Department of History

Email: bdndrsn2@memphis.edu

Research Interests: Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, burial practices, funerary art, stages of childhood and adolescence, roles of young women in society, child burials.

Advisors: : Dr. Aram Goudsouzian and Dr. Beverly Bond

Email: cbuggs@memphis.edu

Research interests: late 19th-early 20th century southern African American History with an emphasis on women and gender studies, Black feminism, and identity. Currently, exploring late 19th-early 20th century middle-class Black women Memphians’ intellectual-activism, their identity construction and demonstration, and the connections between Black liberation and white supremacy via identity construction and demonstration.

Tentative Dissertation Title: I am Me: Middle-Class Black Women Memphians’ Intellectual-Activism, Identity, & Black Liberation and White Supremacy in the Jim/Jane Crow Era, 1880-1930

Email: mwbllock@memphis.edu

Research Interests: U.S. Colonial History, U.S. in the Age of Jackson, African-American History, American Civil War, The Word Wars, and U.S. Historiography.

Advisor: Dr. Susan O’Donovan 

Email: drclark4@memphis.edu

Research Interests: Nineteenth century, African American Women, Reconstruction era, Racial Violence 

My dissertation topic will examine the Ku Klux Klan and its founding in Pulaski, Tennessee during Reconstruction. While the early members of the KKK are important to my study, I intend to center the experiences of African Americans in Pulaski and surrounding counties. How the community responded to the violence and life before the formation of the Klan will be explored. 

Advisor: Dr. Peter Brand 

Email: knwggins@memphis.edu 

Research Interests: Ancient Egyptian religious thought and cosmology, Egyptian gods and goddesses, Nubian religion and history, museum practices and collections management, and historiography and theories of history. 

Dissertation Title: Beyond Cosmogony: A Reassessment of the Egyptian Ogdoad and its Role in Egyptian Religion and Magic 

Email: mpgivens@memphis.edu

Research interests: 20^th century African-American history, classical studies, women and gender studies, revolutions, social movements, memory, and generational trauma

Advisor: Dr. Beverly Bond

Email: aagold@memphis.edu

Research Interests: My research focuses on the nineteenth century, specifically on racial slavery and kinship ties. Within this framework, I examine Black women’s history, exploring how they constructed their own ideas of freedom and resistive practices within the confines of racialized bondage.

Email: hgraham3@memphis.edu

Research Interests: Southern history, American history, history of minority groups

Advisor: Dr. Andrew M. Daily 

Email: tnhmlton@memphis.edu 

Research Interests: Ancient Egyptian religious and magical literature, mummification, and ancient Mediterranean studies. 

Advisor: Dr. Andrew Daily

Email: harris43@memphis.edu

Research Interests: African American Studies, Postmodern African American Music History with an emphasis on Hip Hop History and Black popular culture.

Advisor: Dr. Susan O’Donovan

Email: dhrris42@memphis.edu

Research Interests: U.S. History to 1877 - South during the Reconstruction Era; Elite white Mississippians’ efforts to undermine Reconstruction Era reforms to protect their class and political power; Exploring how elite whites continued to hinder socioeconomic and citizenship reforms for poor black and white Mississippians.

Tentative Dissertation Title: A Way of Life: The Struggle to Reconstruct Class and Citizenship in America.

Email: whllard1@memphis.edu

Research Interests: Ancient Mediterranean History, Greco-Roman History, Mesopotamian History, and Ancient Egyptian History.

Email: whoag@memphis.edu

Research Interests: U.S. colonial history, the experiences of rural southerners in the 19th century, military history 

Email: bghghes2@memphis.edu

Research interests: My past and current research include ancient Egyptian religion, magic, and ritual through the various periods of Egyptian history. I particularly focus on the aspects of Egyptian afterlife, burial, and rebirth. I am also interested in studying Egyptian women and their role in funerary practices. I wrote my Master’s thesis on the Opening of the Mouth ceremony and its social aspect of preserving the bonds between the living and the dead. It is my plan to continue this research in my future dissertation.

Advisor: Dr. Brad Dixon

Email: sjcksncr@memphis.edu

Research Interests: British Atlantic colonies (17^th & 18^th centuries), Colonial American legal structures, Colonial Virginia, histories of minority and oppressed groups

My research is centered around how everyday people affect the development of legal structures. Women, indentured servants, enslaved people of African descent, marooning societies, and indigenous populations were forced into the lower sects of the social order because of the threat they posed to the elite class. Thus far, my research has focused on Colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

Advisor: Dr. Aram Goudsouzian 

Email: rjjnkins@memphis.edu

Research Interests: 20th Century American History, African American History, racial inequality, and demographic change

Tentative Dissertation Title: A City Transformed: Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe 

Email: slee31@memphis.edu

Research Interests: military history, cultural history, and etymology.
Specific research areas include Korean history, focusing on the Goguryeo period and military history of Yi Sun-Sin during the Imjin Wars, and Scandinavian history, focusing on the Sámi people and their cultural influences from 793 - 1066 CE.

Advisor: Dr. Scott Marler

Email: bmlyles@memphis.edu

Research Interests: Religious and intellectual history - finding the place where ideas and faith meet action.

Dissertation Title: Incarnate Faith in the Crescent City
The research centers on the Catholic Church and race in nineteenth-century New Orleans. I focus specifically on how faith was lived out and expressed across boundaries of race.

Advisor: Dr. Aram Goudsouzian 

Email: mpnkrtnm@memphis.edu

Research Interests: 20th Century American History, African American History, Southern Primary and Secondary Education, Mississippi in the 20th Century, School Desegregation and Resegregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and White Flight. 

My intended dissertation topic will explore the desegregation and subsequential resegregation of the Hattiesburg, Mississippi Public School system from the 1960s until 2000. This project will explore legal battles that helped to finally desegregate schools in the 1990s, white flight in response to school desegregation and the formation of suburbs in medium sized southern cities, and the legacy of school desegregation and the resegregation of the school district. It aims to further studies on the legacy of school desegregation and resegregation, the impact of white flight on public education, and explore a prolonged timeline of desegregation in the South in non-urban cities and their instances of school resegregation in the South. 

Advisors: Dr. Beverly Bond and Dr. Brian Kwoba.

Email: vnering@memphis.edu

Research Interests: 19th century and 20th century African American History, Women’s History,  Global History, Gender Studies, Womanist Theory, Public Policy, and Global Remuneration. 

Pronouns: they/them/theirs

Email: enikirk@memphis.edu

Research Interests: Ancient Egyptian religious practices and mythology, magic in every day life, modern paganism, use of gender in Ancient Egypt mythmaking

Email: pcphllps@memphis.edu 

Research Interests: For my research interests, I am interested in studying the Egyptian New Kingdom, Late Period, and Graeco-Roman period. I am also interested in Egyptian religion, Near Eastern studies, and cultural exchange between the Egyptians and Near Eastern groups.

Advisor: Dr. Andrew Daily

Email: lbpitts@memphis.edu

Research Interest: military history, Native American studies, US history, European history 

Advisor: Dr. Bradley Dixon

Email: bjpppell@memphis.edu

Research Interests: I am interested in “state control" in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and the factors that negotiated indifference among a diverse populace that included people (s) from all over the ancient Mediterranean world. I specifically look at the religious realities of state and domestic spaces to try and understand the purpose of how entities, large and small, state and individual, syncretized ideologies to understand their place in their environments in the face of change. I am especially interested in the makeshift religions that were constructed alongside Christianity and how all these ideas came together to build the foundation of the ideas we see manifest in our modern religious practices. 

I am equally interested in understanding “state” formation in colonial America and how piracy was used as a conduit to exercise control and overpower enemies in a global geopolitical arena that included the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean competed for by various entities such as Britain, France, and Spain.

Advisor: Dr. Andrew Daily

Email: jdringer@memphis.edu

Research Interests: American Military History, Georgia State History with a focus on the Civil War, World Religion and Culture

Advisor: Dr. Peter Brand

Email: clrose1@memphis.edu

Research Interests: epigraphy of ancient Egypt, New Kingdom & Ramesside art & architecture, archaeology of ancient Egypt, the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, Museum Studies with a focus on Collections.

Dissertation Title (in-progress): De-Activating Seth: Using Iconoclasm to Contain an Unruly God
Research Synopsis: An examination of the epigraphic defacement of the names, titles, and images of the ancient Egyptian god Seth within the Great Temple of Karnak, to determine when and for what reason(s) the iconoclastic attacks against this deity occurred. 

https://memphis.academia.edu/CristinaRose

Advisor: Dr. Andrew Daily

Email: njroveto@memphis.edu

Research interests: medieval studies (particularly medieval theology, environmental studies, and medieval Sicily)

Email: abbey.sedlak@memphis.edu

Research Interests: Women's History, Social History, History of English Literature

Email: bstwrt15@memphis.edu

Research Interests: The history of German Nationalism and Socialism, European sociopolitical history, and Authoritarianism

Secondary research interests: Comparative Revolutions, Socialism and Communism in Africa and Asia, and comparative sociopolitical history of the ancient and modern eras.

My dissertation topic explores the long-term course of philosophical, intellectual, cultural, and political developments that contributed to the Socialism and National Socialism in Germany.

https://independent.academia.edu/BrandonStewart21

Email: pttlghmn@memphis.edu

Research Interests:  I have always found the connection between World War I, the rise of Fascism in Europe, and World War II to be incredibly fascinating, not merely because of its extreme gravity to our own present day, but also in how we still see its impact in the cities of Europe today, such as places like Munich, Germany.  I am also interested in Romantic era figures such as Frederic Chopin, and in the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Advisor: Dr. Suzanne Onstine 

Email: dmwarne@memphis.edu 

Research Interests: The focus of my current research is on the iconographical classification and ritual function of a particular type of largely royal imagery of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms.  I am also currently a digital epigrapher for the Theban Tomb 16 Project (tomb of Panehsy and Tarenu) at Dra abu al-Naga, directed by Dr. Suzanne Onstine.  My recent research projects include the analysis of a mummy dating to the Ptolemaic Period, the study of the coffin of Ankhefenmut (an Egyptian priest of the 21st Dynasty, Bab el-Gasus cache), Egyptian Revival sphinxes, and an Egyptian collection in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, where I currently serve as advising curator. 

https://memphis.academia.edu/DanielMWarne