Author: aeregan

Digital History Ph.D. Students Amber Edwards and Hallie Knipp have both won Summer Research Fellowships from Clemson University’s Humanities Hub!

Amber Edwards, a first year Digital History Ph.D. student, received funding to conduct archival research at Bowling Green State University’s Browne Library for Pop Culture Studies and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive. Edwards is a 20th Century U.S. historian of women, gender and sexuality – specifically interested in the music culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s in the context of radical feminism and mass American culture. These archives house a variety of zines – non-professional magazines often associated with fan culture of rock music and its offshoots – including some focused on the counterculture and feminism of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Edwards is seeking to analyze how the gender consciousness of hippie women is portrayed within zines alongside the music and culture to explore where content covering hippie culture might intersect with publications expressing radical feminist ideology.

Hallie Knipp, a third year Digital History Ph.D. student, received funding to support research for her dissertation project, Mountain Labors: Contraceptives and Eugenics in Kentucky, 1915-1945. This research explores how birth control programs in early 20th-century Appalachia were shaped by intersecting forces of social reform, public health, and eugenics. Organizations like the Kentucky Birth Control League (KBCL) expanded reproductive healthcare access, but often with troubling motivations—especially through partnerships with eugenicists who sought to control who could and couldn’t access contraception. While some efforts empowered rural women, others targeted vulnerable populations, reinforcing racial and class-based hierarchies. With the support of this grant, Knipp will conduct archival research at the University of Kentucky and the Kentucky Historical Society, examining key collections such as the Alice Lloyd Caney Creek Community Center papers and the Family Planning in Kentucky collection. By mapping the geographic spread of these programs, this study will reveal the lived experiences of women affected by these initiatives—whether as reformers, patients, or those resisting imposed policies. This work sheds light on the complex history of reproductive healthcare in Appalachia and its lasting impact.

First year Ph.D. student Candace Boatwright has won the Lewis P. Jones Research Fellowship in South Carolina History from the Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. The award will fund Boatwright’s research into the social and political history of Unionism in upstate South Carolina. The Lewis P. Jones Fellowship provides researchers who are researching South Carolina History with the opportunity to conduct research at the South Caroliniana Library.

The Department of History and Geography is pleased to welcome three new faculty to our department this year!

Dr. Camden Burd

Dr. Burd comes to Clemson from Eastern Illinois University. He is a historian specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century US history, with a particular focus on the intertwined histories of American capitalism and environmental change. His forthcoming book, The Roots of Flower City: Horticulture, Empire, and the Remaking of Rochester, New York, is set to be published by Cornell University Press in Fall 2024. The book examines how a network of plant nurserymen in Western New York connected their businesses to the broader American imperial project of the nineteenth century, using their social prestige and capital to reshape Rochester according to their vision.

Dr. Burd is also engaged in various digital methodologies, including TEI and Digital Mapping, to explore source material in innovative ways and disseminate information to wider audiences. Before joining Clemson University, he served as an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden. His research has been supported by numerous organizations and institutions, including the Newberry Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Dr. Burd will teach classes on digital, U.S., and environmental history.

Dr. Austin Steelman

Professor Steelman is a historian of twentieth-century America with specializations in the legal and political history of American conservatism and evangelicalism. His current book project, Paper Gods: The Bible, the Constitution, and the Evangelical Revolt Against Modernity, 1923-1986, examines the connections between the theological doctrine of biblical inerrancy and the legal theory of constitutional originalism. Relying on archives from across the United States, he looks at the intellectual importance of these two text-based ideologies to the formation, spread, and influence of the evangelical right beginning in the 20th century and continuing to today. Prior to graduating from Stanford, Professor Steelman attended Harvard Law School and worked for two years as an intellectual property litigator.

Dr. Steelman will teach courses on American legal history and US history. He contributes to the department’s growing Legal History Emphasis Area.

Dr. Li-Chih Hsu

Dr. Hsu’s research focuses on Biogeography and Biogeomorphology, utilizing Geospatial analysis to investigate coastal landscape dynamics in the context of climate change. He specializes in barrier dune topographies and mangrove dynamics, offering insights into coastal resilience and protection.

Dr. Hsu received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. At Clemson he will teach courses on Physical Geography, World Regional Geography, and GIS.

History department faculty member, Josh Catalano, was honored for his outstanding research at the conclusion of the 2023-24 academic year. At the College of Arts and Humanities Award ceremony on May 8, 2024, Dr. Catalano won the Dean’s Excellence in Research Award. The award recognizes national and/or international accomplishments, distinctions, and awards within the nominee’s discipline in the context of the past three years.

Dr. Catalano was also nominated for Junior Researcher of the Year and attended an awards ceremony with university leadership. The Researcher of the Year awards recognize the efforts of high-achieving faculty whose work is improving society through the generation and dissemination of new knowledge. Each college nominated a senior faculty member and a junior faculty member who received their terminal degree within the past 10 years.

Dr. Catalano joined the history department in 2018 and is a historian of early American history with emphases on digital and public history. He has published an impressive amount during his first five years at Clemson, secured numerous external ($302,228) and internal ($163,325) grants, and is a leader within the field of digital history. Congratulations Dr. Catalano!

Second year Ph.D. student Lucas Avelar has been selected as a Mellon Data Fellow for the Freedom on the Move project. As a Fellow, Avelar will spend eight weeks this summer in residence at Cornell University and the experience will count as his internship for the Ph.D. program.

The Freedom on the Move project compiles stories of resistance from fugitive slave ads in newspapers. Through their online database and extensive metadata, the project’s represents “a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.”

As a data fellow, Avelar will work with digital humanists and scholars of slavery, resistance, marronage, and emancipation to help deepen Freedom on the Move dataset. He will also work with a faculty mentor to develop a research paper related to the project.

Second year Ph.D. student Hallie Knipp has been accepted to attend Columbia University’s Archives as Data Workshop this June in New York City. An exclusive NEH funded institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Knipp will spend two weeks learning to organize and analyze large document collections for textual analysis and will participate in several seminars with scholars in the field. The institute is jointly hosted by Columbia’s History Lab and Columbia’s Library.

The “NEH-funded program will offer practical training for historians and archivists in processing and analyzing textual data… Participants in the Text-as-Data workshop, designed for historians, will learn how to organize and analyze large document collections and use new methods to formulate original arguments. All participants will come together in seminar-style discussions on the novel challenges posed by doing archival research in the age of “big data,” including issues related to community representation, protecting private information in online archives, and the professional and scholarly pitfalls in navigating this new terrain.”

As the summer approaches, many of the Digital History Ph.D. students are off to do exciting research thanks to Clemson University’s Humanities Hub! Below is a roundup of some of the exciting research students will be pursuing thanks to the Hub.

Addison Horton

Addison Horton’s project is entitled “‘Antebellum Affairs’ in the United States South.” During the summer she will travel to visit the State Archives in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia to collect data, which she will then organize into dataset which she can analyze using digital methods. This is part of a larger project that will contribute to her dissertation.

Megha Khanna

Megha Khanna’s received funding to travel to India over the summer to conduct research for her project, “Shadows of the Raj” which investigates how British colonialism transformed the societal roles of courtesans in 1857 India.  These women, once respected for their artistic and cultural contributions, faced marginalization as British rule took hold.

Hallie Knipp

Hallie Knipp will travel to Berea, Kentucky to conduct research for her project entitled “Mountain Labors: Contraceptives and Eugenics in 1930s Appalachia.” The Humanities hub grant will fund research at Berea College where she will delve into the history of the Mountain Maternal Health League and then will fund the work to process this research into a workable digital database.

Lucas Avelar, a second year Ph.D. student in Digital History, will present his digital history project entitled “An Imagined Geography of Empire: Mining cultural representations of the American colonial state during the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair” at the 2024 Digital Humanities Conference in Washington, DC. Avelar’s project uses named entity recognition and word vector analysis to assess how local newspapers produced their own discursive representations of the U.S. and the world in response to the ideologies of American colonialism and exceptionalism embedded on the grounds of the St Louis 1904 World’s Fair.

Avelar’s digital history project was first completed in the Ph.D. program’s Digital History Seminar – a research seminar that allows graduate students the opportunity to develop significant digital history projects based on primary source research.

The Digital Humanities conference, hosted by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, is one of the largest DH conferences in the field. Held once a year in the summer, this year’s host in George Mason University in Washington, D.C. It will be the the first time the conference has been held in the United States since 2013.