The Ph.D Program: United States History
Emory has a thriving, nationally recognized doctoral program in U.S. history with 11 faculty members and 7 associated faculty. US History students form close mentoring relationships with faculty amid a lively intellectual community of graduate students from many different fields within the history department, as well as within the larger interdisciplinary community in the Laney Graduate School.
Students admitted to the U.S. history program receive rigorous and comprehensive training in U.S. history from the colonial period through the twentieth century as well as in their chosen fields of specialization. The program has strengths in U.S. slavery and emancipation; race, ethnicity, and immigration; African American history; gender and sexuality; Civil Rights history; U.S. Religious History; and Modern Conservatism. Comparable strengths in Latin American and African History support the investigation of comparative, diasporic, and transnational histories as well. Students have excellent opportunities for training in the digital humanities through the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and for cross-disciplinary study through the department’s close ties with the programs in Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Jewish Studies, the Department of Religion, and the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. Additionally, students receive pedagogical training through the nationally recognized TATTO program, which prepares students across the university for the challenges of teaching in higher education institutions.
For more information on research specialties in U.S. History, see faculty webpages.Recent Graduate Students
| Graduation Year | PhD Recipient | Dissertation Title |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Camille J. Goldmon | "On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940" |
| 2021 | Jennifer Elizabeth Morgan | "American Concubines: Gender, Race, Law, and Power in the British Caribbean and North American South, 1661-1800" |
| 2019 | Hanne I. Blank | "Southern Women, Feminist Health: Place, Politics, and Priorities in Five Feminist Women’s Health Organizations in the Southeastern U.S., 1970-1995" |
| 2018 | Danielle Lee Wiggins | "Crime Capital: Public Safety, Urban Development, and Post-Civil Rights Black Politics in Atlanta" |
| 2018 | Louis Fagnan | "'The Principles of Republicanism': Black and Tan Republicans in South Carolina, 1895-1950" |
| 2017 | William Michael Camp | "Greater Abundance: Energy Production, Environmental Protection, and the Politics of Deregulation in the United States after the OAPEC Embargo" |
| 2016 | Erica Ann Bruchko | "'Slave Traffick': The Informal Economy, the Law, and the Social Order of South Carolina Cotton Country, 1793-1860" |
| 2016 | Colin Edward Reynolds | "The Not-So-Far Right: Radical Right-Wing Politics in the United States, 1941-1977" |
| 2016 | Scott P. Libson | "'Faith in Money': Mission Movement Fundraising and American Philanthropy, 1860-1930" |
| 2015 | Edward Adair Hatfield | "The Too-Busy City: Atlanta and Urbanity at the End of the Twentieh Century" |
| 2015 | Andrea Scionti | "Not Our Kind of Anti-Communists: Americans and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in France and Italy, 1950-1969" |
| 2014 | Sean Thomas Byrnes | "The United States in Opposition: The United Nations, The Third World, and Changing American Visions of Global Order, 1970-1984" |
| 2014 | Christopher Paul Sawula | "From the Lower Sort to the Lower Orders: Labor and Self-Identity in Boston, 1737-1837" |
| 2014 | Jason Schulman | "The Limits of Liberalism: A Constitutional Reconsideration of American Jewish Politics" |
| 2014 | Samir Indar Singh | "For Whom the Blame Tolls: Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and te Plight of Cambodi" |
| 2014 | D. Nathan Vigil | "Elusive Equality: The Nuclear Arms Race in Europe and the History of the INF Treaty, 1969-1988" |
| 2013 | Richard Andrew Cook | ""[T]heir dear Idol ye Charter": The Second Charter of Massachusetts Bay" |
| 2013 | Daniel Glenn Spillman | "The Conservative Baby Boomers' Magazine: A History of The American Spectator and the Conservative Intellectual Movement, 1967-2001" |
| 2011 | Katherine Armstrong | "Thy Will Lord, Not Mine: Parents, Grief, and Child Death in the Antebellum South" |
| 2011 | Remalian Cocar | "Between a Righteous Citizenship and the Unfaith of the Family: The History of Released Time Religious Education in the United States" |
| 2011 | Patrick Connelly | "Nietzsche, Christianity, and Cultural Authority in the United States, 1890-1969" |
| 2011 | Robert Elder | "Southern Saints and Sacred Honor: Evangelicalism, Honor, Community, and the Self in South Carolina and Georgia, 1784-1860" |
| 2011 | Natasha McPherson | "'There Was a Tradition among the Women': New Orleans¿s Colored Creole Women and the Making of a Community in the Tremé and Seventh Ward Neighborhoods, 1791-1930" |
| 2011 | Leah Weinryb Grohsgal | "Reinventing Civil Liberties: Religious Groups, Organized Litigation, and the Rights Revolution" |
| 2010 | Kelly Erby | "Public Appetite: Dining Out in Nineteenth-Century Boston" |
| 2010 | Worth Hayes | "In Our Own Hands: Black Private Education in Chicago, 1940-1986" |
| 2010 | Lisa Vox | "The Death Wish of Humanity: Religious and Scientific Apocalypticism in the United States, 1859-2001" |
| 2009 | Robert David Carlson | "Breach of Faith: Conscription in Confederate Georgia" |
| 2009 | Beverly Sylvester | "Negotiating Unacceptable Behavior: Southeastern Indians and the Evolution of Bilateral Regulation on the Southern Colonial Frontier" |
| 2009 | Michael Thompson | "Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Life along Charleston's Waterfront, 1783-1861" |
| 2008 | Robin Conner | "Gendered Garrisons: Masculinity, Femininity, and Class Identity in the Post-Civil War Western Army, 1865-1898" |
| 2008 | Candice L. Harrison | "The Contest of Exchange: Space, Power, and Politics in Philadelphia's Public Markets, 1770-1859" |
| 2008 | Christopher Allen Luse | "'The Offspring of Infidelity': Polygenesis and the Defense of Slavery" |
| 2008 | Joseph P. Renouard | "Limits and Morality: The Emergence of Human Rights in America's Post-Vietnam Foreign Policy, 1968-1981" |
| 2006 | Sylvia Coulibaly | "Kelly Miller, 1895-1939: Portrait of an African American Intellectual" |
| 2006 | Carolyn Mbajekwe | "A Vision for Black Colleges in a Post-Brown America: Benjamin E. Mays, Frederick D. Patterson, and the Quest for a Cultural Pluralism-Based Definition of Collegiate Desegregation" |
| 2006 | Paul O'Grady | "Vital Arteries: A History of the Streets of New York, 1783-1863" |
| 2005 | Carey Latimore | "Always a Minority: Richmond Area Free Blacks in the Civil War Era" |
| 2005 | H. Paul Thompson | "Race, Temperance, and Prohibition in the Postbellum South: Black Atlanta, 1865-1890" |
| 2004 | Diane Burke | "On Slavery's Borders: Slavery and Slaveholding on Missouri's Farms, 1821-1865" |
| 2004 | Brian Luskey | "The Marginal Men: Merchants' Clerks and Society in the Northeastern United States, 1790-1860" |
| 2004 | Fay Yarbrough | "'Those Disgracefull and unnatural Matches': Interracial Sex and Cherokee Society in the Nineteenth Century" |