Advisor: Dr. Thomas Brown

Education: BA History and Russian (Baylor University, May 2025)

Bio:

I am a second-year History Ph.D. student whose research focuses on the ways disease and medicine have shaped American militarization and armed conflict in the late early modern and modern periods.

My current research examines the role of yellow fever in the American South during the Civil War. From General Benjamin Butler’s public health and quarantine reforms to the practice of military medicine in field hospitals and aboard naval ships, yellow fever had far-reaching consequences for both the Union and the Confederacy.

My research has also taken me into subjects beyond my primary areas of interest. My most recently completed project, Drugged Dissent, is a public history project examining the Soviet Union’s abuse of psychiatry and pharmacology in efforts to silence dissent. This work will be highlighted at Baylor University’s Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society, a Baylor Libraries special collection.

I have also conducted extensive research on the role of Atlantic empire in the development of medicine in Europe and the New World, including the ethical questions raised by medical discoveries and practices. Other research has explored the health and medicine of Vikings and Norse peoples through archaeological evidence, bone analysis, parasitology, sagas and early medical texts such as Bald’s Leechbook.

I also have extensive experience working in academic and special libraries. I have worked with maps dating from the late 1300s to the present, processed materials for my alma mater’s university archives, and worked with rare and one-of-a-kind materials, including the Woman's Memorial Residence Hall Book of Remembrance and a Heritage Edition of The Saint John’s Bible. I enjoy spending time in archives and special collections and searching for the next discovery that can inform my research.

In addition to my research, I work as a teaching assistant in the Department of History and am a fellow in the Presidential Fellowship Program, one of the University of South Carolina’s most prestigious graduate student awards. I also serve on the Society of Civil War Historians Graduate Student Connection Committee.