The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon welcomes our thirteenth class of research fellows for the 2026-27 academic year. Their research helps us better understand the history of colonial America, the Revolutionary era, and the early American republic.
David Armstrong
Family Imperialism: The Mason Family of Virginia and the Expansion of the American Empire, 1787-1861
Armstrong is a Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University and a Graduate Research Assistant for the Center for Mason Legacies (CML). The focus of his research pertains to the family of George Mason IV (the university's namesake) and its role in the imperial endeavors of the United States. He is CML's lead researcher in developing a dataset for Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (enslaved.org), an iterative project that seeks to identify all of the people enslaved by the Mason family from 1773 through 1865.
Richard Bell, Ph.D.
The First American Civil War: Patriots, Loyalists, and the Battle for America
Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He is the author of the book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale, Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and is the recipient of the National Endowment of the Humanities Public Scholar award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His new book, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, published by Penguin, recently won the Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Award. He maintains a list of upcoming events at Richard-Bell.com.
Edward J. Blum, Ph.D.
A Republic that Counts: How Numbers Broke the British Empire and Created an American One
Blum is professor of history at San Diego State University and the project director of the "American Revolution and Constitution History Project" (ARCH). After two decades studying race and religion in United States history, his research now focuses on the role of numerical information in the making and development of the early republic, with particular attention to how figures such as George Washington gathered, interpreted, and deployed quantitative data in governance and state-building. His project examines how numbers, mathematics, and data visualization shaped the American Revolution, structured racial hierarchies within the national government, destabilized the Articles of Confederation, enabled the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, connected everyday Americans to the federal government, and contributed to Thomas Jefferson’s electoral victory in 1800 and the subsequent Louisiana Purchase.
James J. Broomall, Ph.D.
The Fabric of Enslavement: Slave Cloth and Clothing from 1760 to 1860
Broomall holds the William Binford Vest Chair in the Department of History at the University of Richmond. He co-edited Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom (2016), and is the author of Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers (2019). He has completed three major historic resource studies for National Park Service sites, which included extensive research about Black communities in Virginia and Maryland during the eighteenth- and nineteenth- centuries. He is currently completing a manuscript, Battle Pieces: The Art and Artifacts of the American Civil War Era, that uses material and visual culture to explore representations of conflict and death. He directed the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University, in West Virginia, for nearly a decade and previously served on the faculty of the University of North Florida and Virginia Tech.
Frank Cogliano, Ph.D.
Thomas Jefferson Believes: Faith and Politics
Frank Cogliano is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. A specialist in the history of the American Revolution and the early United States, he is the author or editor of twelve books. In April 2026 the University of Virginia Press published The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-four Historians Reflect on the Founding which he edited. In June he and Peter S. Onuf will publish Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours with Norton/Liveright. His 2024 book: Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic (Harvard University Press) was a finalist for the 2025 George Washington Prize. Along with Patrick Griffin, Christa Dierksheide and Eliga Gould he edits the Revolutionary Age series for the University of Virginia Press. He co-hosts the American history podcast The Whiskey Rebellion and makes regular media appearances, commenting on U.S. history, politics and international relations, for the BBC and other outlets.
Recipient of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Senior Fellowship in Political History, the Presidency, and Constitutional Thought
Vernon Creviston, Ph.D.
Lawrence Washington: the Life and Times of a Virginia Planter
Creviston is a Lecturer at California State University where he teaches general education survey courses on US History. His academic focus is primarily on the American Revolution and he has published an article on the Quebec Act and its impact on breaking the bond between American colonists and the British monarchy. While at Mount Vernon, he will continue research into the life and legacy of George Washington's oldest brother Lawrence Washington.
Zachary W. Deibel, Ph.D.
The American Revolutionary Curriculum War
Deibel is Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute where he teaches courses on United States History, the American Revolution, and the Atlantic World. He previously served as a secondary Social Studies teacher for seven years before earning his doctorate in history at Binghamton University. His research explores the intertwined histories of learning and politics in eighteenth-century America.
Dan Du
American Tea Consumption after the Revolution
Du is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2017. Her research focuses on the business history of China and the United States, tea consumption, and credit instruments. Her first book, This World in a Teacup: Credit, Taste, and Power in the U.S.-China Tea Trade, 1784-1911, will be published in August 2026. Her research has been funded by multiple external research fellowships from such institutions as NEH, Massachusetts Historical Society, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Smithsonian National Museum of American History, among others. She has also published articles in Early American Studies, Modern World History Studies (in Chinese), and The Silk Roads: From Local Realities to Global Narratives.
Andrew R. English, Ph.D.
Washington’s Southern Intelligence Network and the Road to Yorktown, September 1780-September 1781
English served as a senior intelligence analyst with several major firms in the Washington DC area and in the United Kingdom. A retired decorated U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, he served in the Pacific, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East, supporting aerial targeting, as well as national-level and coalition intelligence, receiving the Bronze Star Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters, and official commendation from the Japanese Defense Intelligence Headquarters. He received a Ph.D. in History from the University of Exeter (UK) in 2016, and is the author of five books. At Mount Vernon, he will focus on intelligence General Washington received regarding Lord Cornwallis and the British winter encampment at Winnsboro, South Carolina in 1780 and 1781. He will also research intelligence reporting Continental forces received during the renewed Southern campaign in the Carolinas and Virginia, prior to the fateful encounter at Yorktown in September of that year.
Alisha Gaines, Ph.D.
Children of the Plantationocene
Gaines is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Duke University and previously held a Carter G. Woodson Postdoctoral Fellowship at UVA before serving as the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in African American Studies at Florida State University. Her first book, Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy (2017), examines the political limits of empathy through narratives of racial impersonation. A student of Black Souths, she is currently completing her second manuscript, Children of the Plantationocene, which explores Black American origin stories and what we collectively inherit from the plantation. The project is shaped by her ongoing work at Evergreen Plantation, where she co-founded the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School, and her nearly 40 (and counting) pilgrimages to plantation sites across the Southeast.
Recipient of the Black Women United for Action Fellowship
Jamie L. H. Goodall, Ph.D.
Taverns, Trade, and Trust: Commercial Networks and Social Capital in the Chesapeake Bay Region, 1650-1800
Goodall is a historian with expertise in piracy, privateering, and irregular warfare located in Washington, D.C. She earned her Ph.D. in History from The Ohio State University with specializations in Atlantic World, Early American, and Military histories. Her publications include Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (2020); National Geographic's Pirates: Shipwrecks, Conquests, and Their Lasting Legacies (2021); Pirates & Privateers from Long Island Sound to Delaware Bay (2022); and The Daring Exploits of Pirate Black Sam Bellamy: From Cape Cod to the Caribbean (2023). She also writes on U.S. Army history, academic mentorship, the experiences of first-gen students, and pedagogy. Goodall has shared her expertise on programs like Mysteries from Above (2022) and History Channel's History's Greatest Mysteries (2024).
Mark Harnitchek
“United with their Native Bravery and Spirit”: George Washington and the Military Culture of the Continental Army
Harnitchek is a Ph.D. student at George Mason University. A career naval officer, he served afloat in submarines, ships, and an aircraft carrier, and ashore in various locations including the Navy and Joint Staffs, with overseas tours in Guam and Japan. He also served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, ultimately retiring as a Vice Admiral in 2015 after 38 years of service. He then worked in the aerospace industry for five years before retiring again in 2020 to pursue an M.A. in history, graduating in 2022. His dissertation argues that General Washington put his own distinctive cultural imprint on the nation’s first army. As General-in-Chief, Washington borrowed certain tactics, strategies, and organizational structures from the British Army, while simultaneously having to create an effective fighting force essentially from scratch. The unique military culture he created sustained America’s first army throughout its eight-year conflict with Great Britain and made it possible for Americans to prevail against the greatest military power in the world at that time.
Catherine Hutinett
Memory’s Mobility: Gender, Space, and the Making of American Nationhood
Hutinett is a Ph.D. candidate at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. Her dissertation, Memory’s Mobility: Gender, Space, and the Making of American Nationhood, explores how the American national story is formed through the connections between commemoration, nationalism, and public history at home and abroad. In addition to her doctoral research, she has worked as a research assistant at George Washington's Mount Vernon, served on local historic preservation campaigns, and is the lead instructor for a summer course in Washington, D.C. on the history and politics of the beltway.
Bethany McGlyn
Work and Be Happy: Craft, Slavery, and Social Reform in Philadelphia, 1780-1840
McGlyn is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate and Jefferson Scholars Foundation Fellow in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia specializing in eighteenth and nineteenth-century craft and material culture in America and the Atlantic World. Her research project explores how craft labor emerged as central to debates over gradual abolition laws, colonization schemes, and the founding and management of reform institutions like prisons and orphanages in early national Philadelphia. She is also a curator and public historian with experience working at museums and historic sites including the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at UVA, Historic Rock Ford, Winterthur, Historic Annapolis, and the National Parks Service.
George D. Oberle, Ph.D.
Constructing American Histories: Building the Counter Archive in the United States
Oberle holds a Ph.D. in history. He currently serves as the History Librarian at George Mason University and has held several librarian faculty appointments since 2004. He also teaches courses as an Associate (term) Professor in the Department of History and Art History at GMU. His scholarship focuses on the creation and dissemination of knowledge in the United States. His recently published book Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic examines the political debates over what kind of knowledge institutions would best to promote an informed citizenry in the United States. As the Director of the Center for Mason Legacies, he collaborates with a team of scholars who explore the stories of marginalized communities in the DMV area from the colonial period to the present.
Sandra Rebok, Ph.D.
George Washington and New Spain: Diplomacy, Frontier Policy, and the Pacific Trade
Rebok is a historian and cultural scientist specializing in 18th and 19th-century intellectual networks, transnational cooperation, scientific exploration voyages, and imperial expansion. Her research focuses on the connections between the U.S. nation-building process and the Spanish Empire in North America. She is a Senior Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies within the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She also serves as a Research Associate in the History Department at the University of San Diego and as a Lecturer at Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Rebok has over 20 years of scholarship on Alexander von Humboldt, Thomas Jefferson, and other leading minds of the Enlightenment. She is developing the field of global and interconnected history through her new book project, which analyzes Jefferson’s strategic pursuits in the Spanish and Mexican Southwest.
Veronica Spicer
Compass to Capital: George Washington's Surveys and the Shaping of Virginia
Spicer holds a bachelor's and master's degree in history from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where her work focused on early American history. Her research specialties include social networks, cartography, and the ways in which physical space defines culture and politics. In addition to her academic work, she completed the first full English translation of Organt: A Poem in Twenty Cantos, reflecting her engagement with language and lesser-known texts. Her work emphasizes critical interpretation of unconventional or overlooked sources to better understand the past.
Maurizio Valsania, Ph.D.
Inside the Marble: George Washington’s Emotions and the Invention of American Presidency
Valsania is Professor of American History at the University of Turin, Italy. A specialist in the intellectual and cultural history of the Early American Republic, his work explores the Founders within their social, intellectual, and material contexts, with particular attention to the culture of sensibility and the eighteenth-century body. He is the author of The Limits of Optimism (2011), Nature’s Man (2013), Jefferson’s Body (2017), and First Among Men (2022), which was awarded the George Washington Prize. He has held fellowships from institutions including the American Antiquarian Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon. His writing has appeared in publications such as Academic Insights for the Thinking World (Oxford University Press), Oxford Bibliographies Online, and major media outlets including USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Salon, and The Conversation.
