Ph.D. Students

Ph.D. Students in United States and Atlantic History

• Lauren Cameron-Wendler is a second-year doctoral student interested in the 19th-century Atlantic world, particularly the international impact of the American Civil War and Atlantic-wide emancipation movements. She studies Atlantic history, 19th-century America, and U.S. history. Her current research includes looking at the role of Bermuda in the Atlantic theater of the American Civil War, and the competing diplomatic relations between the United States and the British in the Spanish Atlantic realm.
  Co-advisers: Professor Ousmane Power-Greene and Professor Wim Klooster
• Lauren Cyr
• Jason Kinsel is a third-year doctoral student in the process of finishing his dissertation proposal on the fluid nature of property and property rights in the colonial and early Republic periods of U.S. history. He is specifically interested in the social conflicts that resulted from disputes between land speculators and settlers who defended their land claims inside and outside of the courts through legal and philosophical arguments and, at times, physical confrontation. How Americans have understood the nature of property and the rights associated with the concept has remained a divisive issue throughout the nation’s history and deserves continued study.
• Matthew Law is a doctoral student on the American History track currently writing his dissertation on African-American overseas emigration organizing from the U.S. Deep South during the Reconstruction period. His research interests focus on the history of black colonization and on black radicalism in the 19th century. He also is working on an article for publication investigating how the families enslaved by the family of Robert E. Lee were colonized in Liberia during the Civil War.
• Melinda Marchand is a doctoral candidate primarily interested in 19th-century American women’s history, especially relating to religion, politics and work. She currently is finishing her dissertation about Caroline Dall, a Bostonian once considered “the foremost woman of letters of her day” yet now generally unknown. Her dissertation argues that Dall played a pivotal role at the intersection of the transforming feminist, intellectual and professional cultures of the nineteenth century. Her minor field of study is Atlantic history, where she also focuses on women’s religious, political and work experiences. She teaches the full chronology of U.S. history, and has recently become interested in the history of Worcester, particularly through the Worcester Women’s Oral History Project.
• Shaun Sayres is a second-year doctoral student interested in the geopolitical collision of worlds in the early modern period between Indigenous polities and European empires in the Americas. He studies American history, Atlantic colonialism, and Native American history. His current research includes examining how the colonial gunpowder trade facilitated cross-cultural conflict and accommodation in the eastern woodlands of seventeenth-century North America.
  Adviser: Professor Wim Klooster.
• Courtney Slavin is a second-year doctoral student interested in the history of the early republic and the origins of modern America with an emphasis on race, historical memory, and consumerism. She studies American history, Atlantic revolutions, and print culture. Her current research includes investigating how early American schoolbooks shaped the national memory of the American Revolution as well as the social influence of firearms in American urbanization.
  Adviser: Professor Drew McCoy