Adviser: W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Graduate Email: myamanak@mail.doshisha.ac.jp

Education

BA Nanzan University, 2008
MA Kyoto University, 2010
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018

Research Interests

Mishio Yamanaka’s research interests are race and ethnic relations in the U.S. South in the late nineteenth century. She examines the community of Creoles of color in post-Civil War New Orleans, focusing on their racial desegregation movement including the U.S. Supreme Court case of 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson. She is also interested in digital humanities and how new digital techniques enhance further understanding of history. As a Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative fellow, she launched a digital mapping project: “The Fillmore Boys School in 1877.”

She currently serves as an assistant professor at the International Institute of American Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.

Click here to visit Mishio Yamanaka’s personal website.

Adviser: Marcus Bull and Brett E. Whalen

Graduate Email: hasseler@live.unc.edu

Education

BA University of Washington, 2012 (History, summa cum laude)
MA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014
MA Thesis: “Translation, Canonization, and the Cult of the Saints in England, 1160 – 1220.”

Research Interests

My research interests focus on the intersection between traditions of historical writing and religious identity in the Scandinavian north during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. My dissertation, “Holy Kings: Royal Cult and the Making of Latin Christendom, c. 1000 – 1250,” examines the historiographical afterlives of high medieval royal saints as a lens onto the adoption of Christian identities on the northern and eastern peripheries of an expanding Latin Christendom. In the new kingdoms of Hungary, Norway, and Denmark, the earliest and most persistently significant local saints were neither bishops nor monastic founders, but rather kings who had been instrumental in both the centralization of royal authority and the establishment of the Christian faith amongst their peoples. As figures whose memories seemed to illuminate moments of transformational historical change, such as conversion, conquest, and kingdom-formation, royal saints such as Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway, Knútr IV of Denmark, and Stephen I of Hungary became powerful carriers of historical meaning. Deployed within the grand narratives of their young kingdoms, these highly polysemic figures came to represent diverse visions of royal ideology, hegemonic masculinity, and spiritual authority. A study of the representations of royal sanctity in medieval historiography thus allows us to more fully understand the strategies through which new Christian kingdoms in the north and east wrote themselves into the religious and textual community of Latin Christendom.