Melanie Sheehan
May 4, 2022
Education
B.A. Fordham University, 2017
M.A. UNC-Chapel Hill, 2019
PhD UNC-Chapel Hill, 2022
Recent PhDs
Emma Z. Rothberg
May 4, 2022
Education
B.A., Wesleyan University, 2015
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018
M.A. Thesis: “Full-Grown, Large, and Shapely”: Parades, Free Labor, and Civic Manhood after the Civil War
PhD, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2022
Research Interests
My dissertation focuses on the cultural practices of urban democracy and identity in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century. My research interests include urban history, gender history, memory and digital history methodologies.
I currently am the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Predoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the National Women’s History Museum. I served as Co-Director of the Digital History Lab from 2019-2021.
Alyssa Skarbek
January 3, 2022
Education
B.A. in History, University at Buffalo SUNY, 2012
B.A. in English with High Honors, University at Buffalo SUNY, 2012
M.A. in English, University at Buffalo SUNY, 2014
Research Interests
My dissertation is entitled: Becoming Zapatista: Violence and Political Mobilization in Chiapas, 1934-1996. My research interests include the 1994 Zapatista uprising, twentieth-century Mexican history, and Latin American social movements.
Michael Skalski
August 22, 2021
Education
B.A. Rutgers University, 2014
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Research Interests
My dissertation, “A Socialist Neighborhood: Cross-Border Exchanges between Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, 1969-1989,” explores successes and failures of internationalism and integration in the Eastern Bloc. In it, I study the lived experience of border crossing, i.e. the social, cultural, and economic practices in borderlands, and transnational cooperation under state socialism.
Lindsay Holman
August 22, 2021
Education
B.A. North Carolina State University, 2013
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Research Interests
My dissertation, “Herzog’s Roman Tesserae: Their Nature and Purpose Revisited,” grounds the interpretation of Herzog’s tesserae in their physical appearance and inscriptions, rather than solely investigating the prosopography of the named individuals. My research interests broadly are Roman economic and social history, history of slavery, and Roman material culture.
Max Lazar
June 16, 2021
Education
BA College of William & Mary, 2012
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Dissertation: Jerusalem on the Main: Jewish Integration in Frankfurt, 1914-1938
Research Interests
My research interests include modern Germany, Jewish history, Holocaust history, urban history, and spatial theory. My dissertation, titled “Jerusalem on the Main,” is a local study of Jewish integration in Frankfurt am Main between 1914 and 1938. Until now, there has been a historical consensus that the First World War marked a negative turning point of what, until then, had been an upward arc of Jewish integration in Germany that had begun in the late eighteenth century. I challenge this master narrative of German-Jewish history by arguing that the Jews of Frankfurt continued to enjoy a high level of integration into the political, educational, cultural, and social life of their surrounding society until the Nazi Party’s seizure of power in 1933. Furthermore, I use examinations of local literature, popular culture, and the history of Jewish street names to show how scholars have frequently overlooked continuities in Jewish integration in Germany during the years preceding the Holocaust.
Robin Buller
May 31, 2021
Education
B.A. University of Toronto, 2014
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Dissertation: Ottoman Jews in Paris: Sephardi Immigrant Community, Culture, and Identity, 1918-1939
Research Interests
I am a historian of migration, the Jewish Mediterranean, and modern France. I am particularly interested in questions of language, citizenship, and transnational networks. My dissertation (UNC 2021) examined Sephardi Jewish immigrants from the Ottoman Empire in twentieth-century Paris, with a focus on collective identity, communal life, and belonging in the Third Republic. Current and future research projects concentrate on the Holocaust, French colonialism, and immigrant identity in France.
Mark Reeves
May 31, 2021
Education
B.A. Western Kentucky University, 2012
M.A. Western Kentucky University, 2014
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Research Interests
My research focuses on the global history of anticolonialism in the twentieth century, especially intersections between anticolonialism and various forms of internationalism. My dissertation, “Lost Horizons: Anticolonial Internationalism, 1930-1970,” compares the internationalist and anticolonial careers of four leaders from different regions: Shukri al-Quwatli (1892-1967), the first president of Syria; V.K. Krishna Menon (1896-1974), the Indian diplomat and Minister of Defense; Carlos Romulo (1898-1985), the journalist and diplomat from the Philippines; and Nnamdi Azikiwe (1902-96), activist editor and first president of Nigeria.
Recent Publications
“‘Free and Equal Partners in Your Commonwealth’: The Atlantic Charter and Anticolonial Delegations to London, 1941-3,” Twentieth Century British History 29, no. 2 (June 2018): 259-283
“Teaching Decolonization beyond the Nation: The Case of West Africa,” World History Connected 13, no. 2 (June 2016)
Daniel W. Morgan
May 31, 2021
Education
BA Trinity College, 2013
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2021
Dissertation: Historiographical Narratives of Violence, Sacrality, and Community in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Italy: Genoa, Pisa, and the Mezzogiorno, c.1080-c.1170.
Research Interests
I am a cultural historian specializing in interregional, interdisciplinary, and narratological approaches to the study of medieval Italy, with research projects on medieval history-writing, twelfth-century political and religious culture, and ideologies of holy war. My dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which medieval historical narrative texts represented and reconciled anxieties regarding the experience of violence and its role in shaping political life in Latin Christian society, with particular reference to the historiographical projects of Genoa, Pisa, and the Mezzogiorno. I argue that – for these societies – narrative historical texts functioned as articulations of political myths, in that they were discursive spaces within which the experience of political life, specifically the anxieties surrounding boundary-making and the infliction of harm, could be sublimated within a shared religious culture system. This project offers a contribution to our understanding of the development of political cultures within Latin Christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, presents an analytical framework for approaching ambiguous medieval historical narratives, and demonstrates a way of considering northern and southern Italian history together as thematically interrelated.