History Research
Share your research with a broader audience, apply to undergraduate journals and conferences, help hone your writing and presentation skills, meet other history students, and build your resume.
A Top Research University
The University of Mississippi is designated as a R-1 Highest Research Activity University by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. We are in an elite group of 2.5% of universities nationwide for world class research faculty, spending on research, and production of graduate students.
Faculty Examples:
- Dr. Susan Gaunt Sterns recently won the Center for Presidential History’s Book Prize for her book titled EEmpire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade. The CPH Book Prize is awarded annually for a distinguished first book published in English, in any aspect in the field of United States presidential history, broadly defined.
Dr. Peter Thilly, Assistant Professor of History, received the 2024 Dr. Mike L. Edmonds New Scholar Award in the Humanities from the College of Liberal Arts at UM for exemplary performance in research. A historian of modern China, Dr. Thilly’s recent book - The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022) - is a social history of business-state relations during the rise of global capitalism.
Dr. Vivian Ibrahim, Associate Professor of History and International Studies and Director of the UM Office of National Scholarship Advisement, received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for research on her current book project. She is studying Egypt’s cultural diplomacy through the global tours of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s mummy in the 1960s and 1970s.
- Dr. Oliver Dinius spent two months of the summer 2024 in Belém, Brazil, to conduct research under the second half of a Fulbright Scholar Award. Then in his eighth year as Director of the Croft Institute for International Studies, his Fulbright stays in 2023 and 2024 allowed him to continue research for his bookproject Unlocking the Amazon’s Riches: The Environmental Impact of Developmentalism on Brazil’s Northern Frontier.
Recently Published Books
An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South
Dr. Robert Colby
Oxford University Press
2024
Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K.D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom.
Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade
Dr. Susan Stearns
University of Virginia Press
2024
A groundbreaking study situating the Mississippi River valley at the heart of the early American republic’s political economy.
Working-Class Raj: Colonialism and the Making of Class in British India
Dr. Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson
Cambridge University Press
2023
Focusing on the military men, railway workers, and wives and children of the British working-class who went to India after the Rebellion of 1857, Working-Class Raj explores the experiences of these working-class men and women in their own words.
Prestigious Fellowships
Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship
Dr. Joshua Howard completed a year-long fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Studies housed at the School of Historical Studies, an independent research center located in Princeton, NJ, considered a premier interdisciplinary research center in the world. Howard's research was on the Chinese Communist press and its relationship to social change and labor during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and postwar labor movement.
European Fellowship
Dr. Frances Kneupper served as a senior fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Kneupper, a cultural historian of religion whose research focuses on heresy, prophecy and religious dissent in the Holy Roman Empire, is working on her book project, “Beware of False Prophets: The Contest over Prophecy in the Late Middle Ages.” She examines how Medieval women in Europe who declared themselves prophets – a phenomenon typically limited to the realm of men – were fiercely opposed by their male contemporaries.
Public History
Payne is engaged in a number of public history projects. She has worked on exhibitions of art and historical objects at museums and galleries, including the Harvard Art Museum and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. At UM, she is co-director of the Invisible Histories Project – Mississippi, a Mellon Foundation-funded project that documents and preserves Mississippi’s LGBTQ+ history through oral histories and archival collecting.
Dr. Eva Payne is a historian of the 19th- and 20th-century U.S. with a focus on women, gender, and sexuality and the U.S. in transnational perspective. She received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University. Her recent book project, Purity and Power: Americans and the International Crusade Against Sexual Vice, 1870–1937, shows how American reformers transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern.
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Undergraduate Journals
There are so many opportunities to share your research with a broader audience. Undergraduate students might consider sharing their work at undergraduate conferences and publishing them in journals.
Resources in History
Center for Civil War Research
The Center for Civil War Research is designed to promote a more thorough understanding of the American Civil War, its history and its scholarship, among the various constituencies of the University and the broader community. Our programing includes a biannual Conference on the Civil War, the Wiley-Silver Prize for Best First Book in Civil War History, the annual Burnham Lecture in Civil War History, and research funding for graduate students.
The Colloquium Series
The Colloquium series offers the department's graduate students and faculty a venue to present their ongoing research and receive feedback on their publication drafts in a friendly, supportive environment. Each meeting features a pre-circulated paper from one researcher, and most of the time is devoted to discussion. The Colloquium series enriches the department’s intellectual life, bringing together historians at different stages of their careers to learn about each other’s research outside the classroom and across fields of specialization.
Schedule for the Colloquium is typically determined at the beginning of each semester. Please contact the department’s administrative staff for more details.
Student Theses and Dissertations
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The French Divorcee and Her Evolution
This thesis serves to explore the greater questions concerning patterns of divorce in France and how women, through divorce, experienced greater liberties within the law.
Read Mackenzie Bialzik's Undergraduate Thesis, B.A. '24 -
The End of the Prisoner Exchange System in the Civil War: A Case Study into the Effects on the Daily Conditions of Prisoners in Confederate and Union Prisons
This paper is an exploration of the effects the shut down of this system had on both Confederate and Northern prisons.
Read Rachel Stoner's Undergraduate Thesis, B.A. '23 -
Voices from Below: The Politics of Leprosy Control in Southeastern Nigeria, 1926-1960
Utilizing archival materials, oral interviews, and other robust extant literature, it argues that Igbo people of Southeastern Nigeria were the focal point of leprosy control; they protested and collaborated in leprosy eradication.
Read Odinaka Eze's Master's Thesis, M.A. '23 -
"Dug Way to Liberty": Newspapers, Prison, and Jim Crow in Georgia in The Early 1900s
As this thesis investigates the lives, crimes, and recapture of all twelve prisoners, it connects the convict lease prison system with the newspaper media to understand the impact of white supremacy ideology and the repressive systems that constrained the lives of Black Americans at the height of Jim Crow segregation in the South.
Read Avery Gross's Master's Thesis, M.A. '23 -
Food Retailing in Mississippi, 1895-2000
This thesis is a history of the evolution of the grocery industry in Mississippi in the twentieth century.
Read James Gullley's Master's Thesis, M.A. '23 -
Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965
This project argues that the Civil War was the mechanism by which Indian Territory transformed into the white-dominated U.S. state of Oklahoma, both in population and identity.
Read Sarah Elliot's Dissertation, Ph.D. '24 -
"Partnership Housing:" Habitat for Humanity, Jimmy Carter, and the Politics of Self-Help
This dissertation analyzes the origins and development of the faith-based housing non-profit Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI).
Read Colton Babbitt's Dissertation, Ph.D. '24