Graduate Student Research Updates

In 2019, Jillian Glantz completed a feature length documentary entitled Remember My Soul, which unearths the Jewish history and traditions of the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. The film traces the Jewish diaspora to Mexico resulting from the Spanish Inquisition, the migration north to the Texas-Mexico borderlands, and the crypto-Jewish customs that still appear in the region today.

Remember My Soul is housed at several Texas universities, and is archived at the Library of Congress, where patrons can view the film in the Motion Picture Reading Room. Jillian continues to show the film at screenings around Texas and presents her accompanying research at conferences. This past summer, Jillian was invited as a guest keynote speaker and awardee of the Martin Sosin Stratton-Petit Foundation Award by the Society for Crypto-Jewish Studies.

As a member of the Society of Civil War Historians Graduate Connections Committee, I work alongside other graduate students in the field of Civil War and Reconstruction Era to provide professional development opportunities. With monthly meetings, our committee produces workshops and writings groups to help graduate students succeed in their career, and we especially help SCWH address the needs and concerns of graduate students. The highlight of SCWH Graduate Connection Committee is organizing a luncheon at the SCWH Biennial Conference, where we encourage and foster relationships between graduate students and scholars.

My experience with the Society of Civil War Historians Graduate Connections Committee has so far been such a great learning experience. I have particularly enjoyed getting to know the peers I work alongside with, who are all graduate students at different universities. This service has given me the opportunity to network with many scholars, and has allowed me to be more involved in organizations beyond Texas A&M.

In the summer of 2023, Regan Murr interned at the Texas A&M University Press. Being able to work at the Press offered a unique opportunity to explore the inner workings of academic publishing and to gain valuable experience in the industry. Regan interned in the editorial department where she became involved in the peer review process. She solicited reviews, packaged manuscript materials, and tracked the progress of manuscripts throughout the publication process. Not only was Regan given the opportunity to serve as a point of contact in the peer review process, but she also had the opportunity to proofread and format manuscripts where she learned about the remarkable variety of interdisciplinary works the TAMU Press team publishes.

In addition to working on the manuscripts, members of the TAMU Press walked Regan through the publishing process. Even though her internship focused on the editorial side, Regan learned about the life cycle of each book as it went through the editorial, design, and marketing departments. As an aspiring writer and someone interested in publishing as a career option, this was an invaluable opportunity that taught Regan how to publish a book and how to work within the publishing industry. Regan would like to thank the entire TAMU Press team – particularly Thom Lemmons, Jay Drew, Katie Duelm, and Marguerite Avery – for their kindness and mentorship. It was certainly a wonderful experience that Regan would recommend to anyone looking to publish a book in the future or wanting to explore a career in publishing.

Tanner Ogle was recently awarded the Scottish History Society’s Rosebery Prize for best primary source edition. This award is for work on Scottish Episcopal Bishop Robert Forbes’s extensive marginalia and manuscript additions in his copy of Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland. MDCCLXIX (Warrington, 1774). As a Jacobite (a supporter of the Stuart dynasty), Forbes’s marginalia is key to understanding how Jacobites perceived the Highland Reforms that took place in Scotland after the last Jacobite Rebellion (1745-1746). As Britain’s most destructive conflict since the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639-1653), the ’45 left numerous ruins in Northern England and Scotland. Forbes’s marginalia critically reveals how British provincials and travelers remembered the conflict when they came into contact with these sites of memory. While finding this hitherto unused source would not have been possible without the generous support of Texas A&M’s history department and the endowed history department fellowships, Tanner is also grateful to the Gale-North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) Digital Scholar Lab Fellowship which furthered his research on memories of Jacobitism in the British provinces.

In the past year, Tanner has also presented his work at numerous conferences including the Empire and Its Discontents Conference hosted by the American Philosophical Society and Massachusetts Historical Society, the North American Conference on British Studies, the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, the Jacobite Studies Trust Virtual Workshop, and the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850, where he received the Katherine Aaslestad / Charles Crouch Prize for best graduate student paper.