Senior Honors Theses

To read History majors’ Senior Honors Theses from 2014 onwards, visit the Carolina Digital Repository.

2018 Honors Theses

Name: Jacob Bell
Thesis Adviser: Louise McReynolds
Title: “The Autocrat and the Revolutionary: Catherine the Great, John Paul Jones, and the Enlightenment’s ‘Woman Question’”

Name: Mary Grady Bell
Thesis Adviser: Lloyd Kramer
Title:  “The Nationalist Meanings of 20th Century Olympic Games: Conflicting National Identities and Memories in Mexico, Germany, and America”

Name: Sydney Bezanson
Thesis Adviser: Malinda Maynor Lowery
Title: “The ‘C’ in the Name: Religion and Student Activism in the Campus Y at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1930-1990”

Name: Katherine Frances Cayton
Thesis Adviser: Karen Auerbach
Title: “A ‘Third Possibility’ Revolution: The Success of Émigré Reporting Networks at Radio Free Europe During Poland’s 1956 Thaw”

Name: Rebekah Cockram
Thesis Adviser: Michael Morgan
Title: “Cession and Retreat: Negotiating Hong Kong’s Future 1979 – 1984”

Name: Olivia Holder
Thesis Adviser: Michelle King
Title: “Possessions of Empire: The Construction of Imperial Identities in Britain and China”

Name: Jeremy Howell
Thesis Adviser: Lauren Jarvis
Title:  “The Dethroning: Prester John’s Demise and The Shaping of Modern Ethiopia”

Name: Lacey Hunter
Thesis Adviser: Wayne Lee
Title:  “An Expansive Subjecthood in Eighteenth-Century British North America: The Life and Perspectives of Sir Guy Carleton”

Name: Matthew McKnight
Thesis Adviser: Molly Worthen
Title: “’Not a Square Inch’: Abraham Kuyper and the Role of Epistemology in Shaping the American Evangelical Response to Modernity”

Name: James Messmer
Thesis Adviser: Brett Whalen
Title:  “The Final Judgement: John Bale and an Apocalyptic Justification of English Protestantism”

Name: Alexander Peeples
Thesis Adviser: Lauren Jarvis
Title: “Relearning Ujamaa: Education in Tanzania from 1954 to 2002”

Name: Michael Purello
Thesis Adviser: Tobias Hof
Title: “Protesting the ‘Condonation of Savagery’: American Catholics and Non-Involvement in the Spanish Civil War”

Name: Sophie Rupp
Thesis Adviser: Flora Cassen
Title: “The Man Who Meant Too Much: Domestic and International Implications of the Beilis Case”

Name: Michael Sanders
Thesis Adviser: Lloyd Kramer
Title: “Voltaire’s Use of the Other to Reform France: A Philosophe’s Critique of Society”

Name: Emma Watts
Thesis Adviser: James Leloudis
Title:  “The Wimmin Are With Us to Stay’: Women’s Social Activities at the University of North Carolina from 1897-1946”

2017 Honors Theses

Name: Georgia Brunner
Thesis Adviser: Lauren Jarvis
Title: “Trying Trauma and Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda”

Name: Elizabeth Chase
Thesis Adviser: Molly Worthen
Title: “Disease and Distrust: Mandatory Premarital HIV Testing in Illinois”

Name: Michael Hensley
Thesis Adviser:Marcus Bull
Title: “History-writing as a ‘Bulwark againts the Passage of Time:’ The Middle Byzantine World through the Eyes of Michael Psello, Anna Komnene, and John Kinnamos”

Name: Roy Ji
Thesis Adviser: Lloyd Kramer
Title: “Universalism Calling: French Distortion and Invention of the the Image of China from Jesuits to Enlightenment Philosophes, circa 1560-1800”

Name: Adrienne Kronovet
Adviser: William Barney
Title: “A General Change: Ulysses S. Grant’s Evolving Relationship with the Jewish Community, 1862-1885”

Name: Charles Lumsden
Thesis Adviser: Louis A. Perez, Jr.
Title: “A Fratricidal Arm: Cuban Agency and the Abrogation of the Platt Amendment”

Name: Meredith Miller
Adviser: Chad Bryant
Title: “When Paris Met Bohemia: Discovering the Czech Nation through its Art, 1900-1938”

Name: Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler
Thesis Adviser: John Sweet
Title: “Susan Hill at the Supreme Court: Reproductive Rights Advocacy in the Deep South Remembered”

Name: Ethan Tyler
Thesis Adviser: Sarah Shields
Title: “‘A British Lake’: Kuwait and the 1913 Anglo-Ottoman Convention”

2016 Honors Theses

Name: Griffin Creech
Thesis Adviser: Donald Raleigh
Title: “Imagining Russia, Informing America: Samuel N. Harper, U.S. Public Opinion, and the Russian Revolution, 1916 – 1921”

Name: Augusta Dell’Omo
Thesis Adviser: Susan Pennybacker
Title: “Tending the Enemy’s Flock: German Pastors and POWs in Britain, 1940 – 1955”

Name: Sam Fletcher
Thesis Adviser:Brett Whalen and Marcus Bull
Title: “Constructing Sanctity in the Long Twelfth Century: The Miracles of St. Anselm, St. Bernard, and St. Francis”

Name: Dana Landress
Thesis Adviser: Raúl Necochea
Title: “The Nomenclature Precedent: A Pre-History of the Human Genome Project”

Name: Tyler Litke
Adviser: William Barney
Title: “Yearning for Normalcy: Marriage and Gender in the Slaveholding Class during the Civil War”

Name: Brent McKnight
Thesis Adviser: James Leloudis
Title: “Festival Tourism: Advertising the Western North Carolina Tourist Industry Through Cultural Performance in the Cherokee Indian Fair, the Rhododendron Festival, and the Grandfather Mountain Highlight Games”

Name: Mari Moss
Adviser: Chad Bryant
Title:“Adaptation, Immigration, and Identity: The Tensions of American Jewish Food Culture”

Name: Tyra Pearson
Thesis Adviser: John Sweet
Title: “‘Unnatural Mother’: Race, Gender, and Infanticide in the Nineteenth Century”

2015 Honors Theses

Name: Emily Karen Cathey
Thesis Adviser: Harry Watson
Title: “Working and Playing”: Mill-sponsored Baseball in the Early Twentieth Century in the Peidmont of North Carolina

2014 Honors Theses

Name: Lauren Crawford
Thesis Adviser: Michael Morgan
Title: The Human Spill: Economic and Social Impacts of the Response to and Recovery from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Name: Gregg Godwin
Thesis Adviser: Jerma Jackson
Title: Black Women, Domestic Work and Expanding Resistance, 1909-1945

Name: Katie Harper
Thesis Adviser: Marcus Bull
Title: Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Witch To Live: How the Incorporation of Sorcery into Heresy Critically Contributed to the Witch Stereotype of the Late Middle Ages

Name: Maggie Howell
Thesis Adviser: Lloyd Kramer
Title: The Changing ‘Vichy Syndrome’: Sites of Holocaust and Algerian Traumas in Official French Memory

Name: Eric Medlin
Thesis Adviser: Molly Worthen
Title: Populist Appeals to Europe and their Implications, 1883-1908

Name: Jessica Stone
Thesis Adviser: Klaus Larres
Title: Humanitarian Intervention in US Foreign Policy: The Case of Kosovo

Name: Grace Tatter
Thesis Adviser: James L. Leloudis
Title: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools

Name: Liz Tolleson
Thesis Adviser: Zaragosa Vargas
Title: North American Female Cartoonists of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Name: Michael Welker
Thesis Adviser: James L. Leloudis
Title: Nothing Without Demand: Black Power and Student Activism on North Carolina College Campuses, 1967-1973

Name: Burt Westermeier
Thesis Adviser: Marcus Bull
Title: The Impact of Pilgrimage on Local Communities and the Medieval Expansion of Europe in the Twelfth Century

Name: Tom Wolf
Thesis Adviser: Molly Worthen
Title: Bolshevizing America: C.L.R. James and the Black Vanguard

2013 Honors Theses

Name: Kali Abu-Sharr
Thesis Adviser: Marcus Bull
Title: “Forming a Legacy through Building, Literature, and Gift-Giving in the Golden Age of Justinian”

Name: Claire Burridge
Thesis Adviser: Richard J. A. Talbert
Title: “A Fresh Perspective on a Forgotten Community: The Case of Gabii”

Name: Cassie Etter-Wenzel
Thesis Adviser: Karen Hagemann
Title: “Feminism and Peace: Women in the Japanese Peace Movement of the 1970s and 1980s”

Name: Steven Garbin
Thesis Adviser: Lloyd S. Kramer
Title: “Interpreting Democracy:  Tocqueville and Chateaubriand on Political Freedom, Frontier Culture, and the Decline of the French Aristocracy”

Name: Sam Hobbs
Thesis Adviser: W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Title: “Architects of Memory in the Postwar South: The Origins and Evolution of the Lost Cause”

Name: Hillary Hollowood
Thesis Adviser: Joseph T. Glatthaar
Title: “A Blessing and a Curse: The North Carolina Railroad and the American Civil War in Rowan County, North Carolina 1850–1870”

Name: Derrick Kay
Thesis Adviser: Zaragosa Vargas
Title: “Coal Mining in North Carolina: A Forgotten Example of Southern Industrialization”

Name: Lawson Kuehnert
Thesis Adviser: James L. Leloudis
Title: “‘Our South Has Changed’: The Popular Response to Civil Rights in North Carolina and the Evolution of a Social Vision, 1954–1964”

Name: Anna Langley
Thesis Adviser: Iqbal Singh Sevea
Title: “The Minority Search for Belonging: Jews and Bengalis in London’s East End, 1890–present”

Name: John Runge
Thesis Adviser: Raúl Necochea
Title: “Yellow Fever and Medical Helplessness: Lessons from the Past on Caregivers and Patients When There Is No Cure”

Name: Corey Vines
Thesis Adviser: Malinda Maynor Lowery
Title: “On the Eve of Change: The Mental, Social, and Political Journey of African Americans during World War I”

Name: Luke Wander
Thesis Adviser: Michael Tsin
Title: “Shaking the Whole World: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as Global History, 1966–1976”

2012 Honors Theses

Name: Nick Andersen
Thesis Adviser: Jerma Jackson
Title: “Too Real to Be Funny”: Social Protest and Cultural Failure in Four Post World War II American Operas, 1934–1954