[{"id":416,"date":"2026-08-24T11:31:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T11:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/?p=416"},"modified":"2026-08-24T11:34:48","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T11:34:48","slug":"digital-history-ph-d-students-secure-positions-before-graduation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/2026\/08\/24\/digital-history-ph-d-students-secure-positions-before-graduation\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital History Ph.D. Students Secure Positions Before Graduation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Department of History and Geography is proud to announce that two students in Clemson’s Digital History Ph.D. program have accepted positions this year, both before completing their degrees.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Lucas Avelar <\/a>has been appointed Lecturer at Ball State University, where he will teach digital history. He will continue work on his dissertation while teaching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Luc arrives at Ball State with considerable experience in collaborative digital scholarship. While at Clemson he attended the NEH-funded Archives as Data Institute<\/a> at Columbia University, and he served as one of the 2024 Andrew W. Mellon Data Fellows for Freedom on the Move<\/a>. Based at Cornell University, Freedom on the Move is a public history and digital humanities project that recovers and shares the stories of enslaved people in North America who resisted bondage by escaping. It centers on the thousands of advertisements enslavers placed in newspapers from the colonial era through the Civil War, records that are often the only surviving trace of an individual’s life, and through crowdsourced transcription it turns those fragments into a free database available to descendants, educators, researchers, and the public. The fellowship, which fulfilled the program’s internship requirement, gave Luc a summer of sustained work with historical records at scale and with the interpretive and ethical questions such work raises. He carries that experience into the classroom with him.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Megha Khanna<\/a> has joined See What I Mean<\/a> as an Associate. The firm consults with nonprofits, foundations, and networks on strategic planning, applied research, and organizational change, and Megha brings to it both her research training and her experience working with immigrant and diaspora communities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

An instructor at Clemson and a Ph.D. candidate writing on gender, public health, and colonial India, Megha will continue work on her dissertation while at the firm. She completed her internship with the South Asian American Policy & Research Institute, where she served as the Democracy and Civic Engagement Intern, and has also worked with the Ministry of External Affairs in India. That applied policy experience, together with the computational methods she developed in the program, among them data visualization and GIS, prepares her well for the research and assessment work the firm carries out for its clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Placements of this kind, secured before graduation, speak to the hard work of these students and of the training they have pursued here. Clemson’s Digital History Ph.D. pairs traditional historical methods with digital and computational ones and asks every student to complete an internship, an approach meant to prepare graduates for careers within the academy and beyond it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The department congratulates Luc and Megha and looks forward to following their work. We are so proud of you both!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Department of History and Geography is proud to announce that two students in Clemson’s Digital History Ph.D. program have accepted positions this year, both before completing their degrees. Lucas Avelar has been appointed Lecturer at Ball State University, where he will teach digital history. He will continue work on his dissertation while teaching. Luc […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91596,541,890],"tags":[],"coauthors":[91598],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-history","category-history","category-student-news"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4021"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions\/422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":399,"date":"2026-08-19T11:35:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/?p=399"},"modified":"2026-08-19T11:35:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T11:35:40","slug":"recent-books-from-history-department-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/2026\/08\/19\/recent-books-from-history-department-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Books from History Department Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As we begin a new academic year, the Department of History and Geography is proud to celebrate three books published by our faculty over the past year, including work by two colleagues recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stephanie Hassell<\/a>, recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor, is the author of Slavery and Religious Conversion in Portugal’s Indian Empire, 1500-1700<\/em> <\/a>(Ohio University Press). The book examines how enslaved Africans and Asians were part of the larger Portuguese project of building and maintaining a Catholic empire in the Indian Ocean. Responsible for the conversion of their enslaved dependents to Catholicism, slaveholders became religious stewards whose spiritual duties helped expand the Christian population. That converted population was treated as part of the imperial security apparatus, imagined as loyal allies against neighboring Muslim states, even as Catholicism conveyed rights, enabled agency, and provoked struggles within households. Hassell shows that the making of a Catholic empire was a contested process bound up in the complex relationships between enslaved individuals, their enslavers, and the Church.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Rod Andrew Jr.<\/a>, Professor of History and Alumni Master Teacher and a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, is the author of The Marines’ Fight for Survival: War, Politics, and Institutional Crisis, 1945-1952<\/a><\/em> (University Press of Kansas). Just after World War II, leaders in the other services and the Truman Administration launched a determined effort to abolish the Marine Corps or to cut its role back so severely that it would become irrelevant. Through politicking, intrigue, leaked classified documents, deceit, and extreme moral courage, key Marine officers and their supporters barely staved off the crippling of the Corps through 1950. Andrew argues that only the outstanding performance of the Marines in the first year of the Korean War saved the Corps and anchored the place it holds today in the national defense structure. The book has been named co-recipient of the General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rebecca Shimoni Stoil,<\/a> newly tenured as Associate Professor, is the author of Tied to Their Country: The Farm Crisis, Agrarian Activism, and the Rise of Rural Anti-Federalism<\/a><\/em> (University of Nebraska Press). In the book she examines the Farm Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s and its lasting political consequences. As banks collapsed, Main Street storefronts closed, and small towns emptied, what began as an agricultural crisis enveloped all of rural America. Stoil argues that the collapse of rural society during those years helps explain why anti-federal sentiment runs so deep across rural America today, even as many farmers are now beneficiaries of federal programs. Tracing both the immediate upheaval and its long aftermath, she shows how disparate groups coalesced around an ideology of rural anti-federalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please join us in congratulating Professors Hassell, Andrew, and Stoil on these remarkable achievements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we begin a new academic year, the Department of History and Geography is proud to celebrate three books published by our faculty over the past year, including work by two colleagues recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. Stephanie Hassell, recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor, is the author of Slavery and Religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91599,541],"tags":[],"coauthors":[91598],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty-news","category-history"],"fimg_url":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4021"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":395,"date":"2026-07-06T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/?p=395"},"modified":"2026-08-20T13:15:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T13:15:39","slug":"zoom-information-sessions-for-fall-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.clemson.edu\/historyblog\/2026\/07\/06\/zoom-information-sessions-for-fall-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Zoom Information Sessions for Fall 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thinking about applying to Clemson\u2019s groundbreaking Digital History Ph.D. program? Join us for one of our upcoming virtual information sessions!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We will be hosting several informational Zoom sessions in Fall 2026 for prospective applicants to the Digital History Ph.D. program. These sessions will cover program requirements, application tips, and frequently asked questions\u2014and will include time for open Q&A with the program director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upcoming Sessions:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n