Scholars to Follow

W. Tanner Allread (Stanford J.D.) is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. He is a specialist in nineteenth-century Native American history and the history of federal Indian and tribal law. As a researcher, he is particularly interested in the intersection of tribal state-building and debates over sovereignty and federalism during the Removal era. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Anomalous Empires: Indigenous Governance and Indian Removal, 1817-1838,” seeks to reframe the narrative of southern Indian removal as a widespread assault on Indigenous sovereignty in addition to being a forced emigration of Indigenous people. This work aims to demonstrate how Native nations utilized constitutionalism and tribal state-building projects to assert their sovereignty and how those actions impacted the jurisdictional maze that Indigenous peoples were forced to navigate as well as wider debates over sovereignty and federalism in the early republic. In addition to his historical work, he has assisted tribes with numerous legal matters, working for the law firm of Kanji & Katzen, P.L.L.C., and the Yurok Tribe’s Office of the Tribal Attorney. He is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Jen Andrella (Michigan State University Ph.D. in History) is the Andrew W. Mellon Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Knox College. She is a historian of the nineteenth-century American West, Native American ethnohistory, and Reconstruction. Her current book project examines Reconstruction as a national spatial process that experimented with local and federal authority, settler colonialism, and state formation in the West. As a scholar of Digital Humanities, Jen is interested in the construction of space and using geospatial analysis to reconsider colonial placemaking. Her most recent project, Mapping the Upper Missouri: Visualizing Negotiation, Diplomacy, and Culture on the Northern Plains, 1801-1853, is a digital spatial history of the Northwestern Plains through the lens of Indigenous and colonial representations of space and power. Her work has been supported by the Society of Civil War Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Newberry Library, and has been featured in Digital Humanities Now and on H-Net’s H-CivWar channel.

John R. Legg is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at George Mason University. His research focuses on the history of Native America, borderlands studies, refugee studies, spatial history, and digital humanities. John is specifically interested in the history and memory of the U.S.-Dakota War. He's currently finishing his dissertation, titled "Lands of Refuge: Dakota Diplomacy and Belonging in Mni Sota Makoce, 1851-1890," which explores how the Dakota from Minnesota use movement and diplomacy to circumvent U.S. policies of genocide, confinement, and authority after Minnesota's U.S.-Dakota War. This project demonstrates how Dakota understandings of their homeland, Mni Sota Makoce, an expansive geographic space stretching from Minnesota, to the Dakotas, into Iowa and Nebraska, and north into Manitoba and Saskatchewan, allowed these groups to challenge colonial authority by using borders as strategic tools for kinship, trade, warfare, refugeedom, and survival. He will defend in April 2024. 

John's work has been generously funded by the American Philosophical Society, the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and George Mason University's Department of History and the Office of the Provost. He has also received recognition by the Western History Association, the American Society for Ethnohistory, the Northern Great Plains History Conference, and the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, VA.

Dr. Nicole N. Martin (Stanford Ph.D. in History) is a social and cultural historian specializing in gender and women’s history, Reconstruction, and the American West. She is currently the NPS Fellow in Women’s History in the Pacific West. Her book manuscript in progress, In the Name of the Home, explores how Americans have understood and reconciled questions of home and belonging in relation to territorial expansion. For the NPS over the next year, she will host a series of seminars, public talks, and online exhibits that relate the experiences of women and ideas of home in the Pacific West to the complicated story of unfinished revolutions throughout U.S. history.

Dr. Megan Kate Nelson (University of Iowa Ph.D. in American Studies) is a historian and writer who is an expert in the history of the American Civil War, the U.S. West, and popular culture. She is the author of four books, including The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which was a Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History. Her most recent publication, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner 2022), has been celebrated as “a fresh, provocative study … departing from well-trodden narratives about conservation and public recreation” (Booklist, starred review). Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Preservation Magazine, and Civil War Times.

Lindsey R. Peterson (University of Southern Mississippi Ph.D. in History) is a war & society scholar who focuses on the American Civil War era. Her research analyzes the intersection of race, gender, and place in western Union Civil War commemorations. Examining how Union veterans and their families commemorated the war in the trans-Mississippi West, her dissertation argues western Unionists constructed a western-centric narrative of the Civil War to bolster their vision of western expansion and the colonization of indigenous Americans. Her scholarship has been published in the Middle West Review and Civil War History (forthcoming Dec. 2022). She also currently serves as the Senior Associate Editor of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project.

Dr. Alaina E. Roberts (Indiana University Ph.D. in History) is a leader in the Reconstruction in Indian Country field. Her research focuses on the intersection of African American and Native American history from the nineteenth century to the modern day with particular attention to identity, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness. Her first book, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, (Penn Press, 2021), uses archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction, connecting debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. I’ve Been Here All the While was awarded the 2021 Phillis Wheatley Book Award and Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the 2021 Lost Angeles Times Book Prize and 2022 Lincoln Prize. Her work has also been profiled by CNN and the Boston Globe, among other outlets, and her written work has appeared in TIME magazine, the Washington Post, and High Country News. Her next book project will explore public history, memorialization, and the legacy of slavery and anti-Blackness in the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations.

Dr. Alex Stern (Stanford Ph.D. in History) is a political historian who specializes in nineteenth century U.S. and Native American history, with a focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Her research and teaching interests centers on the intersecting histories of race, law, federal power, land, and violence in nineteenth-century America. Her current research investigates the intertwined remaking of U.S. and Indigenous sovereignties after the Civil War and shows how federal Indian policy was a critical arena in which the social and political revolutions of Reconstruction took place. Her current book project, Native Reconstruction, is a Civil War and Reconstruction history of the Five Tribes of Indian Territory (1861-1907) that reveals the ways in which Indian Territory served as a historical laboratory for the federal reforms of Reconstruction. She has worked as an expert consult in federal Indian law cases, collaborating with Kanji & Katzen, P.L.L.C. in preparation for the Supreme Court case Sharp v. Murphy (later decided by the Court in McGirt v. Oklahoma).

Joel Walker Sturgeon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi, where he studies sociopolitical history in the Antebellum South. Joel’s research examines the relationship between Indian nationalism and states’ rights ideology during the Jacksonian Era. His dissertation States’ Rights illuminates how Cherokee nationalist tactics forced Georgians to develop a novel, sovereignty-heavy states’ rights ideology to achieve state removal ambitions. 

Joel has written extensively about states’ rights. He is currently published in The Journal of Mississippi History, the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and the Southern Historian, with forthcoming articles in the Journal of the Early Republic and The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. He further contributed a chapter on Zachary Taylor to the upcoming book Everything Wrong with the Presidents and expects to adapt his dissertation, States’ Rights, into a book in the near future. He previously presented at Louisiana State University, conducted research as a recipient of the Institute of Humane Studies (HIS) Fellowship from George Mason University, and recently won the McMinn Fellowship from The Center for Civil War Research.

Joel was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and attended high school at DeSoto Central in Southaven, Mississippi. He enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he played football, achieved five-time SEC Scholar Athlete honors, and earned degrees in history and Southern Studies. He completed his master’s in history at the University of Alabama before returning to Mississippi to finish his Ph.D.

Dr. Kevin Waite (University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. in History) is a nineteenth-century U.S. political historian who works broadly on the intwined histories of slavery, imperialism, and the American West. His first book, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (UNC Press, 2021), is a study of slaveholding expansion in California and the Far Southwest. It explores how American Southerners extended their labour order and political vision across the continent, and in the process, triggered a series of conflicts that culminated in the Civil War. West of Slavery was a finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize, and was named one of the “11 books that shape the way we think about California” by Boom: A Journal of California. He is also a leading public voice on the history and legacy of slavery and emancipation in California and has been published in The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, Slate, The New Republic, TIME, and The Washington Post, among other major media outlets.

Dr. Cecily Zander (Penn State Ph.D. in History) is a specialist in American military history and the Civil War era in the American West. Her first book, The Army Under Fire: Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era (LSU Press, February 2024), explores the political contestation over national military affairs in the Civil War era. The manuscript examines both partisan fighting over the army’s deployment and financial maintenance, as well as clashes between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government over whether the president or Congress should oversee federal military policy. Zander’s research agenda has been supported by many fellowships, including the University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collections’ Masterson Fellowship and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She has published articles in popular and scholarly journals, including Civil War History, and has also contributed essays to several edited collections. Before joining the faculty at Texas Woman's University, she was a postdoctoral fellow at SMU's Center for Presidential History.