Research Fellowships

Collage of a building, uncle sam, miniature books, and old photos.

The University of North Texas Libraries invite applications annually for Research Fellowships in UNT Special Collections and The Portal to Texas History. Research in our collections is relevant to studies in a variety of disciplines. Preference will be given to applicants who demonstrate the greatest potential for publication and the best use of our UNT Special Collections or The Portal to Texas History.

The Portal to Texas History 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Jordan Johnson

Jordan Johnson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Southwestern University in English, Spanish, and Feminist Studies, and is the recipient of the Debbie Ellis Award in Feminist Studies.

Posted: 04/23/2019

The Portal to Texas History 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Trey Murphy

Trey Murphy is an energy geographer and PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina where he examines the intrinsic relationship between the governance of petroleum extraction and Texas property ownership.

Posted: 04/19/2019

The UNT Special Collections 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Timothy Vale

Timothy Vale attended the University of Houston receiving a Bachelor’s degree in History and minor in Anthropology in 2013. He returned to the University of Houston in 2015 as a master’s student and transferred to the PhD program in August of 2016. His focus is on History of American Medicine and LGBT History.

Posted: 04/18/2019

The Portal to Texas History 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Laura Lee Oviedo

Laura L. Oviedo is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University who grew up along the U.S.-Mexico border in Pharr, Texas. She is currently a Smithsonian Pre-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Division of Political and Military History at the National Museum of American History.

Posted: 04/18/2019

The UNT Special Collections 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Edward Etkins

Edward Etkins is a graduate of the Philadelphia Musical Academy, where he received his BM and BME. Edward achieved his Master of Music degree from Arcadia University, where he currently is an adjunct professor of music. He also completed graduate studies at Rutgers University.

Posted: 04/17/2019

The UNT Special Collections 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Niloofar Gholamrezaei

Niloofar Gholamrezaei is a PhD student in Fine Arts: Critical Studies and Artistic Practice at Texas Tech University. Her dissertation is a cross-cultural investigation of two painters of the twentieth century, Otto Dix (1891-1969 Germany) and Kamal-Al-Molk (or Mohammad Ghaffari, 1848-1940, Iran).

Posted: 04/17/2019

The Portal to Texas History 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Alejandra C. Garza

Alejandra C. Garza is currently the American Historical Association Career Diversity Fellow and a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a portfolio student in the Mexican American Latina/o Studies Department.

Posted: 04/17/2019

The UNT Special Collections 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Eric Denby

Eric W. Denby is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. His research interests include LGBTQ protest and social activist groups, especially among 12 to 18 year olds.

Posted: 04/16/2019

The UNT Special Collections 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - John Carranza

John A. Carranza is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in the history of medicine and disability. A San Antonio native, he received his BA from University of the Incarnate Word and his MA from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Posted: 04/16/2019

The Portal to Texas History 2019 Research Fellowship Awardee - Haley Brown

Haley Brown is a master’s student and Teaching Assistant at the University of North Texas who plans on graduating in Spring 2020. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history and minor in English at the University of North Texas. In the 2019-2020 academic school year, Haley will complete her thesis on the lynching of women in Texas.

Posted: 04/12/2019

The UNT Special Collections 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Agatha Beins

Agatha Beins teaches in the Department of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University. Her book Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity analyzes US feminist newsletters and newspapers published in the 1970s. In addition to her interest in feminist print cultures, she writes and teaches about the relationship between art and activism, feminist pedagogies, the institutionalization of women’s studies, and food studies. She also serves as editor for the online, open access journal Films for the Feminist Classroom.

Posted: 05/29/2018

The UNT Special Collections 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Evelyn Montgomery

Dr. Evelyn Montgomery is the Director of Curatorial Affairs at Dallas Heritage Village, an outdoor museum that contains two of the cabins recorded by Dr. Jordan. She holds degrees in architecture and history, with a particular interest in American houses and domestic life, particularly for Victorians and on the frontier. She frequently presents on these subjects to both academic and popular audiences. She supports historic preservation through volunteer efforts, service on the Dallas Landmark Commission, and the maintenance and interpretation of the buildings of Dallas Heritage Village.

Posted: 05/22/2018

The Portal to Texas History 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Jessica Webb

Born and raised in the state of Texas, Jessica Webb received her Bachelor’s degree in History from Austin College in 2012. In 2014, she obtained her Master’s Degree in American History from TCU in Fort Worth and is working towards her Ph.D. there as well. Her research interests focus on the intersections of gender and sexuality and entrepreneurship within the framework of prostitution. She has been the recipient of several awards including the Boller Dissertation Fellowship and the Erwin E. Smith Research Fellowship.

Posted: 05/14/2018

The Portal to Texas History 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Shay O'Brien

Shay O’Brien is a second-year Sociology student at Princeton studying elites and conservatives in the United States. Her areas of interest include economic sociology, elite sociology, race & ethnicity, and religion. Before beginning graduate school, Shay worked on a large-scale randomized control trial at the social policy research firm MDRC. She graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Anthropology, where she was a research assistant in the Anthropology department and won the prizes for Best Honors Thesis and Highest Achievement in Linguistic Anthropology.

Posted: 05/14/2018

The Portal to Texas History 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Scot McFarlane

Scot McFarlane grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and Palestine, Texas near the Trinity River. Currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University, his work has appeared in The Journal of Southern History and Environmental History. At Columbia, Scot has helped teach Mexican History, the History of the South, the History of New York, and is currently drafting a syllabus for a seminar on the history of rivers in North America. Prior to moving to NYC, Scot taught writing and history at high schools in the Willamette River Valley of Oregon. You can follow his research on his blog.

Posted: 05/14/2018

The Portal to Texas History 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Richard B. McCaslin

Richard B. McCaslin, TSHA Endowed Professor of Texas History at the University of North Texas, is the author or editor of eighteen books. One of the best known is Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, October 1862, which won the Tullis Prize and an AASLH commendation. He also wrote Lee in the Shadow of Washington, which received the Laney Prize and the Slatten Award, and was nominated for a Pulitzer. Another book, At the Heart of Texas: One Hundred Years of the Texas State Historical Association, 1897-1997, earned the Award of Merit from the Texas Philosophical Society. Yet another, Fighting Stock: John S. “Rip” Ford in Texas, received the Pate Award and Bates Award.

Posted: 05/14/2018

The Portal to Texas History 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Kimberly Jackson

Kimberly Jackson is a master’s student and Teaching Assistant in the History Department at the University of North Texas. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history and mathematics at the University of North Texas. In the 2018-2019 academic school year, Kimberly will complete her thesis on the Civilian Conservation Corps in Big Bend National Park. Her larger academic interests include borderlands and environmental history and hopes to apply her research to larger studies of the U.S.-Mexico Border.

Posted: 05/14/2018

The Portal to Texas History 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Kenna Archer

Dr. Kenna Lang Archer is an instructor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where she teaches U.S. environmental history, Texas history, and American history. Her first book, Unruly Waters, was published by University of New Mexico Press. She recently finished writing an updated edition of Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land with John Opie and Char Miller. She will be presenting her current research project at the Western History Association meeting in October.

Posted: 05/14/2018

The UNT Special Collections 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Giselle Greenidge

Ms. Giselle Greenidge is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. Her major concentration is Global and Comparative Sociology and her minor concentration is Social Stratification. Ms. Greenidge is a teaching fellow at UNT, and her research interests include culture, globalization, and immigration.

Posted: 05/08/2018

The UNT Special Collections 2018 Research Fellowship Awardee - Kenna Lang Archer

Dr. Kenna Lang Archer is an instructor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where she teaches U.S. environmental history, Texas history and American history. Her first book, Unruly Waters, was published by University of New Mexico Press. She recently finished writing an updated edition of Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land with John Opie and Char Miller. She will be presenting her current research project at the Western History Association meeting in October.

Posted: 05/08/2018

The Portal to Texas History 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Brian Elliott

Brian Elliot is a Ph.D. Student and Teaching Fellow with the History Department at the University of North Texas. Brian’s research focuses on slavery during the Civil War, and the legacy of former slaves as “Black Confederates.” Brian’s published materials include his Master’s thesis “Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and their Black Body Servants,” as well as a number of published book reviews. Brian has presented his research at several conferences, including at the Society for Military History, and the Southwest Social Science Association, and has given informal talks on his research and the utility of digital resources in historical research.

Posted: 06/22/2017

The Portal to Texas History 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Heather Sinclair

Heather Sinclair has a background in professional midwifery and activism and received her Ph.D. in history in 2016 from the University of Texas at El Paso. Her dissertation is entitled “Birth City: Race and Violence in the History of Childbirth and Midwifery in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez Borderlands, 1907-2013.” She is currently a lecturer in history and women’s studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. She received a B.A. in history and certificate in women’s studies from Duke University.

Posted: 06/22/2017

The Portal to Texas History 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Robin Roe

Robin Roe is a doctoral candidate at Texas A&M University and received her BA and MA in History from Texas A&M University. Her dissertation examines how media used weather-related natural disasters in Texas and the Southwest border region in the early Twentieth Century to manipulate public perceptions of race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, and class, and how some of those victims contested that manipulation. She is a veteran of the U. S. Air Force and has worked as a copy editor and in the computer industry before beginning her graduate work. She is particularly interested in the potential of digital humanities for historical research.

Posted: 06/22/2017

The UNT Special Collections 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Matthew Carr

Matthew Carr is a student in Columbia University’s political science Ph.D .program. His research focuses on American political institutions. He’s working on a project – which makes extensive use of archival resources – collecting state-level political party platforms from 1960 through the present day, in order to trace the evolution of party development.

Posted: 06/16/2017

The Portal to Texas History 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Tiffany J. González

Tiffany J. González grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and in North Richland Hills, Texas. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in the department of history at Texas A&M University. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degree in History from Texas Tech University. In the 2017-2018 academic year, Tiffany will conduct more research and begin the writing phase for the dissertation. Her work has received support from the Texas State Historical Association, the East Texas Historical Association, the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education, and now the Portal to Texas History.

Posted: 06/16/2017

The Portal to Texas History 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Gregg Cantrell

Gregg Cantrell holds the Erma and Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History at Texas Christian University. He is the author of several books and articles, including Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. He is a coauthor of the bestselling Texas History textbook, The History of Texas, coauthored with Robert A. Calvert and Arnoldo De León. In 2013-2014 he was president of the Texas State Historical Association, and he is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Posted: 06/16/2017

The UNT Special Collections 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Stacey Jocoy

Dr. Stacey Jocoy is Associate Professor of Musicology at Texas Tech University, School of Music. She is an Early Modern specialist focused on the material culture, cultural politics, and historiography of the period.

Posted: 06/16/2017

The UNT Special Collections 2017 Research Fellowship Awardee - Laura Lee Oviedo

Laura Lee Oviedo is a native of Pharr, Texas and is currently a Ph.D. student of history at Texas A&M University. Laura’s dissertation employs a comparative framework to examine the Militarization of Mexican and Puerto Rican Women’s Lives during World War II and the Politics of Race, Class, Gender, and Citizenship.

Posted: 06/16/2017

The Portal to Texas History 2016 Research Fellowship Awardee - David J. Cameron

David J. Cameron is a doctoral candidate in Chicano/Latino and Twentieth-Century United States History at Texas A&M University His project Race and Religion in the Bayou City: Latino/a, African American, and Anglo Baptists in Houston’s Long Civil Rights Movement​ ​examines how the intersections of race and religion in the Bayou City shaped Houston-area Baptists’ participation in the struggle for civil rights through religious associations, churches, and leaders.

Posted: 07/19/2016

The Portal to Texas History 2016 Research Fellowship Awardee - Tyler Thompson

Tyler Thompson is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University. His project *Representations of American Indians in Texas Memory and Mythology, 1875-1936

Posted: 07/08/2016

The Portal to Texas History 2016 Research Fellowship Awardee - Dennis Michael Mims

Dennis Michael Mims is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas. His project A Queer History of Dallas: The Formation, Development, and Integration of Big D’s LGBT Community, 1965-2005 ​ shows how significantly things changed for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals living within the city of Dallas during these four decades.

Posted: 06/30/2016

The UNT Special Collections 2016 Research Fellowship Awardee - Hillary Anderson

Hillary Anderson is a PhD candidate in History at Texas A&M University. Her project Radicalizing the South: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in 1970s Liberation Movements seeks to locate subaltern voices that add depth, richness, a fresh geography, and complexity to the historical narrative of civil rights in the 1970s.

Posted: 05/09/2016

The UNT Special Collections 2016 Research Fellowship Awardee - Nancy E. Baker

Nancy E. Baker earned her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. Her project Texas Feminist Legal Reformers in the 20th Century focuses on Texas feminist legal reformers who modernized the state’s laws, bringing Texas from worst in the nation for women to first in the nation to have a unified, reformed Family Code of law.

Posted: 05/09/2016

The UNT Special Collections 2016 Research Fellowship Awardee - Chris Babits

Chris Babits is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. His project To Cure a Sinful Nation: A Cultural and Intellectual History of Conversion Therapy in the United States from the Second World War to the Present Day is a history of the conversion therapy movement that helps us understand how religion and scientific inquiry intersect as well as the changing norms on gender and sexuality from the early Cold War into post-9/11 America.

Posted: 05/09/2016

The Portal to Texas History 2015 Research Fellowship Awardee - Evan C. Rothera

Evan C. Rothera is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at The Pennsylvania State University. His project ‘There are in Texas men who have suffered much’: Reconstruction in the Lone Star State examines how Reconstruction unfolded, at the state and local levels, in Texas.

Posted: 10/09/2015

The Portal to Texas History 2015 Research Fellowship Awardee - Nakia Parker

Nakia Parker is completing her third year in the history doctoral program at the University of Texas. Her project Trails of Tears and Freedom: Slavery, Migration, and Emancipation in the Southwest Borderlands, 1830-1887 chronicles the lived experiences and migration patterns of enslaved people of African and Black Indian descent in Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw slaveholding communities in Arkansas, Indian Territory, and Texas between the time of Indian Removal to the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887.

Posted: 10/09/2015

The UNT Special Collections 2015 Research Fellowship Awardee - William A. Taylor

William A. Taylor is Assistant Professor of Security Studies at Angelo State University. His project In the Service of Democracy: American Military Service from World War II to the Present will contribute to a chapter in a broader work on American military service from World War II to the present.

Posted: 10/09/2015

The UNT Special Collections 2015 Research Fellowship Awardee - Laura Forsberg

Laura Forsberg is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University. Her project The Victorian Miniature Book shows how the miniature book re-enchants familiar works and transports the reader from the dull world of full-sized reality into an expansive realm of minute possibility.

Posted: 10/09/2015

The Portal to Texas History 2015 Research Fellowship Awardee - Ben Davis

Ben Davis holds an MFA in photography and is currently working toward his MS-LS in Archival Studies and Imaging Technology at UNT. His project Historic Architecture of Harrison County Texas investigates the social experience of architecture by documenting cultural rituals and events that took place at historic structures in Texas over 150 years ago.

Posted: 10/06/2015

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