Students & Student Interests

Christopher Allison studies the intersection of race, religion, and reform in the early 19th century, especially the development of the early abolitionist movement. He received his B.S. in Social Sciences Education from Olivet Nazarene University in 2006, and his M.A.R. studying American religious history from Yale Divinity School in 2010. His master’s thesis dealt with the transitional black abolitionist minister, and senior editor of the first African American newspaper in the United States, Samuel Cornish.   

John Frederick Bell received a B.A. in Religious Studies and History from the College of William and Mary in 2007.  He studies the history and literature of the nineteenth-century United States, in particular the relationship between religion and popular culture.  Intermittently he pursues side interests in Bob Dylan and twentieth-century music subcultures.  Before beginning graduate study, he worked as an analyst at the National Archives and as a high school social studies teacher with Teach For America.

Steven Brown studies representations of utopia in America, especially the evolution of those representations from the religious communal boom of the nineteenth century to today's ecologically-minded intentional communities. His work looks at utopian literature, history, and photography. Brown earned his MA in literature and MFA in poetry from McNeese (2008). He recently collaborated with photographer Jerry Uelsmann on a book of his poems and Uelsmann's photographs titled Moth and Bonelight, published by 21st Editions [www.21stphotography.com] (2010).

Carla Cevasco received her B.A. in English and American Literatures from Middlebury College in 2011. She specializes in early American agricultural history, with a focus on New England. Her other interests include food studies, environmental history, material culture, and the industrialization of American agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Holger Droessler received his M.A. in American Cultural History from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich in 2008. In his master thesis he explored the transatlantic debates about the Afro-German occupation children after the Second World War. His research interests center on the history of the long and global nineteenth century, especially U.S. and European imperialism. Currently he is working on an entangled history of imperialism, racism, and capitalism in the Euro-American Pacific at the turn of the twentieth century.

Altin Gavranovic studies freaks, witches, killers, eccentrics, revolutionaries, pirates, pornographers, spiritualists, bohemians, transcendentalists, hippies, modernists, free lovers, crazy persons, motorcycle outlaws, assorted zealots, and other manifestations of the weird and the unusual in American history. He is interested in the social distinction between difference and deviance, and the cultural sublimation of deviance into narratives of danger, adventure and authenticity. He is also interested in cultural and social theory, non-linguistic and non-rational forms of knowledge, radical politics, metaphysics, literature and fine head-wear.

Brian K. Goodman studies twentieth-century American cultural and literary history. He received his undergraduate degree in American Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and his M.St. in English (and American Studies) from the University of Oxford in 2007, where he wrote his master’s thesis on Philip Roth and counterfactual history. His current research focuses on cultural dissent and the transmission of art, ideas, and literature across the “Iron Curtain” during the Cold War.

Aaron Hatley received a B.A. in Music and the Integrated Program in Humane Studies from Kenyon College in 2008. His research interests include 20th-century American composers, performance practice, architecture, and intellectual history.

Jack Hamilton received his B.A. in English from New York University in 2003. His research interests include American popular and vernacular music, race, media, and cultural history, and he is currently working on a dissertation concerning popular music and racial imagination in the 1960s. Prior to graduate school he worked extensively as both a musician and a journalist, and has written on subjects ranging from bluegrass to professional basketball.

Jamie L. Jones is a PhD candidate in the History of American Civilization program.  She is writing a dissertation on the cultural life and afterlife of the American whaling industry.  She argues that representations of American whaling offer a unique perspective on changing popular imaginations of global economic enterprise, human relationship with the environment, and American identity.  Her research and teaching interests include 19th and 20th century American literature, art history, ecocriticism, travel literature, and journalism.  Jamie received an A.B. in English and American Literature from Harvard College.  Before starting graduate school, she wrote travel guides and worked in journalism.

Anna Lvovsky received her B.A. in literature and intellectual history from Yale University in 2007.  Her research interests include Cold War American culture, the history of homosexuality, state and military regulation, expertise, science and technology studies, and the sociology of knowledge. Her dissertation will focus on the history of law enforcement against homosexuality in the twentieth-century United States, relating especially to shifting perceptions of gay visibility. Currently, she is cross-enrolled as a JD candidate at Harvard Law School.

Eve Mayer received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an A.M. in History from Harvard University.  She is currently completing a dissertation on visual culture, nationalism, and racial and ethnic diversity in the nineteenth-century U.S. West.  Her research interests include the history of printing, publishing, and reading; visual culture; Native American history; and the history of anthropology.

Brian McCammack received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering (2004) from Purdue University, where he also received his M.A. in American Studies (2006). His dissertation focuses on the Great Migration in Chicago, bringing together environmental history, ecocriticism, and African American history and literature.

Theresa McCulla received an A.B. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard College in 2004 and a Culinary Arts Diploma from the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in 2010.  >From 2004 to 2007, she worked as a European media analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.  From 2007 to 2010, she managed the Food Literacy Project for Harvard University Hospitality and Dining Services.  There, she educated the Harvard community about nutrition, food preparation, and agricultural sustainability with on-campus farmers’ markets and cooking classes.  Theresa’s research interests include food, ethnicity, gender, language, and cultural representations of the immigrant experience.

Sandy Placido's research interests include the intersection of criminal and immigration law enforcement and the effect this coalescence has had on communities in the United States and abroad.  Sandy's other (theoretical and practical) interests include the Caribbean, imagemaking, musicmaking, and laughter. Sandy was born in the Bronx to parents born in the Dominican Republic. She received her BA, with honors, in American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, from Yale in 2008. Sandy was an immigrant rights organizer in Washington Heights, NYC, before she enrolled at Harvard.

Scott Poulson-Bryant received an A.B. in American Civilization from Brown University (2008), where he also taught classes in hiphop journalism and African American popular culture. His primary research centers around sentimentality and how it informs and helps to construct performance of race and gender in 19th- and 20th-century American (popular) culture. His interests also include film and media studies, genre fictions, (sub)urban social history, and queer cultural history. A founding editor of Vibe magazine, he is also the author of HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (2006).

Caitlin Rosenthal is a doctoral student in the History of American Civilization. Before coming to Harvard, she was a consultant with McKinsey & Company where she worked in a variety of industries ranging from energy to health care and non-profit management. Her experiences there contributed to her current interest in economic history, particularly accounting methods, workforce management, and labor photography. As an undergraduate Caitlin studied Political Science at Rice University in Houston. Outside of work and school, Caitlin enjoys painting, running, cooking, and making bad jokes.

Yael Schacher holds a B.A. in English from Columbia University and an A.M. in History from Harvard. Her primary interests are the history and representation of immigration and ethnicity and modern American intellectual history and cultural studies. She is working on a dissertation entitled "Refugees, their Advocates, and the Meanings of Refuge in 20th-Century America."

Summer Shafer earned her B.A. in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2008). Her interests include 19th- and 20th-century U.S. History with an emphasis on environmental history and American Political Development. Her current research centers on the political and economic aftermath of environmental catastrophe.

Jacob Spencer. American literature of the antebellum period.  Historiography.  Romanticism.  The “long” Eighteenth Century as a transatlantic phenomenon.  Intellectual history.  Critical theory.  Philology.  My dissertation is on American biography, its development during the early-national and antebellum US. 

Stephen Vider received a B.A. in English and Psychology from Yale University in 2003. From 2004 to 2007, he worked for Nextbook.org, an online magazine about Jewish literature and culture (their archive can now be found at Tabletmag.com). ). He is currently working on a dissertation about the cultural history of gay domesticity from 1880 to 1980. His article on social identity and crowd violence can be found in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. His writing has also appeared in the Village Voice and Newsday. He blogs at the Lazy Scholar (http://lazyscholar.wordpress.com), a guide to digital archives for students and teachers of American history and culture.

Tom Wickman received an A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard College (2007), and an A.M. in History, also from Harvard (2009). His dissertation, “Snowshoe Country: The Indian Northeast in the Little Ice Age, 1620-1727,” examines winter encounters and wild ecologies in the Gulf of Maine during a period of extraordinarily unstable weather. He is also pursuing a second project on the uses and representations of numeracy in the early Atlantic world. His methodological approaches include book history, environmental history, and ecocriticism, and he is a contributor to the fields of Atlantic History, Early American History, Native American Studies, and Northern Studies.

D. Clinton Williams received a B.A. from Oberlin College (2003) and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School (2005). He is currently exploring the intersection of religion, history and African American Studies, to locate the role religion played in American and African American social cultural movements in 20th-century America.