Current Students & Recent Graduates

Current Students

Mariah Adin, "The Supreme Adventure: Brooklyn's Thrill-Kill Gang and Mid-Century Juvenile Justice" (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Anthony Anadio, “The Voyage of Refinement: The Many Talents of Thomas Cole” (Chair: Professor Warren Roberts)

Jessica Anderson, “Public Housing in Upstate New York” (Chair: Professor Carl Bon Tempo)

Tricia Barbagallo, “The Poor in Early National Albany” (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Joanne Barker, “The New York State Antebellum Constitutional Conventions and the Rule of Law:  The Interaction of Politics and Theory” (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Jennifer Thompson Burns, "Black Trojans: The Abolition Campaign of the Free Black Community in Troy, New York, 1830-1865" (Chair: Professor Amy Murrell Taylor)

Thomas Donaldson, “Truth, Justice, and the Status Quo: The Resurgence of Superhero Comics and the Redemption of Masculine Hegemony as the American Way of Gender, 1955-1990” (Chair: Professor Gerald Zahavi)

John Evers, "Investigating New York: Governor Alfred E. Smith, the Moreland Act, and Reshaping New York State Government" (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Patrick Gallagher, "Poisoned Hope: MIAs and Myths in the Aftermath of Defeat" (Chair: Professor Dan White)

Patricia Haase, "Security, Prestige, and Realpolitik: Sir Eyre Crowe and British Foreign Policy, 1907-1925" (Chair: Professor Dan White)

Mark Johnson, "Americans are Very Rare: Soldiers of the U.S. Regular Army in Peace and War, 1851-1865" (Chair: Professor Allen Ballard)

David Jones, “Facing the Epokolo: Corporal Punishment and Scandal in Twentieth Century Ovamboland” (Chair: Professor Iris Berger)

Maryann Kelly, "Gendered Patriots and Postrevolutionary Ladies: Girl Guiding and Twentieth Century Mexican Girlhood" (Chair: Professor Susan Gauss)

Darren Kimmet, "Over the World and Back: The Life and Times of Blair Niles" (Chair: Professor Ann Withington)

Kimberly LaMay, "The Creation of an American Collective Memory of the First World War: 1917-1941" (Chair: Professor Richard Fogarty)

Camelia Lenart, "The European Response to Martha Graham's Tours during the 1950s and 1960s" (Chair: Professor Dan White)

Annette Lippold, "Christian Marriage Counseling in Weimar and Nazi Germany" (Chair: Professor Dan White)

Alice Malavasic, “F-Street Mess and Slave Power” (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Theodore Marotta, "Defending God: Thomas Paine’s Last Crusade and the Contest Over His Memory” (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Thomas McGrath, "Nationalism in New England: Keene, New Hampshire and the American Civil War" (Chair: Professor Amy Murrell Taylor)

Sean McGraw, "Striving for Salvation: Margaret Anna Cusack, Sainthood, Religious Foundations and Revolution in Ireland, 1830-1922” (Chair: Nadieszda Kizenko)

Erica Nuckles, "Remarks on a March: Charlotte Browne and the Culture of Sensibility at War" (Chair: G.J. Barker-Benfield)

John Palella, "For the Love of Strength and Beauty: American Bodybuilding, Physical Culture, and Gender Construction, 1865-1983" (Chair: Professor Amy Murrell Taylor)

Michael Panzer, "A Nation in Name, a 'State' in Exile: The FRELIMO Proto-State, Youth, Gender, and the Development of Mozambique, 1962-1975" (Chair: Professor Iris Berger)

Elizabeth Redkey, "For the Improvement of the Breed of Horse: Thoroughbred Racing and National Security in the Age of Horsepower” (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Michael Ruegger, “Rte. 7: Community and Environment” (Chair: Professor Richard Hamm)

Daniel Spanjer, “Lyman Beecher: The Edwardsean Worldview as a Nineteenth Century American Intellectual Tradition” (Chair: Professor Ann Withington)

Ryan Staude, “‘The Center of the Union’: George Washington's Political Philosophy and the Creation of American National Identity in the 1790s” (Chair: Professor Sung Bok Kim)

Matthew Vivyan, “What is your Substance, Whereof are you Made?: Toward the Construction of the Ideal Shakespeare" (Chair: Professor Warren Roberts)

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Recent Graduates

2008 through 2011 PhD Awardees & Dissertation Titles

David Bassano, "Purity and Partisanship: The Central America Peace Movement in the United States in the 1980s" (2011)

Anna Biel, "Sacrifice in the Name of Sacred Duty: The Representation of the Decembrist Wives in Russian Culture, 1825-Present" (2011)

Mary Borden, "Selling New York State to the Nation: The 1939/40 New York World's Fair”  (2011)

Mara Drogan, "Atoms for Peace, U.S. Foreign Policy, and the Globalization of Nuclear Technology, 1953-1960" (2011)    Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

Michelle DuRoss, “The Divorce of Isaac and Elizabeth Gouverneur: Sensibility and Law in the Revolutionary Era” (2011)

Britt Haas, "As They Saw the Thirties:  Activist Youth's Vision of and for America" (2011)

Ronald Helfrich, "Idols of the Tribes: Apologists, Polemicists, Intellectuals, Academics, and Early Mormonism" (2011)

Carla Lesh, "What a Woman Can Do with an Auto: American Women Automobilists in the Northeast, 1895-1919" (2011)

Michael McCarthy, “The Battle of Five Forks in Civil War Historiography: The Quest for Honor” (2011)

Jonathan Nash, "An Incarcerated Republic: Prisoners, Reformers, and the Penitentiary in the Early United States, 1790-1860" (2011)

Joy Newman-Getnick, “Drinking Age Debates” (2011)

Nan Mullenneaux, "Walking Ladies: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Actresses' Work, Family, and Culture" (2008)   Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

Young-In Oh, "As if it was a Land of Language Diversity: Struggles over Immigrants' Language in the United States, 1917-1966" (2008)

Chad Pearson, "Organize and Fight: Communities, Employers, and Open-Shop Movements, 1890-1920" (2008)

Carol Taylor, "The Troubled Entente: Alexander Izvolsky and Russia's Diplomatic Relations with France and Great Britain, 1906-1910" (2008)

2004-2007 PhD Awardees & Dissertation Titles

Susan Goodier, "The Other Women's Movement: Anti-Suffrage Activism in New York State, 1865-1932" (2007)

Evan Lampe, "Merchants, Traders, and Sailors in the Early American Pacific, 1763-1850" (2007)

Lauren Kozakiewicz, "Political Episodes, 1890-1960: Three Republican Women in Twentieth Century New York State Politics" (2006)  Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

Guo Wu, "Media, Nationhood, and State: Zheng Guanying and the Urban Cultural Sphere in Late Qing China" (2006 )

Joanne E. Hurlbut, "Shaker Children: Their Lives, Literatures, and Literacies" (2005)

William F. Kayatin, Jr., "Higher Education Unions and Social Responsibility: United University Professions' Response to Social and Political Change in New York State, 1973-1993" (2004)

Jennifer A. Lemak, "Southern Life, Northern City: The History of Albany's Rapp Road Community" (2004)

Mollie T. Marchione, "'I Know Other Reason than a Woman's': The Pioneering Research of Susan M. Kingsbury, Ph.D., in Creating Social Change, 1906-1942" (2004)

Keith Pomakoy, "Helping Humanity in the Real World: America and the Urge to Rescue, 1895-1945" (2004)

William R. Rainbolt, "Images of Journalism in American Films, 1946-1976" (2004)
Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

2003 PhD Awardees & Dissertation Titles

Randal Angiel, "Geography, Radioactive Contamination, and Public Health: The Albany-Troy Rainout after 50 Years" (2003)

Denis P. Brennan, "The Printer's Stand: William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator" (2003)
Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

Robert G. Drake, "Manipulating the News: The U.S. Press and the Holocaust, 1933-1945" (2003)

Kenneth A. Kresse, "Containing Nationalism and Communism on the 'Dark Continent': Eisenhower's Policy toward Africa, 1953-1961" (2003)

Mary Teresa Linnane, "From Wexford to Wartime Washington: Robert Brennan's Advocacy of Irish Nationalism and Neutrality in the United States, 1938-47" (2003)

Salvador Rivera, "Diplomats, Idealists, and Technocrats: The Long Quest for Latin American Integration" (2003 )

Sonja St. Amant, "Faith by Demonstration: The Connection Between the History of Paranormal Phenomena and a New Age Spirituality" (2003)

John Howard Smith, "'They Suffer Only for Righteousness Sake': The Glasite-Sandemanian Movement in the British-American Atlantic World, 1720-1790" (2003)

Neil A. Tevebaugh-Kenwryck, "Raoul Wallenberg, the American War Refugee Board and the Last Minute Effort to Save Hungary's Jews" (2003)

Laura Wittern Keller, "'Freedom of the Screen': The Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915-1981" (2003)  Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

2001 and 2002 PhD Awardees & Dissertation Titles

Stewart W. Brewer, "Spanish Imperialism and the Ch'orti' Maya, (1524-1700); Institutional Effects of the Spanish Colonial System on Spanish and Indian Communities in the Corregimiento of Chiquimula de la Sierra, Guatemala" (2002)

Robin Dell Campbell, "Mistresses of the Transient Hearth: American Army Officers' Wives and Material Culture, 1840-1880" (2002)

Rosamond L. Hooper-Hamersley, "The Patronage of Mme de Pompadour at the Court of Versailles, 1745-1764: Art, Politics, and Enlightenment" (2002)   Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

Margaret Lynch-Brennan, "Ubiquitous Biddy: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930" (2002)

Kenneth G. Botsford, "Restoring the Dialectic: Lucien Herr, Charles Andler, and the French Hegel, 1888-1934" (2001)

Paul Frazier, "Prohibition Philadelphia: Bootleg Liquor and the Failure of Enforcement" (2001)

Tod M. Ottman, "'Government that has a heart and a head': The Growth of New York State Government During the World War II Era, 1930-1950" (2001)   Winner, College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Dissertation Prize

1998-2000 PhD Awardees & Dissertation Titles

Andrew W. Arpey, "The Van Nest Killings and the Trial of William Freeman: Insanity, Politics, and Race in Antebellum New York" (2000)

Kevin F. Decker, "Grand and Godly Proportions: Roman Catholic Cathedral Churches of the Northeast, 1840-1900" (2000)

Christopher J. Cyphers, "In Defense of Liberalism: The National Civic Federation and the Ideological Origins of Business-Initiated Public Policy Reform, 1900-1915" (1998)

Stuart J. Smyth, "The Evangelical Component of Imperialism" (1998)