William Appleman Williams Emerging Scholar Grants

Ashley Everson’s project, “Voices of the Valley: Black Women, Radical Politics, and Internationalism in the Tennessee Valley, 1931–1950” offers new perspectives on the history of Black internationalism by shifting our focus from the urban north to the rural south. Based on an interdisciplinary methodology and impressive array of national and international organizations, “Voices of the Valley” illustrates how working-class and poor Black women articulated a radical vision of democracy that was both local and global. Everson is an assistant professor in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University in 2025.

Boyd Ruamcharoen’s project, “An Empire of Rot: Weatherable Materials, the Tropics, and American Power,” reexamines the history of the U.S. “pointillist empire” from 1898 to the 1970s through a focus on the material challenges of operating in tropical climes. This original approach centers the hidden infrastructure of weatherability. Ruamcharoen argues that the pursuit of weatherability became a critical tool, and, eventually, a critical liability, for the projection of U.S. power. He is a postdoctoral fellow in Global American Studies at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and earned his Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) at MIT in 2025.

Michael J. Hogan Foreign Language Fellowship

We are pleased to award this year’s Michael J. Hogan Foreign Language Fellowship to Bohan Zhang, Rice University, to support his dissertation project, “The Pan-Pacific Territory: Hawai‘i at the Border of China and the U.S. Empire, 1910s–1950s.” Zhang will use the Hogan Fellowship to increase his proficiency in Hawaiian and conduct research using Indigenous Hawaiian language sources. The committee was impressed with Zhang’s efforts to bring Indigenous Hawaiian voices into a broader Pan-Pacific history. By focusing on Hawai’i, a critical imperial borderland between the United States and China, Zhang will contribute to the historiography of American foreign relations by recovering and foregrounding the perspectives of the islands’ original inhabitants amidst the powerful pressures of two dominant Pacific powers. The access to Hawaiian language primary sources significantly enhances the exploration of a Pan-Pacific space marked by inter-imperial competition and clashing national interests as well as trans-imperial cooperation and cross-Pacific internationalism.

Stuart L. Bernath Dissertation Research Grant

Grace Easterly is completing her doctorate at the University of Connecticut, under the direction of Dr. Bradley Simpson. Her dissertation, “Cold War Chokepoints: U.S. Empire, Freedom of Navigation, and Sovereignty at Sea” promises to be the first full-length academic history of how the question of freedom of navigation evolved in the second half of the twentieth century, as jurists and diplomats brought the questions of who was allowed to navigate, where they were allowed to navigate, and what was allowed to navigate on the seas into post-war international legal fora. It examines how U.S. officials sought to contest these claims and project legal and military power across the world’s sea lanes, by looking at three intersecting global phenomena shaped and influenced their efforts: the Cold War, technological change in shipping, and decolonization. She plans to use the SHAFR grant to visit the Library of Congress and NARA in DC while finalizing her dissertation.

W. Stull Holt Dissertation Fellowship

Alexander Insley is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Missouri mentored by Dr. Jay Sexton. His dissertation, “Loyalism and Empire: African Americans and U.S. Overseas Expansion, 1877–1915,” examines the relationship between race and Americanforeign policy by placing African Americans and their diverse activism as central actors in turn-of-the-century debates over the formation of America’s Empire. Confronted with disenfranchisement and racializedviolence, African Americans turned outside of the United States for solutions and often found the boundary between foreign and domestic affair a porous one. Reinterpreting American foreign affairs through the lens of the Black experience frames overseas expansion as a continuation of racial politics, rather than a brief break or divergence that it has frequently been cast as. The dissertation offers an examination of a Black internationalism and transnational racial dialogue that predate the First World War and later twentieth-century radicalism.

Lawrence Gelfand – Armin Rappaport – Walter LaFeber Dissertation Fellowship

Ryan Metz is a doctoral student at Ohio State University working with Dr. Joseph Parrott. Her dissertation, “Destination Havana: U.S.-Cuban Travel Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Late-Post-War Cold War World Order, 1977–2001,” focuses on an understudied topic. It highlights U.S. based travel groups and tourist ventures including missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, Cuban-Americans, and businesspeople and how they helped shape formal and informal U.S. relations with the island nation. She utilizes multiple sources including private archives, oral histories, and the archives of the Canadian government and European Union. Metz will utilize the grant to conduct research in a number of these archives.

Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grants

Rosie Click is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Georgetown University under the direction of Dr. Karine Walther. Her dissertation, “Studying ‘Abroad’ in the Empire: Higher Education and Cuban, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian, and Filipino Students in the Continental United States, 1898–1939,” discusses the rise of international education in the United States, its relationship to federal and imperial policies, and its impact on both domestic and overseas communities. By focusing on students from current and former U.S. territories, who were not quite foreign yet not considered fully American, the dissertation highlights the often-overlooked imperial roots of international education programs in the United States. The dissertation adds another dimension to the scholarship on education and U.S. empire (both domestic and overseas) in the 19th and 20th centuries while also exploring the roots of U.S. international education, both in practice and in federal policy.

Lucas de Souza Martins is a Ph.D. candidate in Diplomatic History at Temple University mentored by Dr. Alan McPherson. “The Centrist Way to Democracy: Brazil’s Opposition and U.S. Restraint (1973–1985)”examines the international dimensions of Brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, focusing on the evolving relationship between the Brazilian opposition party, PMDB, and the United States government. It argues that the PMDB’s outreach to U.S. officials played a critical role in reframing Brazil’s opposition as a legitimate and pragmatic force. The dissertation challenges a prevailing interpretation that characterizes U.S. policy toward Brazil’s democratization in the 1980s as largely reactive and unstructured by demonstrating that U.S. policy was strategically articulated and deliberately calibrated to facilitate Brazil’s transition to civilian rule without provoking political backlash. At its core, the dissertation underscores how international engagement by domestic coalitions can serve as a foundation for advancing and defending democracy in the face of ideological extremism.

Liye Hong is a doctoral student at George Washington University studying under the guidance of Dr. James Hershberg. His dissertation, “A Tortuous Way to Beijing: John Kenneth Galbraith’s Discovery of the Romanian Channel and His Mission to Connect with China in 1967,” breaks new ground and expands the historiography of the formalization of relations between the United States and China. He provides insights into the understudied topic of Galbraith’s effort in a triangular diplomacy between the United States and China with Romania acting as an intermediary. He employs multilingual and multinational archival works, some supported by this SHAFR research grant.

Joseph Johnson is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in History at Temple University under the direction of Dr. Alan McPherson. “Moving Mountains: Project Plowshare, Peaceful Nuclear Explosions, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1952–1977” explores how the US government approached the global public regarding alternative uses of thermonuclear weapons. The dissertation argues that Project Plowshare was a valuable bargaining chip in U.S. foreign policy that could simultaneously demonstrate the scientific superiority of the country, offer opportunities for rapid growth in developing countries, act as a counterweight to the growing international regulatory regime, and also serve as an eventual cautionary tale to direct international nuclear policy in the later Cold War. By tracing the connections between foreign policy objectives and the challenge of converting nuclear weapons to peaceful ends, the dissertation provides a unique vantage point for understanding forces like bureaucratic momentum, modernization and development, technological advancement, and environmental understanding.

Zachary Tayler is a doctoral student at Ohio University working with Dr. Ingo Trauschweizer. His dissertation, “The Lost Peace: Normalization of Diplomatic Relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 1975–1995,” is a multinational study in multiple archives in the United States and Vietnam to construct the complex story of how two enemies created formal relations through a variety of methods, creating a relationship that flourished afterward. The travel grant will be used to expand his language skills and conduct archival work in Vietnam.

Yixin Tian is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford working with Dr. Eduardo Posada-Carbo. Her dissertation, “The Revolutionary Mirage: Third Worldism, Counterinsurgent Violence and U.S. Power in Mexico, 1970-1976,” is a study of “revolutionary diplomacy abroad and camouflaged violence at home.” This binational study employs multiple archives in both the United States and Mexico and the use of multilingual resources. The research grant will support research at the SRE and AGN archives in Mexico and further develop the important relationship that shaped U.S.-Mexican relations from the 1970s forward, as well as the U.S. relationship with Latin America in the same period.

James Spencer Tompkins is a Ph.D. candidate at Fordham University, mentored by Dr. Christopher Dietrich and Dr. Samantha Iyer. The project titled, “Commercial Diplomacy: Aviation, Fair Trade, and National Sovereignty in U.S.-Brazilian Relations, 1959–1985” traces competing visions, in the United States and Brazil, of how states should mediate relations between national industry and foreign markets by focusing on commercial aircraft producers and airlines. To link stories of U.S. industrial decline, Brazilian development, and trade between the two countries, this project draws upon archival sources in both the United States and Brazil. He will use the SHAFR grant to return to Brazil and visit various archives including the Aeronautics Technical Center in São José dos Campos, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce records at the National Archives in Brasília, and the Historical Institute of Aeronautics in Rio de Janeiro.

Jieon Yoo is a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, mentored by Dr. Monica Kim. “The Smuggling Republic: U.S. Military Capitalism and Shadow Sovereignty” argues that shadow sovereignty was the political counterpart to military capitalism, a form of sovereignty from below. This dissertation brings to the fore the informal economy sustained by military capitalism, a network in which the U.S. military’s logistical and consumption systems generated parallel circuits of trade and value beyond official oversight, to further our understanding of the everyday economic foundations of the U.S.-led Cold War order and provide a materially-grounded analysis of the U.S. soft power in the post-WWII period. The SHAFR grant will help fund archival research at NARA in College Park.