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 Magnus 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 Magnus 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 Magnus 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 Magnus 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 Magnus Bernhardsson and Eric Goldberg)
Honors Students and Their Thesis Topics, 2007-08
Jimmy Bierman
Foreign Interventions in Lebanon: Misguided Benevolence
(Advisor: Professor Magnus Berhardsson)
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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