Bryant Barnes (MA '17, PhD '25) has won the Southern Historical Association’s 2026 C. Vann Woodward Award for the best dissertation in Southern History! The award is given for a dissertation defended in the previous year. Bryant's work is entitled, "Bonded by Debt: Interracial Politics, Railroads, and Capitalism in the Gilded Age South."

Bryant Barnes has a recent published entry in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Lonesome Cowboys Raid, available on the New Georgia Encyclopedia site https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/lonesome-cowboys-raid/. 

Theodora "Tedi" Light (PhD '25) has accepted a position at Reconstruction Era National Park in Beaufort, South Carolina. Tedi said, "NPS job was my dream when I went back to school in 2017." Congratulations!

Keri Leigh Merritt's new book An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America, was published this year by Macmillan Publishers (2026). The publisher notes, 

Lillian Smith was one of the most famous writers in America in the first half of the 20th century, but today she is mostly forgotten. An Inconvenient Woman offers an in-depth portrait of this remarkable woman, whose political and literary legacy has new resonance today, 60 years after her death...Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality. Macmillan.

Nathanael Mickelson (PhD '26) has an article in Enterprise and Society, Vol 27, Issue 2, June 2026, "Salt of the Earth: ABF Freight and Entrepreneurial Processes in American Trucking."

Benjamin Roy (PhD '26), started law school this fall at the University of Chicago's prestigious program, and was awarded the Rachel Nussbaum Scholarship for Animal Rights Law.