Adviser: Kathleen DuVal

Education

B.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020

Research Interests

My dissertation focuses on the Apalachee Indians, who historically lived in the Florida panhandle near present-day Tallahassee, but it is foremost a regional history that examines how the Apalachees shaped diplomacy, war, and trade in the Gulf Southeast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I take an ethnohistorical approach to this project, drawing on Spanish colonial documents and recent archaeology.

Contrary to the common narrative of Spanish colonialism in the Gulf Southeast, I argue that Apalachee territory remained an Apalachee-controlled space during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Apalachees overwhelmingly dictated their diplomatic and trade relationships with both the Spaniards and their Indigenous neighbors. By situating themselves at the geographic and power center of an ever-expanding network of primarily Indigenous allies, the Apalachees became a regional diplomatic powerhouse. Yet when regional changes destabilized this diplomatic network in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Apalachees invited both Indigenous allies and the Spaniards to undertake infrastructure- and settlement-building projects in their territory, cultivating these allies’ dependence on Apalachee land, labor, and resources and helping the Apalachees concentrate diplomatic power locally. By revealing St. Augustine’s marginal position in its diplomatic and trade relationships with the Apalachees and other allies, this project reconsiders diplomatic power in the Gulf Southeast more broadly. I demonstrate that framing the Gulf Southeast as “Spanish Florida” has obscured, rather than revealed, the dynamic, Indigenous-centered networks that determined the diplomatic and trade landscape of this region.

I have received support for this research from a variety of sources, including the UNC Graduate School, UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the University of Florida Libraries, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. I also have presented my research at a number of conferences, including the American Historical Association, the American Society for Ethnohistory, the Southern Historical Association, the Agricultural History Society, and the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies, and workshops, including at the Huntington Library and at King’s College in London. At the University of North Carolina, I have taught courses including “Native North America,” “American Women’s History to 1865,” and “Colonialism, Power, and Resistance (co-taught).”

Adviser: Lloyd S. Kramer

Graduate Email: drjeffreyryanharris@gmail.com

Education

B.A. University of South Alabama, 2009
M.A. (French) The Ohio State University, 2011
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020

Research Interests

My work focuses on the intellectual history and political culture of early modern France and the French colonial empire. My dissertation and current book project, “The Struggle for the General Will and the Making of the French and Haitian Revolutions,” examines competing ideas of the People’s “general will” in the emergence of proto-democratic political cultures and in the origins and trajectory of the Revolution. I have also written about Franco-Indigenous relationships in French colonial Louisiana and Polynesia. My intended second book project will examine contested definitions of who was or could be “French” in French colonial North America and will explore Old Regime origins of the purportedly post-Revolutionary colonial civilizing mission.

More about my dissertation and book project, “The Struggle for the General Will and the Making of the French and Haitian Revolutions”:

This dissertation examines the rapid emergence of a near-consensus in French politics that all political authority derived from the “general will” of the French People. Whereas popular sovereignty, which forms the justification of all modern democracies, has usually been understood as a principal legacy of the revolutionary era, this dissertation argues that this belief in the People’s sovereignty was a cause of the French Revolution, not an outcome. The Revolution formalized and codified the transformation in French political culture that had already taken place between the 1750s and 1789.
Historians have long debated whether French revolutionaries’ decisions were shaped more by unforeseen events and circumstances or by preexisting values and ideas. This dissertation’s original contribution is to provide a new understanding of how ideas and values shaped revolutionaries’ choices by providing a new understanding of those values. This study analyzes the overlapping, interdependent theories of the “general will” that emerged in mid-18th-century France, demonstrates how these ideas created a “general will discourse” that pervaded late Old Regime politics and replaced traditional beliefs about the monarchy, and demonstrates how that general will discourse created the Revolution’s political culture and shaped factional alignments both within and beyond the national government.

Much of the “ideas vs. circumstances” debate has depended on historians’ reading of revolutionaries’ discussions of the general will as expressions of Rousseau’s version of the idea. This dissertation argues that Rousseau’s was only one variant of the general will within a constellation of competing beliefs that created a shared framework for debate. Royalists and republicans alike argued for forms of government premised on popular sovereignty; the irreconcilable differences between them derived from their conflicting definitions of “the People” and conflicting judgments about who could interpret and represent the People’s will.
This debate also spread to struggles between white and black factions in the colonial Caribbean and contributed to the origins of the Haitian Revolution. This dissertation thus argues that these struggles to define and speak for the People’s general will dominated late Old Regime politics and created a central point of contention in both revolutionary France and its colonial empire.

Recent Publications

• “Jansenism, Popular Sovereignty, and the General Will in the Prerevolutionary Crisis.” In Belief and Politics in Enlightenment France: Essays in Honor of Dale K. Van Kley, edited by Daniel J. Watkins and Mita Choudhury. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation’s Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2019. Link.
• “The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Huguenot Diaspora: French Protestants and the Transnational Commodification of English Nationalism.” Book History, Vol. 21 (2018): 27-53. Link.

Adviser: Donald J. Raleigh and Louise McReynolds

Education

B.A. Gettysburg College, 2009
M.A. University of Maryland, College Park 2013
Ph.D.University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2020

Research Interests

My research focuses on the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and early 1920s in the Urals city of Ekaterinburg. In particular, I am interested in issues concerning local government, political legitimacy, and the nature state power.

Recent Publications

“Blood on the Square: Perspectives on Revolutionary Violence and Disorder in 1905 Ekaterinburg,” Revolutionary Russia 29:1 (2016): 43-65

With Evgenii Volkov, “‘Russkii Vashington,’ ili Sibirskii Diktator? Obrazy i otsenki A.V.
Kolchaka kak verkhovnogo pravitelia v amerikanskoi presse (1918-1920),” Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta 4 (2016): 104-123

Adviser: Sarah D. Shields and Cemil Aydin

Adviser: Jay M. Smith and Chad Bryant

Education

BA Emory University, 2012 (European History)
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014
MA Thesis: “Inventing a French Tyrant: Crisis, Propaganda, and the Origins of Fénelon’s Ideal King”

Research Interests

My research interests focus especially on the intersection of political and diplomatic developments with socio-cultural trends and public opinion, as well as the formation and development of concepts of national characteristics and national stereotypes across political boundaries. I am interested in transnational interactions across Europe in the early modern period, but especially relations between France, the Habsburgs, and the Holy Roman Empire.

Adviser: Zaragosa Vargas

Graduate Email: auer@live.unc.edu

Adviser: Cemil Aydin

Adviser: Joseph T. Glatthaar

Education

BA Ohio University, Honors Tutorial College, 2014 (History, summa cum laude)
Honor’s Thesis: “Decidedly Unmilitary: The Roots of Social Order in the Union Army”
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016
Thesis: “Egyptian Darkness: Antebellum Reconstruction and Southern Illinois in the Republican Imagination, 1854-1861″
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019

Research Interests

My research focuses principally on the interrelationships between organizational culture and learning, operational behavior, and tactical adaptation in both large and small complex adaptive military organizations throughout history. More specifically, my dissertation project examines the interaction between ideology, soldier culture, and tactical adaptation in the Fifteenth Army Corps of the Union Army across multiple campaigns during the American Civil War. I am interested in the ways in which elements of organizational structure like the volunteer regimental system and division into corps d’armee affected the pattern of cultural evolution and tactical adaptation within Federal ranks, and how operational behaviors in the field were impacted by shifts in national war aims across the conflict. My project also makes an effort to explain the reciprocal relationship through which particular leaders and particular commands shape the “character” of one another over long service together.

In the past, my research has also engaged with nineteenth-century American history topics beyond the purview of military history. My master’s thesis, “Egyptian Darkness: Antebellum Reconstruction and Southern Illinois in the Republican Imagination, 1854-1861,” focused on early Republican (1854-1860) plans to “reconstruct” and “Northernize” the poor white inhabitants of southern Illinois (“Egypt”) before the Civil War – an intellectual prelude to many of the same efforts later directed toward poor whites of the postbellum South. Prior to this project, my undergraduate honor’s thesis, “Decidedly Unmilitary: The Roots of Social Order in the Union Army” examined how the simultaneous coexistence of conflicting individual motivations for service exhibited by members of a volunteer regiment, as well as the natural ebb and flow of those motivations over time, necessitated an adaptive leadership style by junior leaders in order to secure the obedience of subordinates.

Adviser: Morgan Pitelka

Education

B.A. University of Naples “L’Orientale” 2006
M.A. University of Rome “Sapienza” 2009
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2013
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2019

Adviser: Kathleen DuVal

Education

BA University of Central Arkansas, 2012
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019