Graduate
Student Achievements
The USF Department of History is immensely proud of the many achievements of its graduate students. Below are a few of them. If you would like to see your achievements or the achievements of another graduate student detailed on this page, please email Matt King with information about them and their work!
M.A. student Juliana Whittinglow has been awarded the Time Sifters' Cornelia Futor Memorial Student Grant to participate to the IDEx's excavation project in Malta (Melite Civitas Romana).
Ph.D. student Rachel Sanderson received a Fulbright Award to study in Spain in the 2023-2024 academic year for her dissertation project, "Identifying Race, Racializing Identity: Belonging in Colonial Florida, 1565-1702."
M.A. student Kylie Dillinger won first prize (arts and humanities category) at USF's 2023 Graduate Research Symposium for her project, "Digital Preservation of Fading Memories: Virtualization and Online Dissemination of the WWII-era Japanese American Detention Camp Amache (Granada, Colorado)."
Ph.D. student Ryan Hom was a People's Choice winner at USF's 2023 Graduate Research Symposium for his project, "Rediscovering an Ancient Greek city in Sicily: Multi-sensorial Remote Sensing of Heloros."
Ph.D. student Madeleine Kraft has joined the editorial team of the peer-reviewed journal "Reviews in Digital Humanities", edited by Jennifer Guiliano (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis) and Roopika Risam (Dartmouth College), as Topic Editor for the endangered cultural heritage area. In that role, Madeleine will coordinate a team of two junior editors. The journal is published through the support of the Mellon Foundation and Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College.
Ph.D. Candidate Christopher Adkins published two piecies of poetry in The Eckerd Review. "Better Dog" is a tone piece about werewolves in love at dusk in the Springtime, and "September Story" is an interrogation of nostalgia and how longing for days gone by can lie to us. They can be accessed here on pages 82-85. Christopher also published a peer-reviewed article in the academic journal Preternature (Penn State University) that considers shapeshifters in Norse mythology using comparative Medieval and Renaissance texts and Scandinavian folklore.
Madeliene Kraft and Ryan Hom presented their research at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in New Orleans. Madeliene's paper, "Digitization of the Abbatija tad-Dejr Catacombs in Rabat, Malta" considered her current archaeological research on the island of Malta. Ryan's paper, "Ancient Greek Mercenaries Abroad Mapping Project" looked at the geographic distribution of ancient Greek mercenaries.
A project spearheaded by Angela Costello and Kylie Dillinger for the Institute for Digital Exploration that digitizes and visualizes a Japanese-American detention camp in Colorado was featured in the HUB.
Stephan Hassam, Kaitlyn Kingsland, Madeleine Kraft and Juliana Whittinglow presented to USF donors the highlights of their archaeological work in Malta!
Angela Costello was selected for the Dumbarton Oaks Museum Graduate Study Day The award will cover her travel/lodging expenses to get to Washington, D.C. and to conduct one day of research there.
Morgan Greig and Hannah Tweet were admitted to PhD programs at the University of Cambridge and University of Michigan (respectively) in Fall 2022. Both students were involved in the La Florida project at the USF St. Pete campus and will build off this work in these graduate programs.
Michael LoSasso recently published an article in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Drawn from his dissertation research on television portrayals of World War II during the cold war, the article discusses the first Soviet-American television production, The Unknown War, as a product of 1970s Détente. Unlike most previous American portrayals, The Unknown War discussed the importance of the Eastern Front. You can read the article here.
Kaitlyn Kingsland had the paper “Stories and Changing Social Norms: Exploring How Video Games Reflect Society through the case study of Dragon Age” accepted for presentation at the DiGRA 2022 conference organized by the Digital Games Research Association in Guadalajara (Mexico) in April 2022. The paper was also accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed proceedings of the conference.
PhD candidate Stephan Hassam has been awarded a Fulbright-IIE research fellowship to Italy in 2022-2023.
PhD student Rachel Sanderson was one of only eight graduate students to receive funding from the Huntington Library to present her research at the “New and Emerging Studies of the Spanish Colonial Borderlands” workshop in March 2022.
PhD candidate Hanna Lipsey received a 2022 OAH Travel Award for PhD students from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as well as a 2021 Russel F. Weigley Graduate Student Travel Grant from the Society for Military History to present her work at the OAH and the Society for Military History.
MA student Reagan Vernon presented a paper on the “ambiguous accusation of heresy against Protestant reformer George Wishart” at the 2022 Florida Conference of Historians.
After two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, Ashley Buchanan (who received her PhD from USF in 2018) was hired as an Associate Director of Fellowships at the Folger Institute in Washington, D.C. Check out this interview with Ashley from January 2022 in which she discusses her own research and her roll at the Folger Institute.
Angela Costello had the paper “Anachronistic and Impulsive: Echoes of the Classics as Interwoven in the World-Building Catalog of VNV Nation” accepted for presentation at the next Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South that will be held at the Wake Forest University in Winston-Sale (NC) in March 2022.