Current & Past Graduate Students

Sascha Darlington holds a dual B.A. in History and Gender Studies and is a first year graduate
student pursuing a M.A. in American History. Her goal is to continue her exploration of art as a
form of protest in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, centering on the intersections of disease and
medicine with identity, gender, and sexuality.
Previously, Sascha completed a two-year internship at a local Salt Lake high school, where she,
along with three other undergraduate students, developed and taught a course entitled “Queer
History and Activism”, that focused on centering queer BIPOC voices, fostering queer and trans
joy, and making a lasting impact on the world.

Anthony Ray is a first-year master’s student at the University of Utah. At the age of twelve, he became fascinated with family history and began researching his ancestry. This commenced a life-long love of history and historical research. His areas of interest include the American Southwest (California, Arizona, New Mexico) and northern Mexico from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1930s. He is also interested in the history of Catholicism, especially the development of its rites and liturgies and the effects of its councils. Anthony has specifically been researching early Spanish colonists that settled in Alta California. He has been published in the California Missions Foundation journal Boletín.

In addition to these pursuits, Anthony also holds a Bachelor of Religious Education degree from West Coast Baptist College, a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from California State University Los Angeles, and has studied graduate level theology at St. John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota. Anthony is an accomplished tenor and countertenor and has performed with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Sound of Ages, the Sunday Night Singers, and the Cathedral of the Madeleine Choir, among many others. He has worked with conductors Gustavo Dudamel, Grant Gershon, Jenny Wong, Eric Whitacre, Maria Guinand, Alan Gilbert, Zubin Mehta, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Susana Mälkki.

John Perry Christensen was born, raised, and educated in Utah Valley—a place he calls home in every sense of the word. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy from Utah Valley University and a Master of Arts in History from the University of Utah. His students at Utah County Academy of Sciences—where he teaches concurrent enrollment history courses—refer to him as Mr. C. (Though, as he is a dissertation away from his Ph.D., his students will probably refer to him as Dr. C someday soon.) John’s dissertation, which he is currently finishing for the History Department at the University of Utah, investigates the history of science, medicine, and psychiatry in the United States. It looks at how psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers conceptualized the relationship between work, class, poverty, and mental health from Freud’s visit to the Americas in 1909 to the establishment of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1949. In addition to teaching at UCAS, John teaches philosophy and history at UVU and history for the Salt Lake Community College Prison Education Program. As of 2024, he has accumulated fifteen years of teaching experience in higher education and five years of experience in secondary education. He was awarded UCAS Teacher of the Year in 2021 and was nominated for Utah Teacher of the Year in 2021 and 2024. He is married with four children. When he is not reading, writing, or teaching, he likes to explore the many mysteries of Provo River and Utah Lake with his family.

MA student in Colonialism and Imerialism with special interest in Indigenous American history and Early Modern Spanish colonialism. 

Christopher Rich is from Salt Lake City, Utah.  He has a BA in history from Brigham Young University, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, and an LLM from the Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School.  He spent 12 years as a Judge Advocate in the United States Army and continues to serve as a Reservist.  He is currently pursuing a PhD in American History with minor fields in European History and Law and War.  His primary research interests include nineteenth century Latter-day Saint history and the American West.  However, he is also interested in American foreign policy, military history, and national security law.

E McKinley Hopf is from Salt Lake City, UT and has a B.A. in American Studies. He is pursuing an M.A. in US History, with a primary focus on 20^th century sex politics. His research centers on queer politics and debates over public and semi-public sex in the 1980s and 1990s. He has academic and fannish interests in fan studies, and has most recently researched the histories of censorship in online fan spaces. Outside of schoolwork, E enjoys handicrafts, including crochet and cross-stitch, as well as performing and listening to Renaissance and Baroque music in voice and instrument ensembles.

Born and raised in Utah, Mark Melville obtained a BA in English linguistics, with minors in editing and geology, from Brigham Young University. His editing career brought him into the world of Mormon and Utah history, and he later decided to earn an MS in US history from the University of Utah. He is interested in American festivities and celebrations, and he is currently researching the history of Utah's July 24/Pioneer Day holiday.

Stormy Shepherd is from Salt Lake City, UT where she attended the University of Utah, and received BA degrees in History and English, and an MA in U.S. History with an emphasis on the Vietnam War. She is currently pursuing her PhD in U.S. History with minors in Asian History and Post-War Conflict and Gender in SE Asia. Her focus is 20th century relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. She is currently researching the influence and power of music during the Vietnam Era, and how it impacted social movements, culture and politics. As the recipient of a FLAS Fellowship, she traveled throughout Vietnam in 2017 to begin research. She is currently the president of Leave Home Booking, and continues to enjoy teaching courses at UVU and the University of Utah.

Kalli Huntsman is originally from Arizona, but moved to Utah when she was 10.  She has lived in several states including, Arizona, Virginia, Ohio, Colorado & Utah.  She is working on an MS in History and Comparative Gender and Sexuality. She finds herself drawn to Great Britain /Europe in late 18th and 19th Century History.

She is married with 5 kids and 5 grandchildren.  She was a student at the U over 30 years ago and is now back to finish her education.

Travis Hancock is a PhD candidate and Maybelle Burton Graduate Fellow (2019-2022). He is also the curator at Washington Place, the official residence of the Governor of Hawaiʻi and historic home of Queen Liliʻuokalani.

He has worked for the Honolulu Museum of Art, Arizona's Desert Botanical Garden, the Natural History Museum of Utah, and the National Council on Public History.

Born and raised on Oʻahu's north shore, Travis holds an MA in American Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a BA in Classics from the University of Puget Sound. His dissertation (in progress) channels life-writing methods and Kanaka Maoli worldviews to explore intersections between indigeneity, whiteness, print culture, and settler science in late 19th- and early 20th-century Hawaiʻi. Initial research for this project was supported by a fellowship at the Henry E. Huntington Library. His work has also been supported by the Dee Foundation, and the University of Utah's Department of History. In 2020, he was a graduate fellow in the Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities.

Travis is the author of the forthcoming article, "The Many (De)colonial Lives of Kāpena George Gilley," Pacific Historical Review (Accepted, 1/24/2022). The article offers the first biographical study of history's only known Kanaka Maoli whaling captain.

Outside of the academy, Travis writes for several Hawaiʻi-based magazines, and hosts an annual Honolulu-based skateboarding film festival, HI Sk8 Films, which he created in 2011.

Explore His Work Here

Emily Larsen lives in Orem, Utah and is a part-time M.A. student at the University of Utah. She studied art history as an undergraduate and currently works full-time as the Head of Exhibitions and Programs at the Springville Museum of Art. She is interested in the art and visual culture of the American West, museums, and public history. Her current research projects focus on Utah women artists and dealers c.1890-1950.

Megan Weiss received a combined BA in History and Cultural Studies from Franklin University Switzerland and is now pursuing an MA in US History with a Public History Certificate at the University of Utah. Her area of interest is Utah pioneer history and its intersections with race, gender, and material culture. She has worked in the field of public history in Utah for a little over three years and is currently the Collections Manager/Curatorial Assistant at Fort Douglas Military Museum. She is also a volunteer at the Salt Lake County Archives and a docent at the Salt Lake City Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum.

Morgan Hardy is a M.A student at the University of Utah where he studies race, identity, and resistance in colonial and Atlantic history, with an emphasis on the early modern French empire. Morgan received his B.A. in history from Utah Valley University with a minor in Latin American Studies. Before pursuing his M.A., Morgan worked for Instructure, developing and maintaining the Canvas learning management system. 

Outside of academics, Morgan pursues rock climbing and podcasting. He and his wife, Madison, have two daughters.

Andrea is working on an MA in U.S. History  with an emphasis in Gender and Religion. She currently works full-time as a project manager for the LDS Church Public Affairs Department.

Elizabeth Seis is from Wichita, Kansas and graduated from the University of Kansas (Rock Chalk!) with a Bachelor's degree in Art History. She is currently pursuing her Master's in U.S. history focusing on 20th century air warfare. After graduation, she plans on working in war museums.

Matt is a history doctoral candidate and the 2018 Maybelle Burton Fellow. He is researching the first dissertation on the history of backcountry skiing in the United States. His work focuses on the culture and commerce of risk. Matt has completed the Graduate Certificate in Public History and conducted nearly fifty oral history interviews with a variety of people involved in mountain recreation. He has presented his work at multiple academic conferences, including the 2021 Western History Association (WHA) Conference. The WHA, the Southwest Oral History Association, and the American Alpine Club have each supported his work with grants or awards.  

Matt’s graduate studies have also included three years of Mandarin Chinese, for which he was awarded fellowships to attend two intensive summer courses at Middlebury College’s prestigious Chinese Language School. Previously, he completed a History MA degree at George Washington University. Before that, he served as a Marine Corps officer and worked various jobs—roofer, English teacher in China, and Alaskan salmon fisherman. Favorite pastimes are backcountry skiing and surfing, and he is an avid White Sox and Bulls fan.  

If you’d like to contact Matt, please send him an email at matthew.j.green@utah.edu.

Shavauna Munster is from Salt Lake City, Utah and received her B.A. in History from the University of Utah in 2015. She is pursuing her MA in European History and is the 2019-20 HGSA president. She is interested in the history of medicine, the body, and legally sanctioned physical punishment. Her current research focuses on connections between medical knowledge and law codes governing implements of discipline in the Middle Ages. 

Julia Huddleston is an M.A. student in U.S. History at the University of Utah where she studies race, gender, and labor in the American West.  Before pursuing an M.A., Julia worked as an archivist at the Marriott Library. In that position, she helped establish the Marriott Library Zine Collection, and she remains active in the zine librarian community. She earned a Masters in Library and Information Science with an emphasis in Archival Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2015.

Jon Bingham is an M.A. student focusing on U.S. history and the West. He is primarily interested in working within the public history field. Jon graduated from the U with Bachelors of Art in History and German (2007) and from Emporia State University with a Master of Library Science (2015).

Elizabeth Egleston Giraud is pursuing a M.S. degree with an emphasis on American history in order to strengthen and focus the knowledge she has gained throughout her long and varied career in public history.  After working as an architectural historian for the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office and the Utah Department of Transportation, (where she is currently employed) and as a planner for Salt Lake City, she has come to believe that the study of planning, history and architecture has failed to coalesce in a way that effectively analyzes the history of our cities and neighborhoods.  She looks forward to acquiring new knowledge and developing new skills in order to convey the story of urban development in a new way.  A native of Salt Lake City, she has an undergraduate degree from Lewis and College and a M.A. degree from Cornell University in Historic Preservation Planning.  She loves tennis and cultural events.

Cody K. Osguthorpe is from Ogden, Utah and graduated from Weber State University with a dual Bachelor’s degree in History and Political Science. In his undergraduate studies, he focused on a wide range of historical topics (including a senior thesis on the Baha’i Faith and race relations) and political theory. Currently, as a graduate student at the University of Utah, he is pursuing a Master of Arts degree in European History. His area of focus is Western Europe, from the High Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period. After completing his Master’s, Cody aspires to attain a Ph.D. 

Nate Housley is an M.A. student in US History and the 2018–2019 Editorial Fellow for the Utah Historical Quarterly. He studies labor history and is interested in the digital humanities. He holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Anthropology from Brigham Young University, is fluent in Tagalog, and has worked as a systems administrator. Born and raised in South Carolina, he and his Siberian husky now call Salt Lake City home.

Mariana Alliatti Joaquim is a MA student from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She graduated in History (Teaching History Degree) from the Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS), in 2016. During her undergraduate studies, Mariana has worked as a Research Assistant in a Professor’s project for four years, focusing on Jesuit Science from the Eighteenth Century, specially a handwritten manuscript on Paraguayan Natural History. Her undergraduate thesis analyzed the writing process of this Jesuit manuscript, centering on the Intertextuality with Natural History authors. Mariana is currently a Master of Arts student at the History Department of the University of Utah, focusing on Latin American History. Her Master’s Thesis will present a theoretical analysis of the Jesuit networks in the Italian exile, during the end of the eighteenth century. She is also interested in Gender Studies, Women’s History, and History of Science.

Lindsay Adams hails from Salt Lake City, Utah and received her BA in History from the University of Utah.  Lindsay is deeply interested in slavery and resistance, and is therefore pursuing her Master's degree in American History with an emphasis on African slavery in the Atlantic World. Her research focuses on the color Haint Blue, along with the various forms of cultural retention, knowledge making, and memory of enslaved peoples in South Carolina.  

PhD Candidate / Maybelle Burton Fellow
Environmental and Digital History / Colonial Americas
Brandon.C.Clark@utah.edu
(M.A., University of Colorado at Boulder)

Brandon Clark is an environmental historian of the colonial Americas.  His recent article “Blood in the Water:  A Digital History Project on the Geography of Pontiac’s War, 1763” (Arcadia:  Explorations in Environmental History) highlighted the importance Great Lakes Indians placed on controlling  North America’s interior waterways.  His dissertation explores the interplay between environment and European colonialism during the late eighteenth century.

Brandon has worked in seven countries as an intelligence analyst, Geographic Information Scientist (GIS), cartographer, and English language instructor.  He is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and hails from Jamestown, New York.

Amanda Fountain-Scheuerman studies Public History, Historic Preservation, and Native American and African American history.  She earned a BA in Anthropology from the University of Nevada, Reno (go Wolfpack!) and a BA in History from the University of Utah.  Amanda has multiple years of experience working in various museums in Nevada and Utah.  As a Graduate Research Assistant for the American West Center, she collects Oral Histories for the Marriott Library Special Collections’ Ski Archives project.  Amanda is also registering the Nevada Stewart Indian School as a National Historic Landmark.  Amanda thrives in the desert, at cosplay conventions, and gaming with her family.

Michael Huefner is from Omaha, Nebraska. He received his B.A. in History Teaching from Brigham Young University and is pursuing the M.S. degree in modern British history. A middle-school history and English teacher, he hopes to help students navigate this formative period, learn how to think and reflect, and establish an academic identity. He feels that becoming a better historian himself will allow him to better represent the discipline as a teacher. He cares deeply about the powerful relevance of history's lessons and is dedicated to advocating for public education, the historical discipline, and the teaching profession. He loves building engaging curriculum, spending time with loved ones, and gaining refreshment in nature. 

Lori Motzkus Wilkinson is a PhD student in History and Dean L. May Fellow at the University of Utah.  She received a Bachelor of Arts in English, with a Minor in History.  In 2015 she received her Master’s degree in American Studies and is now studying 19^th and 20^th century US History. She enjoyed teaching history for two years at Salt Lake Community College before pursuing her doctorate.  Lori studies Mormon history, literature, and gender.  Her research focuses on women’s identity formation though the analysis of larger sociocultural contexts.  She received the Mormon History Association 2017 Davis Bitton Student Research Paper Award of Merit for her paper, “Scribbling Women in Zion:  Mormon Women’s Fascination with Fanny Fern.” Currently, she is investigating Mormon women’s involvement in social movements. Upon completion of her doctorate, Lori hopes to continue teaching at a university to share her passion and knowledge of history and literature, pursue other intellectual interests, and golf much more.

Joseph Stuart is a PhD Student in History and Dean L. May Fellow at the University of Utah. His previous academic work has explored the connections of race and religion in the formation of New Religious Movements in the United States and the ways that religions use science as a means of gaining social acceptance in the United States. His dissertation will address the relationship of race, gender, and religion in the formation of conservative politics during the Long Civil Rights Movement. He has received fellowships and awards from the University of Virginia’s Office of Graduate & Postdoctoral Affairs, BYU’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, the Utah State Historical Society, and the Mormon History Association. He also works as a research assistant and editor for professors throughout the United States. You can find more about Joseph and his work at his academia.edu website.

Jeff Turner is a PhD student in US History. He has a MA in Religion from Claremont Graduate University, and undergraduate degrees in philosophy and religious studies from Washington State University. Jeff studies immigration history, American religious history, and history of the American West. He is currently researching the religious implications of the federalization of immigration restriction in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States.

Arica Roberts is a current History MA student at the University of Utah specializing in early medieval gender and religion. She received her BA in History from Brigham Young University in 2014 with minors in Women's Studies and Philosophy and was the recipient of the Susa Young Gates Award for her paper "Una Guerra Contra La Mujer: Chicana Feminism and Vietnam War Protest". In the summer 2016, she received the Reza Ali Khazeni Memorial Scholarship for Graduate Study Abroad for her work on the abortion miracles of St. Brigit of Kildare, Ireland and attended the Institute for Field Research for an archaeological excavation of a medieval monastery in Trim Co. Meath, Ireland. Her current project is her MA thesis on early medieval Welsh women, which uses a variety of sources from epitaphs, burial archaeology, and penitential law codes. She hopes to work more in archaeology and pursue a PhD program that bridges early medieval history and archaeology to study gender of this period.

Kate Mower grew up in the Salt Lake valley and attended the University of Utah out of high school. She studied abroad in Thessaloniki, Greece in 2007 and graduated in 2008 with a degree in Film. After five years working odd jobs, she went back to school at the University of Utah for a second BA in History, with an emphasis in ancient history and classical Greek. In 2014, she began a Master's degree in Ancient History, working with Professor Lindsay Adams, which she completed in 2016. Her thesis, titled "Creating Greek Identity: How Philip II of Macedon used the Third Sacred War to Infiltrate Greek Politics and Establish Macedonia as a Greek State," focuses on questions of political and cultural identity, transnationalism, central and northern Greek politics in the fourth century, military history, and religious history. She spent two summers working with the archaeology team Archaeotek in Rapolt, Romania on the excavation of a Roman villa.  She received a Research/Study Fulbright Grant for the 2016-2017 academic year to study at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, Bulgaria, and to conduct research at four archaeological sites in Bulgaria and Romania.  She will examine the relationship between Thracian and Greek cults of Apollo at these sites, and create GIS images of artifacts. As a reciprocal benefit to these Bulgarian and Romanian communities, she will map the sites for local museums to promote tourism to these areas.

You can access her Academia page at: https://utah.academia.edu/KMower. 

Alexandria Waltz grew up in Southern California and has lived in Utah for the past ten years. She received a dual Bachelor's degree in History and English from Weber State University and a Master's in History from the University of Utah. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Utah in US History. Alexandria specializes in the 20th century, particularly in youth studies. For the dissertation, she is examining youth subcultures in Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s. This project has also remained her primary research focus as a Burton Fellow. After the PhD, Alexandria would ideally like to pursue a history teaching position on the university level.  

Jessica Young graduated summa cum laude in 2014 with her Bachelor of Arts in History and a minor in Religious Studies from The Ohio State University.  Jessica studies American religious history and gender in the nineteenth century. She focuses on questions of religion and identity formation, women in religion, religion as it creates lifestyles and communities, and religion’s influence on the lives of ordinary people. While utilizing the Dean L. May Fellowship she created two original research papers entitled “The Power of Words: Plural Wives’ Rhetoric About Polygamy During the Mormon Underground” and “The Mormon Underground and Its Challenges to Victorian Masculinity.” Thanks to the generous Dean L. May Fellowship Jessica will earn her Masters of Arts in History in 2016. She plans to pursue work in museums so she can share her passion for and knowledge of US religious history with the public.

Justin Bray is a Ph.D. student in U.S. history. His research explores the intersection of old age and religion in America. He has received awards for his research from the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, the Department of Religion at Florida State University, and the Mormon History Association. Justin is a historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, working primarily with its oral history program.

Justin Bray is a Ph.D. student in U.S. history. His research explores the intersection of old age and religion in America. He has received awards for his research from the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, the Department of Religion at Florida State University, and the Mormon History Association. Justin is a historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, working primarily with its oral history program.

Beans Velocci was the 2013-2014 May Fellow and 2014-2015 Burton Scholar. Before coming to the U, Beans earned a BA cum laude in History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College in Northampton, MA. They received departmental honors for a thesis entitled “‘A Very Threatened and Nervous Group of People’: Public Scrutiny of Sexuality at Smith College in Two Historical Moments.” Beans again focused on gender and sexuality at the U, with a new interest in childhood, the family, and labor. Their MA thesis was called “‘Prosperous, But Too Sophisticated’: Labor, Capitalism, and Endangering the Morals of a Child Cases in New York City, 1881-1920.” Beans is currently working on a PhD at Yale University, where they continue to pursue questions related to gender and sexuality in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an effort to not be altogether consumed by academic things, Beans also spends large amounts of time running on roads and trails, traveling to cabins in forested regions, and reading the complete works of various American women poets.

Cindy Solomon-Klebba is completing her dissertation and teaching a variety of settings. While writing and research are important, it is her passion for teaching that prompted her to pursue a PhD.

Cindy earned her B.A. (With Highest Distinction) and M.A. in history from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Along with working as a student Cindy also serves as pastor to a local church and a social activist. Her wife of 24 years and her teenage daughter also help to motivate her in her work.

Cindy’s dissertation focuses on the Girl Scouts and their response to social change.  This also reflects her interest in women’s history and gender studies. The plan is to complete the dissertation by Spring of 2020 and to begin the next chapter of life with her graduate degrees.

Nels Abrams is a PhD candidate from Spokane, Washington. He attended the University of Washington as an undergraduate, where he earned a degree in the Comparative History of Ideas.  At the University of Utah he continues to explore the relationship between ideas and culture in a historical context. His first project dealt with the changing landscape of public parks as the nation left behind Victorianism and entered the Progressive Era. Currently, he is investigating the return of biological analyses in the social sciences during the 1970s after that lens of inquiry had become taboo in academia following the atrocities of the holocaust. Upon completion of his doctorate, Nels hopes to develop as a teacher and to find new intellectual projects.

My name is Leighton Quarles. I grew up in southwest Montana and received a BA in History from Montana State University in 2007 before moving to the University of Alaska Fairbanks for an MA in Northern Studies with a concentration in Northern History. I became involved in public history while in Fairbanks and decided to come to Utah to pursue a PhD in US history with emphases in the American West, Latin America, and Public History. The Burton Fellowship has made getting a PhD fiscally possible rather than just a pipe dream, and has helped me not only in my PhD studies overall but also in receiving a graduate certificate in Historic Preservation and presenting material at professional conferences. I have been doubly fortunate at Utah—first in my receipt of the Burton Fellowship, and second in my tenure as assistant director of the American West Center under the auspices of Dr. Gregory Smoak. What really excites me is studying the West’s land and its peoples and trying to foster harmony and cooperation through better knowledge of different and intersecting pasts, something I hope to address in my dissertation, an administrative history of Zion National Park. I look forward to moving from the U into the cultural resources/public history field equipped to succeed in federal, state, or military cultural resources programs.

Travis E. Ross (PhD, 2017) currently holds an appointment as a Lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University, where he teaches courses about the North American West. Titled “History, Inc.—Hubert Howe Bancroft’s History Company and the Problem of Selling the Past,” Ross’s dissertation won the department’s 2017 dissertation prize as well as the 2019 Phyllis Dain Library History Dissertation Award from the American Library Association. In his final year in the program, Ross worked for the Utah Division of State History as the project manager, research historian, lead author, and co-curator of Utah Drawn: An Exhibition of Rare Maps, which won the 2018 Autry Public Prize from the Western History Association.

Ross benefitted from generous support as a graduate student at the U, including the department’s Dean L. May Graduate Fellowship (2011–2013), a Floyd A. O’Neil Fellow at the American West Center (2012–2013), a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center (2014–2015), and an Ellen Christina Steffensen Cannon Graduate Scholar (2015–2017).

Anyone interested in contacting him can find his current CV and contact information at traviseross.com.

Jennifer Macias is originally from Fort Collins, Colorado, where she attended Colorado State University and received both her BA and MA in History, with an emphasis in Latin American history. She currently studies twentieth-century Latinx and United States History. Her dissertation investigates the ways in which Latinxs in the post-World War II era have fundamentally altered the political, social and cultural terrain of the Rocky Mountain West. Her areas of specialization include Latin American history, Gender Studies, and Latinx Studies. She has presented at various historical conferences, including the American Historical Association, the Western History Association and the Western Association of Women Historians. Her work has been graciously supported by research fellowships from the University of Utah’s American West Center, the Brigham Young University Charles Redd Center, the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, and the University of Utah History Department.

Samuel Newton has worked for both prosecuting and public defender organizations in Utah and Montana. He is a licensed attorney in Colorado, Montana, and Utah. He has represented several people who have been charged with and sentenced to death, which have been the most challenging cases of his career. He is a former professor of criminal justice at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah and the author of a book on criminal evidence and several articles on criminal law-related topics. His research areas of interest include civil disobedience, peace studies, and the death penalty.

He thrives on everything outdoors, especially backpacking, skiing, and rock climbing, and loves his family, including his wife, kids and an ever-growing number of foster and adopted children.

Ramazan Hakki Oztan is an historian of the modern Middle East, with a research interest on the late Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East. A native of Turkey, I have a BA in English from Hacettepe University (Ankara) and a MA in History from the University of Wyoming (Laramie). I was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the New Europe College (Bucharest) in Spring 2015. I completed my dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Peter Sluglett and will graduate in Spring 2016. My dissertation explores the late nineteenth-century connections between the expansion of global commodity chains, increased availability of illicit goods, and those who made political fortunes out of their contentious trade. My dissertation reconstructs a history of what I call ‘alternative marketplaces’ as a background to the often violent political transformations that marked the late Ottoman period, highlights complex connections between state-making and illicit economic practices, and problematizes the impact of global economy on nationalism. With a geographic focus on the Ottoman Balkans, I am interested in capturing the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century ways of attaining and circulating guns, cartridges, chemicals, bombs, monies, personnel, and propaganda materials. I explore how the introduction of such novel technologies and illicit commodities came to create an unregulated site of political economy in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Balkans. In doing so, my work highlights more material conditions behind what is often seen as ideological processes of political change. Analytically, my approach moves beyond the local and regional terms of engagement and situates the late Ottoman Balkans within a constantly evolving and entangled world history context.

Nathan Lassen Jones is from El Dorado Hills, California, a suburb of Sacramento. He received his B.A. in history from the University of California at Davis and an M.A. in history from California State University, Fresno. His general area of interest is American history. Within that broad field, Nathan is particularly drawn to the history of religious and political thought, and frequently to the blending of the two. His current dissertation research examines Mormon political thought in twentieth-century America.