Colin Reynolds is presently a graduate student in the Emory program.  He received his B.A. in History from Grinnell College in 2007 and his M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago in 2009.  He is interested in twentieth-century U.S. political and social history, specifically the rise of conservative populism during the second half of the last century.  His advisor is Prof. Joe Crespino, and Colin expects to work closely with both him and Patrick Allitt.  He writes, “My recent work has focused on West Virginia.  My MA thesis was entitled ‘Born Again Solidarity: Conservative Activism and Organized Labor in the Textbook Controversy of 1974.’  I considered how conservative activists and their rhetoric influenced working-class activism in a 1974 protest against public school textbooks.  Most recently I wrote a short history of West Virginia’s Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, considering how this organization operated as part of the state’s government before integration, and how its existence complicates nice distinctions between radical and conservative civil rights activism.”

Alexander Lorenzo Colonna, B.A. in History, French and Pre-Med, 1998, is a Major in the U.S. Army Reserves. He is presently serving at a Combat Support Hospital in Iraq. Last fall, he wrote, “Well I’m finally all grown up and finished with many long years of medical training.  I went to med school at MUSC in Charleston, did my General Surgery residency at ETSU in Johnson City, TN, and did an Acute Care Surgery fellowship at Wake Forest.  12 years of work in all.”  He is married and his wife, Sarah, did her medicine residency at Wake Forest.  Now she is doing a Hematology/Oncology fellowship at Vanderbilt. Their son, Gabriel, is almost two years old.  Alexander started a general surgery practice outside of Nashville.

Patrick Jamieson, B.A. 2011, is pursuing a J.D. at Duke Law School and a M.A. in History from the graduate school at Duke.  His senior thesis, “’The Delicacy of the Subject’: Creating a Proslavery Argument at Antebellum Emory,” received Highest Honors.  He writes, “I hope that the combination of traditional legal education and graduate study of history will allow me to further explore not only the influences of history on the law, but the ways such influences will be relevant in the changing law of tomorrow.  I hope to continue my focus on the nineteenth century U.S. South, perhaps looking to the connections between antebellum property law and the slave trade.”

Kirsten Cooper, Class of 2012, is spending the summer of 2011 doing historical research with the SIRE Summer Research Partner Program. She will work 40 hours per week on two projects: one under the direction of Dr. Tonio Andrade and the other an independent pursuit. She has worked with Dr. Andrade over the past year on his comparative exploration of military development in Europe and Asia, looking specifically to see whether or not the Military Revolution was a purely European phenomenon. Her independent research will focus more on military and diplomatic relations between France and Austria, and their consequences on various facets of society and national consciousness over the approximately 250 years leading up to the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756. She will also study the effects that this event had on the two societies. This research will help inform her upcoming honors thesis. She explains that she “is very excited to get the opportunity to work full time on both of these projects and to spend the summer in our amazing city of Atlanta!” Last summer, she went to Vienna with the German Studies program and began learning German (taking 101 and 102 while abroad), which she has continued at Emory over the past year. She writes, “It was an amazing experience and I absolutely fell in love with the city, its culture, and its history.” As part of her work, she conducted an independent survey course of Austrian and Habsburg History with the help of Robert A. Kann’s A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918. She enjoyed eating in the Naschmarkt, a lovely open air market with great restaurants, and riding the Strassenbahn through the city.  The obligatory tourist stop at the Café Sacher for their famous Sacher-Torte was a special treat.

Kate Armstrong, Ph.D. 2011, writes that she is thrilled to have completed her doctorate, directed by Professor James Roark. The dissertation is entitled, “Thy Will Lord, Not Mine: Parents, Grief, and Child Death in the Antebellum South.” The research for her project took her to archives in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. It was supported by fellowships from Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Southern Historical Collection, and Emory. The dissertation investigates the emotions and experiences of planter-class parents of the Old South as they grieved the death of a child, and argues that southern parents’ profound difficulty aligning their feelings of loss with the expectations of their society–particularly the expectation that parents must resign themselves to God’s will–defined their grief. Although Kate is looking forward to revising her thesis for publication, she is also happy to focus on her own, very healthy child for a little while as she figures out her next career move.