Department of History
Graduate Newsletter
Happenings in the History Department
The Rooted Project Takes Root in the History Graduate Program
The Rooted Project is a three-year institutional history project designed to produce a fuller account of the University’s history. Professor Judith Giesberg, PhD, and Angelina Lincoln ’18 CLAS, ’20 MA, developed the project idea based on Lincoln’s groundbreaking research into the life and legacy of William and Julia Moulden. The Mouldens were the first known Black Catholics in the area around Villanova and donated money and land to the University in 1886. Struggling to survive during difficult financial times, the University greatly benefitted from the Mouldens’ gifts. Yet until Angelina Lincoln embarked on this project in one of Dr. Giesberg’s graduate courses, the Mouldens failed to attract serious historical attention. Recognizing the importance of this history, the Rev. Peter Donohue, OSA, PhD, ’75 CLAS, University President, committed Villanova to support these efforts to better understand the school’s past.

In 2021, Colin McCrossan ’23 MA became the latest graduate student in History to become involved in rediscovering the Mouldens as the new graduate research assistant for the Rooted Project. Now in its second year, the Rooted Project is currently directed by Associate Professor Craig Bailey, PhD. Lincoln has continued her work as a University Researcher, focusing this year on Julia Moulden’s life. For his work, McCrossan has researched the history of slavery at Villanova, in Radnor Township, and throughout the Greater Philadelphia area. He has traced the ownership of the land which became Villanova’s campus back to a family in Radnor named the Morgans, who owned the land until the early 19th century. The main enslavers in the family were Samuel and Magdalen Morgan, and their son John. The Morgans enslaved at least six Black people. McCrossan has recovered the names of three of them: a woman named Chloe; a man named Jack; and a young boy named George. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, McCrossan is exploring this history and reconstructing the lives of Chloe, Jack, George and the Morgans.

“Though the Morgans enslaved Chloe, Jack, George and other Black people before Villanova existed,” McCrossan explains, “they are still a part of Villanova’s history.” McCrossan says that “the Morgans forced Chloe, Jack, and George to labor and live on the land that became Villanova” and that they “improved and changed the historical landscape.” “Examining their lives and stories,” he continues, “helps us to better understand the Mouldens by providing more context, but is also important because in doing so we can recognize and remember the humanity of these enslaved people who lived complex and dynamic lives.” McCrossan looks forward to continuing his research and work with the Rooted Project this year.
New Book by Rebecca Winer, PhD

Associate Professor Dr. Rebecca Winer’s expansive collection Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present, which she co-edited with Federica Francesconi of SUNY Albany, has just been published with the award-winning Jewish studies list from Wayne State University Press. The volume is endorsed by three senior scholars in the field as offering “some of the newest and most innovative work on the lives and experiences of Jewish women across the centuries.” Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present aims to reach beyond Jewish studies to all historians of women and gender.
Publications and Teaching Honor for Alumnus

Elliot Drago, PhD, '10 MA published “A Precarious Freedom: The 1820 Philadelphia Kidnapping Crisis” in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. In addition, Elliot was awarded a contract with Johns Hopkins University Press for his book Neither Northern nor Southern, which will be published in the fall of 2022. Along with these exciting scholarly achievements, Dr. Drago received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. In sharing these wonderful professional updates with the department, Elliot generously expressed his gratitude for the faculty in Villanova’s Department of History, “[faculty members in the department] have and will always inspire me. I will continue to grow as a thinker, educator, and human being because of their scholarship, stewardship, wisdom and empathy.”
New Master's in History with Certificate in City Management Program
Beginning in the fall semester of 2022, the Graduate Program in History, in partnership with the Master of Public Administration (MPA) Program, will offer a combined MA in History with a Certificate in City Management. This program will provide a unique opportunity to graduate students in history who are interested in pursuing careers in federal, state or local government agencies. The program allows students to gain the practical skills necessary for managing and promoting the political, economic and administrative elements of government institutions while providing them with in-depth knowledge and experience in historical research, historiography and methodology.
Graduate Students Benefit from Lepage-Funded Internships
Sophia Lockwood ’22 MA
Micaela Miralles ’21 MA
Kyle Scripko ’21 MA
Villanova’s Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest launched a new program in 2021 to help Villanova students interested in the field of history take advantage of summer professional work opportunities in settings and organizations that support history in the public interest. The Lepage Center awards stipends to both graduate students and undergraduate students interning at partner organizations across the country. Three history graduate students received the inaugural funding:

  • Sophia Lockwood ’22 MA interned in Philadelphia with the Beyond Better Project, a public medical humanities project that seeks to destabilize ableist narratives in American healthcare through oral history, archival research, storytelling and art. Sophia engaged in the “Afterlives of Pandemics, Past and Future” initiative, which includes original archival and oral history research.

  • Micaela Miralles ’21 MA accepted an internship with “Documenting the Undocumented: COVID-19 Oral Histories and Immigrant Workers in Rural Wisconsin.” She served as a project assistant, documenting and preserving oral histories of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on Spanish-speaking migrant and undocumented farmworkers in Wisconsin’s dairy industry.

  • Kyle Scripko ’21 MA worked at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, a historical, natural and cultural site owned by the City of Philadelphia and operated by the John Bartram Association in cooperation with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation. He helped the organization with cataloguing, organizing and digitizing materials to provide better access to their collections on the website. The garden has ties to histories of the Lenape people, colonization, botany, industry, the environment, and African American life and culture. Scripko wrote about his experience for MainlyMuseums.

The Lepage Center’s funding for student internships will continue in the summer of 2022 and will offer graduate interns a $5,000 stipend.

Commencement Festivities Return
Under a tent on South Campus in May, the History Department celebrated its 2021 MA graduates. Every graduation ceremony is meaningful but having spent so much of the previous year limited to Zoom interactions, this year’s in-person celebration was especially poignant. The department-only outdoor format, necessitated by public health precautions, allowed the faculty and staff to celebrate each of our graduates individually. We cheered our students’ accomplishments and raised a glass to toast the promise of their futures. The next day, the celebration continued as our MA students officially received their degrees at the Master’s and Doctoral Degree Commencement and Recognition ceremony. The class of 2021 was a special group of students. Though we were sad to say goodbye we look forward to the great success that awaits them.
Graduate Student Forum Reignited
The return to in-person learning in the Fall of 2021 brought a new appreciation for the spirit of collegiality and camaraderie that has always been an essential element of our MA program. Anxious to further the scholarly collaboration engendered in our courses, a dynamic group of students, Alessandra Albertini, Christopher DelSanto, Marissa Ivie, Elizabeth Miner and Hannah Pfeifer reconstituted and revived the Graduate Student Forum. The Graduate Student Forum provides an inclusive space for students to encourage and support professional development, scholastic thought, discussion, critical thinking and research in service of fostering a peer-based intellectual community at Villanova. It has been and surely will continue to be a wonderful resource for our graduate community.

Eliza Gettel Medals at the Dragon Boat Federation’s Club Crew Nationals
This past fall, Assistant Professor Eliza Gettel, PhD, showed us that in addition to being an accomplished historian of the Ancient Mediterranean, she is also a National Dragon Boat champion. With other members of the Schuylkill Dragons, her local all-female-identifying Dragon Boat team, Dr. Gettel medaled in three different events at the sport’s national competition in October 2021. With a first-place finish in the 200m, the Schuylkill Dragons earned a spot in the Club Crew World Championship next summer.

Athletic competition is nothing new for Dr. Gettel. Although a life-long competitive skier, while she was in college, Villanova’s Ancient Mediterranean historian gave rowing a try. She soon found a new passion. While pursuing her PhD, Dr. Gettel led Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Science’s rowing program for five years. She also became a member of Harvard’s dragon boat team which allowed her to participate in festivals around the world from Montreal to China. Now, as a member of the national championship team, Dr. Gettel’s next stop will be Sarasota, Florida, where she and the Schuylkill Dragons will compete for a world title in 2022.
Student and Alumni News
Current student James Alfano was the recipient of the Graduate Research Prize awarded by the interdisciplinary graduate student journal CONCEPT.

Current student Christopher DelSanto was awarded a Graduate Summer Research Fellowship by the Office of the Graduate Dean for his project, “Conspiracy Theories and Party Politics in the Antebellum North” in the summer of 2021.

Thomas Harvell-Degolier’s '21 MA paper, “From Guajira to Florida: International Narcotics Trafficking, the Cold War, and U.S.-Colombian Relations during the 1970s” was the runner-up for the Best Overall Paper at the University of Alabama’s Graduate History Association Conference on Power and Struggle. The paper was also recognized as the runner-up for the best paper by a member of Phi Alpha Theta.

Mary Manfredi '20 MA began a new position as a Registrar in Sotheby’s New York City office.

Current student David McCauley was awarded a Graduate Summer Research Fellowship by the Office of the Graduate Studies for his project “David Burpee and the Marigold Makeover,” in the summer of 2021. McCauley, pictured above, presented his work at this fall's Graduate Research Symposium in the Connelly Center.

Lori Wysong '21 MA published Historic Washington, DC: A Tour of the District’s Top 50 National Landmarks with Globe Pequot Publishers in 2021.

New Doctoral Students

  • James Hassett '21 MA began the PhD program in History at Northwestern University.

  • Micaela Miralles '21 MA began the PhD program in History at the College of William and Mary.

  • Kimberly Webb '21 MA began the PhD program in History at the University of Birmingham (UK).
Faculty News
Joseph Casino
Joseph Casino, PhD, published the article “Panic in Philadelphia, 1777: Civilian Behavior and British Military Failure,” in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies in the fall of 2021. The article is available through open access on JSTOR and the web site of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. 
 
Kelly-Anne Diamond
Kelly-Anne Diamond, PhD, published “Masculinities and the Mechanisms of Hegemony in the Instruction of Ptahhotep,” 29–46 in C. Geisen, et al (eds), Patterns of Identity and Self-Presentation in Ancient Egypt, "The one perfect in years, who has sustained minds"– Essays in honor of Ronald J. Leprohon in Material & Visual Culture of Ancient Egypt (Atlanta: Lockwood Press. 2021). Over the past year Dr. Diamond has presented "The Transformative Power of Dress: Sobekneferu and Statue E 27135" at the British Egyptology Congress 5 (Virtual), sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Society, on September 30, 2020, and "The Transformative Power of Being Dressed: The Louvre Statue of Sobekneferu (E 27135)" at the American School of Oriental Research Annual Meeting (Virtual) on November 21, 2020. She is also a Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America for 2021-2022.
 
Marc Gallicchio
Marc Gallicchio, PhD, continued his service as department chair during the 2020-2021 academic year. In addition, he published two short essays for online magazines on public memory and the domestic politics of America’s unconditional surrender policy; “The Last Day of World War Two – How Americans Marked VJ-Day in 1945 and How We Remember It Today.” Military History Now.com (September 29, 2020); and “Grand Old Conspiracy Theorists,” Project Syndicate (September 1, 2020). He lectured via Zoom on unconditional surrender at the National Museum of U.S. Army, Ft. Belvoir, Md., (November 19, 2020) and the National Pacific War Museum, Fredericksburg, Texas, (September 18, 2020). Dr. Gallicchio also gave a presentation titled "Black Internationalism in Asia During the Early Twentieth Century" to the Georgetown University Asian Studies Program (April 8, 2021) and one on “The Legacy of U.S. Strategy Against Japan” to the Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and Services, Tufts University (October 21, 2020). In addition, Dr. Gallicchio published the chapter, “The Petrograd Colonists and the American Red Cross: Humanitarian Action during the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920,” which he co-wrote with Dean Adele Lindenmeyr, in the edited volume A Journey Around the World to Take Children Home: A True Story from the Russian Revolution.
 
Eliza Gettel
In September 2021, Eliza Gettel, PhD, was named the Albert R. Lepage Assistant Professor of History. In the past year, she published two articles. The first investigated an inscription attesting to the afterlife of Greek federalism within the Roman Empire: “Saon and the koinon of the Achaeans in Roman Arcadia,” In The Koina of Southern Greece: Historical and Numismatic Studies in Ancient Greek Federalism, edited by Catherine Grandjean (Ausonius, 2021), p. 83-92. The second addressed how studying federal coinages can expand understanding of ancient Greek history: “Exploring the Ancient Greek World through Federal Coinages,” Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia 30 (2020/2021): 73-95. She also presented research for her current book project about Greek federalism within the Roman Empire in the University of Pennsylvania’s Classics Colloquium, “Maintaining a Common Polity: Shared cult in the koina of the imperial Greek mainland” (22 October 2020), and at the Association of Ancient Historians’ Annual Meeting, “Embassies from Hellas to Rome (1st to 3rd cent. CE)” (virtual, 8 May 2021). During summer 2021, she received a University Summer Grant from Villanova to work on her monograph. Villanova’s VITAL also awarded her a Lilly Online Conference Fellowship in winter 2020. She remains invested in ancient historical pedagogy and serves as the co-chair of the Committee on Teaching for the Association of Ancient Historians. In that position, she co-hosted an online workshop in August 2021 to discuss creating a welcoming classroom with ancient historians across the country. 
 
Judith Giesberg
In February 2021, Judy Giesberg, PhD, published “’A Muster Roll of the American People:’ The 1870 Census, Voting Rights, and the Postwar South,” in the Journal of Southern History. Dr. Giesberg also wrote an essay titled, “A Revolution against Interracial Democracy” for Public Seminar that was published on January 21, 2021. In addition, Judy published two op-eds in the Washington Post’s Made by History series. The first, “Grant — not Lincoln or Roosevelt — may hold the key to Biden’s success,” appeared on February 3, 2021. The second, “More People than We Thought Get Excluded when the Right to Vote Isn’t Protected” was co-authored with Adam Arenson and came out on March 26, 2021.
 
Dr. Giesberg delivered several conference presentations and public talks as well. She was especially busy in June given the commemorations of Juneteenth. She discussed the Last Seen Project as part of the SXM Media DIRO Speaker Series: Juneteenth Program with Joe Madison on June 17, 2021. The next day, she took part in the Plenary Session on Women and Gender in the Civil War Era at the Society of Civil War Historians Biennial Conference and delivered the paper “The 1870 Census Schedule,” at the same conference. Dr. Giesberg gave a talk titled “Emilie Davis’s Civil War, 1863-1865” for the Riverfront Historical Society Juneteenth Lecture on June 19. The following month, with Adam Arenson, Judy delivered the paper, “Who is Denied the Vote? Insight from the Full-Count 1870 Data,” at the Data-Intensive Research Conference, University of Minnesota.
Judy Giesberg’s ongoing research on the Last Seen Project: Finding Family after Slavery was recognized by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and National Archives and Records Administration which awarded her a $200,000 Publishing Historical Records in Documentary Editions Grant for the project. 
 
Lynne Hartnett
In March 2021, Lynne Hartnett, PhD, published The Great Revolutions of Modern History, a 24-lecture video and audio course with accompanying guidebook for The Great Courses and the streaming service Wondrium. Dr. Hartnett was the featured guest on the History Channel’s Podcast History This Week in September of 2020 where she discussed the historical significance of Peter the Great’s 17th-century beard tax in the episode, “Shaving Russia.” 
 
Catherine Kerrison
Catherine Kerrison, PhD, was the Keynote Speaker for the New York State Council for the Social Studies conference in March. Dr. Kerrison discussed her book Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America on the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s “Book Breaks” in March. She also was the featured speaker for the University of Georgia Press’s launch of the Georgia Open History Library in October 2021. 
 
Dean Adele Lindenmeyr
Over the past seven years, Dean Adele Lindenmeyr, PhD, has served as an editor on the massive project, Russia’s Great War and Revolution. This past summer, Volume 9 in the series, Personal Trajectories in Russia's Great War and Revolution, 1914-22: Biographical Itineraries, Individual Experiences, Autobiographical Reflections, for which Dr. Lindenmeyr served as a co-editor, was published by Slavica. Dean Lindenmeyr also wrote an article for the volume entitled, “Common Sense Vanishes in Revolutionary Times’: Sofia Panina and Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams Reflect on 1917.” Along with Dr. Marc Gallicchio, Dean Lindenmeyr wrote the chapter “The Petrograd Colonists and the American Red Cross: Humanitarian Action during the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920,” for A Journey Around the World to Take Children Home: A True Story from the Russian Revolution. Dr. Lindenmeyr also served as the co-editor for this book which was published in 2021.
 
Finally, in recognition of the positive impact that Dean Lindenmeyr has had on Villanova’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the CLAS Dean’s Advisory Council Scholarship has been named in her honor.
 
Whitney Martinko
Whitney Martinko, PhD, published “The History of History in Early Marietta and the Origins of David McCullough’s The Pioneers,” an invited essay for the Journal of the Early Republic 41:2. Though conferences were cancelled due to COVID-19, she spoke at a number of online venues about her recent book, Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States (Penn Press, 2020). These included the National Park Service Staff Book Lecture Series, Newport Historical Society, University of Kentucky Department of Historic Preservation and Department of History with Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate, the Philadelphia Athenaeum, and the National Preservation Institute. Dr. Martinko was also nominated and elected to serve as the chairperson of the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
 
Tim McCall
In late 2020, Tim McCall, PhD, published the article “Questo misto di profano e di sacro: The studiolo oratorio of Torrechiara” in the Italian journal Predella. Throughout the year, he presented several virtual conference papers and invited lectures, including for Art History at Reed College, for the School of Art & Art History at the University of Iowa, and at the Renaissance Society of America annual conference. In November 2020, Dr. McCall delivered a paper for the University of Toronto’s Renaissance & Reformation Colloquium, “Masculinities in the Premodern World: Continuities, Change, and Contradictions,” and this past spring, he contributed a lecture to the Ferrari Humanities Symposium on Leonardo da Vinci at the University of Rochester. Most recently, in September 2021, Dr. McCall virtually presented the talk “Beauty, Power, and Representation” for the Renaissance Skin Project at King’s College, London. 
 
Cristina Soriano
In the Spring of 2021, Cristina Soriano, PhD, was on leave as a Research Scholar at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. At the Davis Seminar on “Revolutionary Change,” she presented her paper “A Disrupted Colony: The Impact of the French Revolution in Spanish Trinidad, 1776-1796.” on Feb. 19, 2021.
 
In March 2021 Dr. Soriano presented her book talk “Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela” in the Tertulia at the Latin American History Seminar, Latin American Centre at Oxford University. She also presented her project “Imperial Ruptures: Colonial Experiments in Trinidad During the Age of Revolutions” at the Latin American and Caribbean Workshop, Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton University on March 25, 2021.
 
Dr. Soriano published the article “Public Sphere without a Printing Press: Texts, Reading Networks, and Public Opinion in Venezuela during the Age of Revolutions” in Itinerario. Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions, 44:2, 2020, 341-364.
 
In September 2020, Dr. Soriano’s first book Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and The Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018) received the 2020 Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book about Venezuela (English, Spanish or Portuguese), awarded by the Venezuelan Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association.
 
Paul Steege
Paul Steege’s, PhD, chapter, “Border Fragments, Border Fantasies: Cold War Berlin in Retrospect,” appeared in the edited volume, Cold War Berlin: Confrontations, Cultures and Identities (IB Tauris, 2021). He also published an essay for the Washington Post’s Made by History section titled, “The dangerous history behind the hottest gift purchase on Black Friday. Along with Jennifer Evans of Carleton University, Dr. Steege organized the three-day seminar, “Delivering German Studies for Multiple Publics / Publishing for Diverse Publics,” which was held at this year’s German Studies Association conference in Indianapolis. Finally, he and Professor Jean Lutes from Villanova’s English Department, received a $10,000 grant for “Reimagining Mentoring as Multi-Directional Professional Development: A Joint Initiative of the English and History Departments.” 
 
Rebecca Winer
Rebecca Winer’s, PhD, expansive collection Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present, which she co-edited with Federica Francesconi of SUNY Albany, has just been published with the award-winning Jewish studies list from Wayne State University Press. The volume is endorsed by three senior scholars in the field as offering: “some of the newest and most innovative work on the lives and experiences of Jewish women across the centuries.” Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present aims to reach beyond Jewish studies to all historians of women and gender. Dr. Winer co-wrote the chapter on medieval and early modern Iberia in the collection as well. On July 7, 2021, Dr. Winer presented a paper entitled “The Date Palm and the Wet Nurse: Commodified Breast Milk in Medieval Jewish Thought” with a research group from Cyprus studying wet nursing and motherhood from antiquity to the Middle Ages at the International Medieval Congress (Leeds, UK) online. On March 10, 2021, she discussed “The Body Work of Breastfeeding and Interfaith Relations” at the Virtual Symposium in Honor of Harriet Goldberg: “Transformed Bodies in Medieval Culture” online, which was hosted by Villanova University and the Delaware Valley Medieval Association. In the area of teaching, Dr. Winer and her former student Zoe Mendel (Villanova 2021) discussed Mendel’s Lepage sponsored research project (completed under Dr. Winer’s supervision) on “Deep Histories of Disease” on the “Covid-Calls Podcast,” hosted by Scott Gabriel Knowles (April 13, 2021). Dr. Winer won a CLAS Course Initiative Grant in Diversity for “Global Slavery Before the Atlantic World” a new undergraduate course. She presented on teaching medieval slavery at a national online conference on “challenging history pedagogy” hosted by UC Davis with other members of the team of college educators that developed the website medievalslavery.org, which addresses an international teaching need for educators from middle school to university level.
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