PROFILE DESCRIPTION: Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, I received my BA in History with a minor field in Political Science at West Virginia Wesleyan College (2018). I went on to earn my MA in History at West Virginia University (2020). Currently, I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in the history of German migration to the United States. I am interested in the involvement of German-speaking immigrants in the business and process of migration in the nineteenth century. My dissertation, titled “The Pathways of Migration: Agents, Migrants, and Routes from German Central Europe to the Western Great Lakes Region, 1840-1914,” focuses on the work of German-born emigrant agents from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and their relationship with other German migrants, private industry, and the state to produce and preserve migratory pathways further west. My dissertation also explores the business of migration and how it evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the face of political and economic developments across Europe and North America, as well as demographic changes within patterns of migration itself. My project exposes the people, places, and businesses with a substantial interest in maintaining flows of migration to their locales.
ADVISOR: Gregor Thum
FIELDS
- 19th Century U.S. History
- U.S. Immigration History
- Migration History
- Modern German History
- German-America
MA THESIS
“Galvanizing Germantown: The Politicization of Louisville’s German Community, 1848-1855.” This work focused on the efforts of radical forty-eighter immigrant Karl Heinzen and his political allies to reform Americans’ exclusionist interpretations of citizenship and belonging prior to the American Civil War. Spreading awareness of the hypocrisy of the presence of slavery within a Republic, as well as defending the local German immigrant community from rising nativist scorn and attack, Heinzen and other activists sought to influence, reform, and thus promote inclusion and empowerment for immigrants in their adopted homeland.
FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS
2023-2024
Social Science Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (SSDD)
2021-2022
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), German
Summer 2021
Klinzing Grant
2020-2021
Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS), German
CONFERENCES AND PRESENTATIONS
March 2021
Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Organization Grad Expo
Outstanding Presenter Prize
“Galvanizing Germantown: The Politicization of Louisville’s German Community, 1848-1855.” Pittsburgh, PA.
April 2019
Graduate Student History Conference
“The League of Nations and the Jewish Refugee Crisis: Shifting Historiography on the International World Order.” Morgantown, WV.
April 2019
Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
“The Lost Colony: Visiting Vandalia through the Gateway of Archives.” Morgantown, WV
March 2017
Gender Studies Conference
“The Good Earth: A Comparison of Farm Women in China and Appalachia in the Early Twentieth Century.” Buckhannon, WV.
September 2016
Pearl S. Buck Living Gateway Conference
“The Good Earth: A Comparison of Farm Women in China and Appalachia in the Early Twentieth Century.” Morgantown, WV.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Spring 2020
ULIB-101: Introduction to Library Research (Primary Instructor, WVU)
Spring 2019
HIST-221: History of Modern Germany (Teaching Assistant, WVU)
Fall and Spring 2018/2019
ULIB-204: Storytelling with Archives (Co-instructor, WVU)
GUEST LECTURES
February 2018
HIST-102: “Post-Second World War: The Marshall Plan and Efforts for Western European Recovery,” U.S. History, Reconstruction to the Present
October 2017
HIST-121: “The Economic and Social Effects of the Black Death,” History of Western Civilization to the Age of Absolutism
September 2017
HIST-121: “The Feudal System and its Functions,” History of Western Civilization to the Age of Absolutism
STUDENT SERVICE
2021-2022
Vice-President of the History Graduate Student Organization, University of Pittsburgh
2019-2020
Vice-President of the History Graduate Student Association, West Virginia University
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
German Studies Association Central European History Society