Khalid is a Lehigh Ph.D. student from California focusing his research on Atlantic history and nineteenth-century America. He received a BA in History from the University of Maryland, and a Master’s degree from Lehigh University. His Master’s thesis focused on the political and economic ideologies of the antebellum South.
Graduate Students
2020
Austin is a PhD. candidate that specializes in early American history, the Atlantic World, and the history of Native America through the early nineteenth century. His dissertation, Boundaries and Power: Western Cherokees, Territoriality, and the Politics of Land and Movement in the Trans-Mississippian West, 1763-1840, analyzes the substantial evolution of complex claims to land in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century trans-Mississippian west through the eyes of Cherokee migrants, or Western Cherokees. This study of Cherokee migration and resettlement reveals how race, property, and sovereignty gradually merged in the nineteenth-century west. Even before the legal invention of the term “domestic dependent nation,” the ambiguous nature of Cherokee sovereignty in the west impacted how Euroamerican polities thought about the fluid relationship between territory, jurisdiction, and authority across ill-defined political boundaries. Western Cherokees influenced the construction and destruction of geopolitical borders through conflict, negotiation and collaboration with Anglo-Americans, indigenous peoples and European-descended polities. The relocation of the Western Cherokees to “Indian Territory” in present-day Oklahoma demonstrates how shared geopolitical spaces slowly began giving way to ideas and practices of establishing exclusive political control over space, which encouraged the hardening of racial lines, property lines, and lines of sovereignty in the nineteenth-century trans-Mississippian west.
Since my M.A. Thesis titled “The King, a Queen, and an Oath Sealed by Blood: A Cultural Re-Evaluation of the Bois-Caiman Ceremony and Its Impact on the Early Haitian Revolution,” I have focused my attention on exploring how the cultural and spiritual practices of enslaved men and women in Saint-Domingue impacted the formation of moments of social action and collective violence in the late eighteenth century. Conceptually, I am currently looking at how inter-disciplinary methods (historical, anthropological, literary) can help historians come to new understandings of the past. My work broadly focuses on the Greater Caribbean area and, in particular, those areas that were under French colonial control.
Grants and awards from Dale S. Strohl, the Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Office of International Affairs have graciously funded much of my research. I currently hold a teaching assistant position in the history department and I am the department's graduate Dean's Council representative.
Colonial Black Atlantic and Slavery, Modern Caribbean, Anthropology and History
B.A. Anthropology, Muhlenberg College (2005)
M.A. History, Lehigh University (2016)
2021
My name is Nicholas Stark, and I am in the History Ph.D. program, currently attending on a full-time scholarship from the university. My research is primarily in Modern Europe, with an emphasis on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era. Born and raised in Philadelphia, I earned my B.A. in History and French from West Chester University. I earned my M.A. in History from Florida State University, where I was part of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, writing my thesis on Franco-Irish revolutionary movements. I am a fellow of the Masséna Society and the International Napoleonic Society, an honorary member of the Napoleonic Society of Ireland, and a member of Nu-Sigma chapter of the Phi Alpha Theta Honors Society. I am also presently teaching as an adjunct at Union County College.
2019
Atlantic History, Colonial American History, Native American History
B.A, History, Messiah College (2006), M.A. History, Lehigh University (2014)
As an historian, I have focused my research on the multi-cultural political environment in the 18th-century trans-Appalachian West. Specifically, I am interested in uncovering the political voices of 18th-century Native Americans as they negotiated their places within expanding North American empires. I received the Lehigh College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Master's Thesis Award in 2015. I currently teach Native American Cultures at Messiah College.
2021
A Ph.D. candidate since 2014, Christine specializes in early American religion with interests in cultural, intellectual, and public history. Her dissertation, “’Physicians of the Soul,’ ‘Physicians of the Body,’: Religious and Medical Discourse of Health and the Body in Puritan New England, 1660 to 1730,” examines the reciprocal and communal nature of ministers' and physicians' printed exchange of ideas and the crucial role this transference played in notions of gender, religious orthodoxy, and cultural status, and the subsequent emergence of two specialized vocations. Christine recently presented a paper at the 2018 South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS) Annual Meeting, entitled “’Wicked Imaginations’: Distempered Minds and the Power of Imagination.” She has also presented her work at the 2016 Ways of Knowing 5th Annual Conference on Religion at the Harvard Divinity School and for the History Department Colloquium. In 2017, she worked with Dr. Monica Najar on a digital mapping project, which highlighted the growth of evangelical Baptist churches in the Upper South from 1755 to 1815. Christine’s other accomplishments include a research internship at the Pennsylvania Recreation & Parks Society, a curatorial internship at Martha Vineyard’s Museum, a scholarship to attend Winterthur Institute’s two-week decorative arts course, and a practicum for the creation of an interpretative sign for a public greenway. Christine is also the recipient of several fellowships and grants from the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Kritzer Family Foundation, Lehigh’s History Department, and Lehigh’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Zachary is a Ph.D. candidate from Tennessee with a focus on twentieth century U.S. cultural, intellectual, and gender history. He received a B.A. in History from Lee University in 2014 and an M.A. in History from Indiana State University in 2016. His research interests include the intersection of gender and consumerism, magazine culture, and the popularization of jogging in the late twentieth century. He is working on a dissertation tentatively titled “Jogging for Profit and Pleasure: Running and American Consumer Culture, 1968-1992”. He is currently a teaching fellow in the First Year Writing Program.
I am from Philadelphia, PA and am working on a Ph.D. specializing in urban, African American, late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and gender history. I received my B.A. from Villanova University in 2008 and my M.A. from that institution in 2011. Before coming to Lehigh University, I taught at Strayer University and Delaware County Community College. I held a teaching assistantship during the 2016 spring and fall semesters.
Kristin E. Tremper is a Ph.D. Candidate in History with interests in the cultural and social history of early America, particularly political culture, gender, and slavery in the colonial and revolutionary periods. She received her B.A. with Honors in History from George Mason University in 2008 and her M.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010. Her dissertation, “Beyond the Grave: The Politicization of Death in Eighteenth-Century America,” examines how news of death and memorialization shaped social relations, political ventures, and power. She has received generous research support from Colonial Williamsburg’s Rockefeller Library, the Virginia Historical Society, and Lehigh University’s History Department, Humanities Center, and College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Hoben Teaching Fellowship from the History Department for Spring 2016.
Samuel Alonzo Dodge is a PhD Candidate and former Dean’s Fellow at Lehigh University. He received his MA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he received the History Department’s Caldwell Prize, and his BA from Brigham Young University. He has expertise in the fields of American Colonial, Latin America, British Empire, and American Religious history. His current dissertation, “Disturbing the Good Order: The Negotiation of Religious Liberty in the Early American Republic” explores how public political discourse shaped competing notions of religious liberty from the Revolution up through the War of 1812. He has published work in the Journal of Mormon History, Methodist History, and interned for The Joseph Smith Papers. He is the coeditor, with Dr. Steven C. Harper, of the historical anthology Exploring the First Vision. He has developed and taught courses at Salt Lake Community College and the College of Staten Island. Samuel currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Cecily, and their children Hyrum and Clara.