Bevilacqua)
Emily Kuwaye
Print, Knowledge, and the Making of Race: Examining the Life and Legacy of Linschoten’s Itinerario
(Advisor: Joel Pattison)
Amelia Levitt Smith
Tell It Like It Is! The Purpose, Politics, and Power of Abortion Storytelling in the United States and France
(Advisor: Sara Dubow)
Georgia Panitz
“New England Has Claims on Asia” The Acquisition of Assyrian Reliefs for New England Colleges Under the Auspices of the American Christian Mission Movement in Mosul
(Advisor: Magnús Bernhardsson)
Benjamin Platt
Stable Foundations: The Early History of the Housing and Development Boards and the Construction of Modern Singapore (1960-1971)
(Advisor: Aparna Kapadia)
Jacob Posner
Elegance, Pleasure, and Gender Disorder: Representing Men’s Fashion in Early Weimar Germany
(Advisor: Chris Waters)
Hazel Richards
In the Eye of the Cyclone: Martinique’s 1946 Vote for Departmentalization and the Choice Between the United States and France
(Advisor: Jessica Chapman)
Salvadore Robayo
A Culture that Conquers: Fascism and the Construction of Whiteness in Colombia
(Advisor: Roger Kittleson)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2021-2022
Zeynep Sude Akgundogdu
Soldiers of the Wisdom Army: Turkish National Education Policies in the Early Years of Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(Advisor: Thomas Kohut)
Rachel Horowitz
‘A great mental revolution’: Taylorist Experts, Watertown Workers, and the Democratic Party, 1908-1915
(Advisor: Casey Bohlen)
Elizabeth Hughes
‘The Citizens of Tomorrow’: Upper-Class Ideals as Drivers of Social Reform and Control in Child Healthcare in 1890-1924 New York City
(Advisor: Scott Wong)
Will Kingham
A Creation of Memory: Commemorating Arthur Wharton, Victorian Sportsman
(Advisor: Chris Waters)
Michaela O’Connor
Inside the Minds of White Southerners: The Role of Religion in Proslavery Pamphlet Literature in the Late Antebellum South
(Advisor: Charles Dew)
Hal Olson
Internationalist Modernity and Ethnolinguistic Nationalism in Chinese Script Reform, 1949-1958
(Advisor: Anne Reinhardt and Christopher Nugent)
Clare Rogowski
Save the American Dream: Mobilizing White Homeowners and Renters in the Campaign for Proposition 13
(Advisor: Karen Merrill)
Kaylen Smith
Material Repentance: The Religion Behind Reparations
(Advisor: Tyran Steward)
Ben Weinstein
The World of a Company Scholar: Tracing ‘Connections’ in India in the Late Eighteenth Century
(Advisor: Alexander Bevilacqua)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2020-2021
Will Abersek
‘All that perchance shall e’er be known’: William Hunter’s Eighteenth-Century Collection of Medieval Manuscripts
(Advisor: Alexander Bevilacqua)
Zoë Fisher
Poverty Law Eroded: the ACLU, the Welfare Rights Movement, and the Judicial ‘Denigration of the Pauper’
(Advisor: Sara Dubow)
James FitzGerald
The Consistent Chameleon: Getúlio Vargas and the Roots of Environmental Conservation in Brazil
(Advisor: Roger Kittleson)
Joey Fox
Everybody’s Neighborhood: Narratives of Crime and Disorder on the New York City Subway
(Advisor: Casey Bohlen)
Meadhbh Ginnane
‘To do this through a simple maid’: the Rehabilitation of Joan of Arc’s Image in Fifteenth-Century France
(Advisor: Gretchen Long and Peter Low)
Emma Larson
The Making of Mothers in the Motherland: Pravda and the Soviet Family Code of 1936
(Advisor: Yana Skorobogatov)
Sonia Nyarko
Returning to Black Internationalism: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Council on African Affairs, 1944-1963
(Advisor: Tyran Steward and Scott Wong)
Rebecca Tauber
‘Under Those Apple Trees’: Jewish Youth Culture, Ideology, and Education in the Largest American Zionist Youth Movement of the 1960s and 1970s
(Advisor: Alexandra Garbarini)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2019-2020
Kees Humes
From Dishonest Immorality to Dangerous Contagion: Male-Male Sex Under Franco
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Kenneth Thomas Marshall
Fighting the Jihad of the Muslims: Al-Sulami’s Kitab al-Jihad and continuity in Islamic thought during the “counter-Crusade
(Advisor: Professor Magnús Bernhardsson)
Kevin Silverman
“The Truth, Always the Truth and Nothing More Than the Truth”: Reimagining Spanish History after the Disaster of 1898
(Advisor: Professor Alexander Bevilacqua)
Patrick Smith
Banners, Lances, and Crosses: The Battle Standards of the First Crusade
(Advisor: Professor Eric Knibbs)
Hannah Tager
Little Fools and Visionaries: Converso Children on Trial During the Spanish Inquisition
(Advisor: Professor Alexander Bevilacqua)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2018-2019
Zeke Cohen
The Earliest English Law Code? Reexamining the Origins of the Law Code of King Aethelberht of Kent
(Advisor: Professor Eric Knibbs)
Alexandra Gudaitis
“An Act of Honor”: Revisiting the GI and Vietnam Veterans Against the War Movements
(Advisor: Professor Jessica Chapman)
Ross Hoch
Victory at the Black Parliament: Robert the Bruce and the Domestic Political Struggle of the First War of Scottish Independence
(Advisor: Professor Eric Knibbs)
Reed Jenkins
An American Surgeon, The Spanish Civil War, and the Faultlines of American Politics
(Advisor: Professors Jessica Chapman and Soledad Fox)
Lindsay Klickstein
(Re)creating History: Holocaust Testimony, Jewish Collective Memory, and Polish-Jewish Relations
(Advisor: Professor Alexandra Garbarini)
Harmon Pardoe
“Ihr gehört nicht dazu?” Citizenship and Belonging in Germany, 1990-2008
(Advisor: Professors Chris Waters)
Isabel Peña
The New O.C.: Race, Space, Immigration and the Re-making of Suburban California
(Advisor: Professor Sara Dubow)
Rebecca Van Pamel
“The End is Near, the Turks are Here”: Instrumentalized History and the Politics of Siege Commemoration in 1883 Vienna
(Advisor: Professor Alexander Bevilacqua)
Andrew Wallace
The Eldest Daughter of the Church: France, the Vatican, and the Memory of the Great War
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Jonathan Williams
Siberia as Stage: Russia Depicted in Allied Narratives of the Intervention in Siberia, 1918-1920
(Advisor: Professor Yana Skorobogatov)
Christopher Zaro
The Roots of Roses: Pasadena’s Identification with the Home and the Maximization of Local Control
(Advisor: Professor Karen Merrill)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2017-18
Tamar Aizenberg
History Becoming Memory: American Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors and their Jewish Identity in the 21st Century
(Advisor: Professor Alexandra Garbarini)
Hannah Antonellis
David B. Lyman & Samuel C. Armstrong: The Cultivation of Character as Racialized Education
(Advisor: Professor Scott Wong)
Kar Yern Chin
We Are What We Makan: Conceptions of Malaysian Food Practices 1950s-1070s
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Ian Concannon
Williamstown and the Peacock Family Throne: Constructing Meaning from the Exile of the Iranian Royal Family
(Advisor: Professors Magnús Bernhardsson and Karen Merrill)
Victoria Kingham
“Civilian Women in the Siege of Leningrad: Self-Understandings, Myths, and Narrative Constructions
(Advisor: Professor Bill Wagner)
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio
The Intersection of Spanish and Mexican Identities: Spanish Republicans and Their Testimonials of Exile in Mexico
(Advisor: Professors Roger Kittleson and Soledad Fox)
Thomas Riley
“Not As Easy As ‘Gossip’”: The Journal Science-Gossip and the Community It Fostered
(Advisor: Professor Thomas Kohut)
Sophie Wunderlich
“We See Into the Distant Future, Because We Know What It Will Be”: Destiny, Utopia, and Apocalypse in National Socialism
(Advisor: Professor Thomas Kohut)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2016-17
Courtney Fields
Jesus in the Far East: Christian Missions and Japanese Response, 1549-1600
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Peter Hale
“Hermaphroditic Children”: Education Policy During the Option of South Tyrol
(Advisor: Professor Thomas Kohut)
Aglaia Ho
A Tale of Two Communities: Evaluating the Identity of Forest Hills, NY During the Twentieth Century
(Advisor: Professor Karen Merrill)
Jackson Myers
“A New Era in our Politicks”: John C. Calhoun and the Legacy of the Founders, 1811-1817
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Rachel Schwartz
“Serving with Pride and Dignity”: Women in the U.S. Military at the Transition to the All-Volunteer Force
(Advisor: Professor Sara Dubow)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2015-16
Arnold Capute
The South Starts Here: The History of Race Relations and Southern Identity on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore
(Advisor: Professor Leslie Brown)
Phoebe Hall
Representations of Workers on the Aswan High Dam Project
(Advisor: Professor Magnús Bernhardsson)
Joshua Morrison
Labor, Race, and Food: Mary Chesnut’s Reconstruction
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Cleo Nevakivi-Callanan
From Farewell to Welfare: Class Conflict, Social Policy, and Myth Formation During the Child Evacuations in Wartime Britain
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2014-15
Laura Berman
Henry VI and the Fall of the Lancastrians
(Advisor: Professor Eric Knibbs)
Samuel Chapin
‘The Mecca of a Thousand Noble Aspirations’: The Struggle for Freedom in New Bern, NC from 1862-1866
(Advisor: Professor Leslie Brown)
Matthew Conway
The Same Old Ways: Nazi Theater and Volkisch Cult
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Benjamin Nathan
The Administrative Strategy of Thomas Stamford Raffles in Java, 1811-1816
(Advisor: Professor Aparna Kapadia)
Kirby Neuner
The United Nations in Haiti: A Turbulent Relationship in an Age of Shifting Conflict
(Advisor: Professor Shanti Singham)
Aidyn Osgood
‘A Song for Britain’: The Eurovision Song Contest and the Cultural Politics of Popular Music in the United Kingdom, 1956-1979
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Miho Sakuma
Reviving, Modifying, and Inventing: Liberal Arts Education in Japan’s Lost Decades
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
AJ Solovy
In Search of the Extraordinary: Defendant Psychology at the 1947-1948 Einsatzgruppen Trial
(Advisor: Professor Eric Knibbs)
Nathan Thompson
Grievance, Governance, and Guns: Shays Rebellion and Political Expression in Early America
(Advisor: Professor Karen Merrill)
Catherine Treesh
The Life and Legacy of Dr. Joseph Warren
(Advisor: Professor Scott Wong)
Philip von Hahn
Charlemagne and the Politics of Biography in the Ninth Century
(Advisor: Professor Eric Knibbs)
Paige Whidbee
’Inimical to the Cause of American Liberty’: The American Government’s Treatment of Neutrals in Revolutionary Philadelphia
(Advisor: Professor Sara Dubow)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2013-14
Jacob Addelson
“Whereas a controversy has long subsisted”: The Massachusetts – New York Border Dispute, 1609-1787
(Advisor: Professor Patrick Spero)
Sharona Bollinger
Shadow of the Beast: Complexities and Legacies of Godzilla in Japan and the United States
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Linda Tzu-Kwan Chu
Shifting Homes: Identity Formations of the Chinese in Peru
(Advisor: Professor Scott Wong)
Nataly A. Garzon
Pioneering White, Black and Brown: Textile Labor in Greenville, South Carolina
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Isabel Greer
The Art of Survival
(Advisor: Professor Thomas Kohut)
Annie Estella Jeong
From Pictures to Pageants through Plastic: Korea’s Changing Face
(Advisor: Professor Gretchen Long)
Sara Kang
Contested Memory: Struggles of the 1990s in Post-Cold War Okinawa
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Leo Obata
Blueprint for a New Vision: The Past, Present and Future of War Museums in Japan
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Alexandra Rossana Oviedo
Creating Kings: Gertrude Bells’ Evolving Views of Arab Political Aspirations and the Creation of Iraq
(Advisor: Professor Magnús Bernhardsson)
Eilin Perez
The North Korean Mass Education System
(Advisor: Professor Anne Reinhardt)
Joon Hun Seong
Lives of Their Own: A Social History of the German Democratic Republic Examined Through Die Kinder von Golzow
(Advisor: Professor Thomas Kohut)
Quinn Squires Solfisburg
Savages or Activists? U.S. Journalists Narrate Ecuadorian Indigenous Movements, 1990-1995
(Advisor: Professor Roger Kittleson)
Nathaniel Chase Sutton
Sandusky County, Ohio: A Community at War
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Nick Tyson
Atatük and the Turkish Language Reforms: One Man’s Vision and the Future of a Nation
(Advisor: Professor Magnús Bernhardsson)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2012-13
Courtney Alexander
In Spite of It All: Sexuality and Motherhood in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(Advisor: Professor Gretchen Long)
Thomas Daubert
A Cause Not Lost: The Unyielding Struggle of Confederate Veterans to Preserve White Supremacy During North Carolina’s Reconstruction
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Tyler Holden
One Country, Watching Television: How Kennedy Became the First Television President
(Advisor: Professor Jessica Chapman)
Christine Hulsizer
Reconciling Sein and Schein: Writing Modern Lives in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
(Advisor: Professor Anna Fishzon)
Hannah Kaemmer
Hall Overhaul: The English Gentry and their Great Halls at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century
(Advisor: Professor Eric Knibbs)
Kevin O’Connell
Ideology and Infrastructure: Internal Improvements & the American Constitution
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Grace Rehnquist
Letters Divided: An Experiential Deconstruction of the Nisei Collective During Wartime Internment
(Advisor: Professor Scott Wong)
Kristen Sinicariello
Reconciliation without Justice: The Politics of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Uruguay
(Advisor: Professor Roger Kittleson)
Sungik Yang
Rioters, Victims, or Heroes: Transforming Narratives about the Gwangju Uprising
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2011-12
Evelyn Denham
Between Sublime Porte and Hofburg: Negotiating European Identity at the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Court
(Advisor: Professor Thomas Kohut)
Charlotte Kiechel
Coming of Age during the Holocaust: Representing an Adolescence of Survival
(Advisor: Professor Alexandra Garbarini)
Adriana Mendoza Leigh
‘Re-membering’: The Struggle for Memory in Postwar Peru
(Advisor: Professor Roger Kittleson)
Alison Pincus
The Mark of Reliability? A Documentary Study of the Closing of the Sprague Electric Company Facilities in North Adams, MA
(Advisor: Professor Sara Dubow)
Lily Wong
Remembering the Nanjing Massacre: Transnationalism and Atrocity
(Advisors: Professors Scott Wong/Alexandra Garbarini/Anne Reinhardt)
Amanda Reid
‘I’m Crowning You Myself’: The Miss World Beauty Pageant and the Performance of Jamaican Nationalism
(Advisor: Professor Devyn Spence Benson)
David Samuelson
Writing for Geneva: Japanese Foreign Relations Rhetoric Surrounding the Manchurian Incident
(Advisor: Professor Karen Merrill)
Glynis Startz
Through the Lens of Japanese American Internment: Twentieth-Century Changes in West Coast Agricultural Counties
(Advisor: Professor Scott Wong)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2010-11
Mary Freeman
Civilian Soldiers:Letters Home in the American Civil War
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Iliyana Hadjistoyanova
“I Feel Pretty American . . . But Then I Also Feel Very Cuban”: Exploring Hyphenated Identities in ¿Qué pasa USA?, 1977-1980
(Advisor: Professor Devyn Spence Benson)
William Harron
Wars and Rumors of Wars: Three Northern Communities During Lee’s Gettysburg Invasion
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Peter Hick
Writing for Stalin: Anglo-American Journalists and the Soviet Famine, 1928-34
(Advisor: Professor James Wood)
Madeleine Jacobs
A Modern Strategy for Saving Suez: The Rise of British Information Policy in the United States during the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956
(Advisor: Professor Jessica Chapman)
Anne Kerth
Missouri Compromised: The Daily Missouri Democrat, Party Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War
(Advisor: Professor Sara Dubow)
William Lee
“”They Used to Call Us Garment Queens”: Narratives of Decline in New York City’s Chinatown Garment Industry, 1982-2000
(Advisor: Professor Carmen Whalen)
Jennifer Potvin
Scaling the Wall: Division and its Opposition in Nicosia, Cyprus, 1956-2008
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Loretta Shen
Formation of a Lost Generation: The Sent-Down Movement and the “Three Old Classes”
(Advisor: Professor Anne Reinhardt)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2009-10
Margot Bernstein
Preston Smith Brooks in the Verbal and the Visual: Showing Face to Save Face and Avoid Disgrace in the Antebellum South
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Charles Crawford
Breaking with the Past: How the Rwandan State and its Military Moved the Land of a Thousand Hills Beyond Genocide
(Advisor: Professor Kenda Mutongi)
Ben Davidson
‘Arches of Fire’: The Civil War and its Aftermath in the Minds of White Southern Children
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
R. Alexander Dyroff
Influence and Impotence: Multinational Corporations and the US Government in Guatemala and Chile
(Advisor: Professor Roger Kittleson)
Cristina Florea
The (After)Life of a Dream: East German Children, Selfhood, and the “Socialist Personality” Before and After 1989
(Advisor: Professor Alexandra Garbarini)
Lindsey Jones
Hidden Hydra: The Development and Decline of American Mafia Power
(Advisor: Professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Zach Miller
‘Take Communism Away from the Communists’: The Early Intellectual Crucible of Walt Whitman Rostow and the States of Economic Grown
(Advisor: Professor Jessica Chapman)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2008-09
Charlie Dougherty
The Elusive Peace: Washington, Saigon, and the Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1966-1969
(Advisor: Professor Jessica Chapman)
Ryan Ford
The Founding Fathers as Fathers: Revolutionary Change and Crisis in Authority
(Advisor: Professor Robert Dalzell)
Emily George
Piety, Religion, and Morality: Church, State, and the Constitutional Process in Massachusetts
(Advisor: Professor Guillaume Aubert)
Jeremy Goldstein
Equally Entitled? Transatlantic Tensions and the Crisis over Representation in Eighteenth-Century North America
(Advisor: Professor Guillaume Aubert)
Kate Ireland
Ruin in the City of Palaces: The Fall of the Great Agency Houses of Calcutta, 1830-1834
(Advisor: Professor James Wood)
Galen Jackson
Militarized Democracy: The American Reactions to the Coups in Turkey
(Advisor: Professor Magnus Bernhardsson)
Katie Johnson
Maleficent Eden: French Views of America and its Cultural Products in the Interwar Years
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Bucky Marshall
For These We Strive: The Philadelphia Light Horse and American Identity
(Advisor: Professor James Wood)
Susan Raich
Like Father Like Son? Henry III’s Tomb at Westminster Abbey as a Case Study in Late Thirteenth-Century English Kingship
(Advisor: Professor Peter Low, Art History)
Kevin Waite
The Masculine Divide: Violence, Manhood, and Nationalism in the Plain Folk South, 1820-1861
(Advisor: Professor Charles Dew)
Shawn Woo
Scripture and Tradition: A Rapprochement of the Reformations
(Advisors: Professors Magnús Bernhardsson and Eric Goldberg)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2007-08
Jimmy Bierman
Foreign Interventions in Lebanon: Misguided Benevolence
(Advisor: Professor Magnús Bernhardsson)
Megan Brankley
When a Patron Falls: Contesting the History of 1965 in Post-Suharto Indonesia
(Advisor: Professors Anne Reinhardt and Eiko Maruko Siniawer)
Ashley Burrell
‘One God! One Aim! One Destiny!’: The Use of Christianity in the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(Advisor: Professor Carmen Whalen)
Jeff Callahan
Falling Out of Love: Boston, the Big Dig, and the Romance of Automobility
(Advisor: Professor Robert Dalzell)
Jim Clayton
Order Through Confrontation: Lanfranc of Bec’s Search for Religious Stability
(Advisors: Professors Eric Goldberg and James Wood)
Katie Edgerton
The Same Old Story: History, Narrative, and Myth in the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968-1985
(Advisor: Professor Chris Waters)
Roy Garcia
President Nixon, China, and the Bilateral Strategy: A New Interpretation of Sino-American Rapprochement, 1969-1972
(Advisor: Professor Anne Reinhardt)
Lizzie Gomez
The Puzzle of a Revolution: Sendero Luminoso’s Guerilla War in the Peruvian Highlands
(Advisor: Professor Roger Kittleson)
Aston Gonzalez
‘I Was Walking Every Inch with Those Kids’: Media Coverage of Black Children in Three Civil Rights Event
(Advisor: Professor Gretchen Long)
David Mathias
The Pauper and the Peasant: Poverty and Class in Carolingian Europe
(Advisors: Professors Eric Goldberg and Chris Waters)
Walker Matthews
Justinian’s Reconquest of the West: Warfare, Ideology, Religion, and Politics in Sixth-Century Byzantium
(Advisors: Professors Eric Goldberg and Edan Dekel, Classics)
Adam Pinto
Comic Books and September 11: Memory and Commodification
(Advisor: Professor Scott Wong)
Alex Roth
Global Strategies, Regional Realities: Moving Towards the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, 1955-1957
(Advisor: Professor Karen Merrill)
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