Current & Recent Dissertations

Dissertations in Progress

S.M. Tanveer Ahmed

PhD Student
smtanveer.ahmed@wsu.edu

Western Missionaries and Local Religions: Socio-Religious Transformation in Colonial Bengal, 1853–1947

Jordan Bergstrom

PhD Candidate, ABD
jordan.bergstrom@wsu.edu

Red, White, and Brown: American Nazis, America First, and the Fight to Join World War II, 1939-1941

Kyley Canion-Brewer

PhD Candidate, ABD
kyley.canionbrewer@wsu.edu

Cold War on Ice: Nuclear Experimentation, Environmental Law, and the Construction of Race in Post-War Alaska (1945-2000)

Cassandra Crisman

PhD Candidate, ABD
cassandra.crisman@wsu.edu

A Woman’s Work is Never Done: Gender in the American West Coast Wave of Communes, 1855-1920

Berit Davis

PhD Student
berit.davis@wsu.edu

Go West, Young Tourist: Tourism and White Settlement in 19th century British Columbia

Samantha Edgerton

PhD Candidate, ABD
samantha.edgerton@wsu.edu

Every City Has a Story to Tell: Chicana Activism, Intimate Partner Violence, and the City of Los Angeles

Sam Fleischer

PhD Candidate, ABD
sam.fleischer@wsu.edu

Twentieth-Century Women’s Olympic Basketball: Gender and Political Crossroads

Drew Gamboa

PhD Student
drew.gamboa@wsu.edu

Education on the Periphery: Learning Environments for Mexican descendent Students in the Pacific Northwest, 1940s to 1980s

Robert Franklin

PhD Student
robert.franklin@wsu.edu

To HEAL the Hanford Family: Radiation Exposure, Grassroots Activism, and the Transition from Plutonium Production to Enviornmental Cleanup

Ryan Hollister

PhD Student
ryan.hollister@wsu.edu

Hypersexual: The State and Queer Communities in the 20th century

Sreya Mukherjee

PhD Candidate, ABD
sreya.mukherjee@wsu.edu

Discourses of Drunkenness: Decoding the Dynamics of Liquor and Narratives in Colonial Bengal, 1860s- 1920s

Saheed (Niyi) Ogunkoya

PhD Candidate, ABD
saheed.ogunkoya@wsu.edu

Cold War, Immigration Laws, and the Paper Curtains: Politics of US Immigration Laws in the New World Order, 1945-1975

Mina Park

PhD Candidate, ABD
mina.park1@wsu.edu

Feeding a Nation: U.S. Food Aid and Korean Dietary Culture (1945–1953)

Blair Rogers

PhD Student
blair.a.rogers@wsu.edu

Sounds of Detainment: Cubans, Arkansans and the Music of Fort Chaffee During the Mariel Boatlift (1980-1983)

Md (Doha) Shamsuddoha

PhD Student
md.shamsuddoha@wsu.edu

Historical Legacies and Post-colonial Nationalism: The Genesis of Rohingya Crisis in a South Asian Context (1785-2017)

Recent Alumni Dissertations

  • Atkins, Gregory: “America’s Theopolis: Boosters, Businesses, and Christian Nonprofits in Colorado Springs, 1871-2000.” (2018)
  • Binczewski, Jennifer: “Solitary Sparrows: Widowhood and the Catholic Community in Post-Reformation England, 1580-1630.” (2017)
  • Bolingbroke, David: “Atomic Restoration: An Environmental History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.” (2021)
  • Bond, Trevor: “Why Should We Have to Buy Our Own Things Back? The Struggle Over the Spalding-Allen Collection.” (2017)
  • Booth, Ryan: “Crossed Arrows: The US Indian Scouts, 1866-1947.” (2021)
  • Chowdhury, Amitava: “Horizons of Memory: A Global Processual Study of Cultural Memory and Identity of the South Asian Indentured Labor Diaspora in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean.” (2008)
  • Fogt, Daniel: “Regulating Marriage and Socioreligious Boundaries: The Reformation and Acts of Noncomformity in Netherlandish Migrant Communities, 1570-1600”. (2023)
  • Grav, Hans-Petter: “Vesterheim in Red, White, and Blue: The Hyphenated Norweigan-American and Regional Identity in the Pacific Northwest.” (2017)
  • Hardyway, Fred: “Songhai’s Fall: The Role of Scholars and Blacksmiths in the Adoption, Adaptation, and Rejection of Gun Technology in West Africa, 1464-1612.” (2020)
  • Herzog, Shawna R.: “Convenient Compromises: A History of Slavery and Abolition in the British East Indies, 1795-1841.” (2013)
  • Jesch, Aaron: “The Industrial Workers of the World and the Performance of Protest”. (2023)
  • Kipers, Kevin: “Switchmen in the American West: Worker Unrest and Radicalism along the Early Twentieth-Century Transcontinental Railroads, 1893-1910”. (2022)
  • Kotin, Daniel: “Soundscapes of the Black Atlantic: Music, Memory, Recreation, and Nationalism in Trinidad Calypso, Ghanaian Highlife, and the African Diaspora.” (2020)
  • Krotke-Crandall, Karl: “The Holocaust in Russian Life: New Perspectives on Soviet-Jewish Memory”. (2021)
  • Lee, Hsin-Hsuan (Pamela): “Cordon Sanitaire: Empire and Disease Prevention in British and American Overseas Colonies in East and Southeast Asia, 1870-1910” (2025)
  • Link, Amanda Rae: “Spectors of Empire: Remembrance of the Great War in the Irish Free State, 1914-1937.” (2015)
  • Martin, Nicholas: “From Crying Blood to Capitalism: The Transition of Tribal Leadership in the Revolutionary Era.” (2020)
  • Maxwell, Mary Jane: “Journeys of Faith and Fortune: Christian Travelers in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth-Century dar al-Islam.” (2004)
  • McCormack, Carey: “Collection and Discovery: Botanical Collection in South and Southeast Asia, 1754-1885.” (2018)
  • Moreno, Mark: “World at War: Mexican Identities, Insurgents, and the French Occupation, 1862-1867.” (2011)
  • Perry, Katherine: “Mau Mau in the Metropole: The British Conservation Party and Kenya’s State of Emergency, 1952-1960.” (2018)
  • Powell, Randal: “The Day Soon Cometh”: Mormons, the Apocalypse, and the Shaping of a Nation.” (2020)
  • Reimann, Melanie: “They Would ‘Grant Canada at a Usual and Accustomed Gathering Place’: Cultural Survival and Preservation Across the US-Canada Border by the Sinixt Nation and the Confederated tribes of the Colville Reservation.” (2020)
  • Rhett, Maryanne: “’Quasi-barbarians’ and ‘Wandering Jews’: The Balfour Declaration in Light of World Events.” (2008)
  • Rond, Terisa Jeanine: “Altogether Useless’: Women, Crime and the Creation of Unfree Labor for the British Atlantic Colonies, 1660-1783.” (2014)
  • Selmanovic, Amir: “Self Managed Tuzla: The Development of a Working Class City.” (2015)
  • Schroeder, James: “An American Foreign Legion: The Recruitment of European Refugees for United States Military and Psychological Warfare Programs during the Early Cold War” (2025)
  • Shin, Dong Jo: “Sinicization with Socialist Characteristics: Han Control Over Ethnic Koreans in Northeast China, 1921-1976.” (2018)
  • Song, Sikang: “Building a Smoking Society: Culture and Ecology of the Tobacco Industry in North China, 1902-1937.” (2017)
  • Stack, Brian: “In Certain Western Areas of the United States: Bestiality, Animals, and Sexuality in the 20th-Century American West.” (2021)
  • Traver, Barbara: “After Kourou: Settlement Schemes in French Guiana in the Age of Enlightenment.” (2011)
  • Wang, Ai: “City of the River: The Hai River and the Construction of Tianjin, 1897–1948.” (2014)
  • Wemlinger, Cherri: “Making their Voices Heard: Expressions of World Opinion to the League of Nations during the Italo-Ethiopian Dispute (1934-1938).” (2012)
  • Whelchel, Aaron: “The Schoolmaster is Abroad: The Diffusion of Educational Innovations in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire.” (2011)
  • Wiecko, Cynthia Ross: “Guam: At the Crossroads of Spanish Imperial Militarization, Ecological Change, and Identity in World History.” (2011)