Recent Dissertations

Ph.D. students in the Department of History have completed doctoral dissertations on a wide range of topics across place and time since the founding of our program nearly fifty years ago. Their work enriches our shared knowledge of history and informs professionals in academia, public history, international relations, public policy, law, and many other fields. Below is a list of dissertations completed in the Department of History since 2000.

Dissertations


  • (2021) Katie Brown, "The End of Gentlemanly Warfare?: Gendered Language and Great Britain's Evolving Arguments for Strategic Bombing, 1920-1945"
  • (2021) Eric Williams, "'Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?': Deconstructing British Visual Media Propagana in Word War I"
  • (2020) Anne Maltempi, "We are the Kingdom of Sicily: Humanism and Identity Formation in the Sicilian Renaissance"
  • (2019) Dionna Richardson, "Purloined Subjects: Race, Gender, and the Legacies of Colonial Surveillance in the British Caribbean"
  • (2019) Jared Ward, "A Breach in America's Backyard: The People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Caribbean, 1949-1976"
  • (2018) Robert Faith, "'This Despotic and Arbitrary Power': British Diplomacy and Resistance in the Habeas Corpus Controversy of the American Civil War"
  • (2018) Angela Riotto, "'Beyond the scrawl'd, worn slips of paper': Union and Confederate Prisoners of War and their Postwar Memories"
  • (2017) Christopher Howard, "Black Insurgency: The Black Convention Movement in the Antebellum United States, 1830-1865"
  • (2016) Ryan Bixby, "Refusing to Join Their Waters and Mingle into One Grand Kindred Stream; The Transformation of Jefferson County, West Virginia in the Civil War Era"
  • (2016) Theodore Easterling, "Separating the Fish from the Water: United States Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons in the Vietnam War"
  • (2016) Sevin Gallo, "Honor Crimes and the Embodiment of Turkish Nationalism, 1926-2016"
  • (2016) Thomas Weyant, "'Your Years Here Have Been Most Unreal': Political and Social Activism during the Vietnam War Era at Northern Appalachian Universities"
  • (2015) Christa Adams, "Bringing 'Culture' to Cleveland: East Asian Art, Sympathetic Appropriation, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, 1914-1930"
  • (2015) Daniel Griesmer, "The Evolution of Military Strategy and Ohio Indian Removal in the 1790s"
  • (2015) Gene Veronesi, "Collateral Promoters of the Venetian Myth: Veronese Chronicles in the Age of Venetian Hegemony"
  • (2014) Valerie Schutte, "'To The Mooste Excellent And Vertuouse Queene Marye': Book Dedications as Negotiations with Mary I"
  • (2013) Theresa Davis, "We Will All Come Together: Women In the Nineteenth Century Stark County Court in Ohio"
  • (2013) Tamara Rand, "'And if Men Might also Imitate her Virtues' An Examination of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin's Hagiographies of the Female Saints of Ely and Their Role in the Creation of Historic Memory"
  • (2013) Lucius Wedge, "Andrew Johnson and the Ministers of Nashville: A Study in the Relationship Between War, Politics, and Morality"
  • (2012) Maurice LaBelle, "Traces of Empire: Decolonization and the United States in Lebanon, 1941-1967"
  • (2011) Peter Guiler, "Quaker Youth Incarcerated: Abandoned Pacifist Doctrines of the Ohio Valley Friends During World War II"
  • (2011) Steven Kawczak, "Beliefs and Approaches to Death and Dying in Late Seventeenth-Century England"
  • (2011) Peter Manos, "Joseph Plumb Martin and the American Imagination"
  • (2011) Lisa Smith, "Netta Taylor and the Divided Ohio Home Front, 1861-1865"
  • (2009) John Henris, "Apples Abound: Farmers, Orchards, and the Cultural Landscapes of Agrarian Reform, 1820-1860"
  • (2009) Jay Lemanski, "The Rectitudines singularum personarum: A Pre- and Post-Conquest Text"
  • (2008) Barbara Wittman, "A Community of Letters: A Quaker Woman’s Correspondence and the Making of the American Frontier, 1791-1824"
  • (2007) David Zietsma, "Imagining Heaven and Hell: Religion, National Identity, and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1930-1953"
  • (2006) Matthew Hiner, "Nationalization and Deregulation: The Creation of Conrail and the Demise of the ICC, 1973-1980"
  • (2004) Brian Himebaugh, "'All for One': Restoring American National Identity in Film and Prime Time Television after Vietnam"
  • (2002) John Michael Vohlidka, "For Crown and County: Middle-men and the Failure of the Militia in the Response to the Rebellion of 1569"
  • (2001) Michael Epple, "American Crusader: Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Campaign against Communism"
  • (2001) Kenneth Rhodes, "Ambivalent Fundamentalist: The Life and Ministry of Rev. Chester E. Tulga"
  • (2000) Lisabeth Robinson, "Murder, Mayhem and Morality: Social Order and the Presses of Early Modern England and France"

More Information

Graduate Director:

Prof. Greg Wilson
Department of History
(330) 972-8575

Contact Us

T: (330) 972-7006
F: (330) 972-5840

The University of Akron
Department of History
Arts and Sciences 216
Akron, Ohio 44325-1902

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