Graduate Research

Students in the MA program at Old Dominion University complete original research projects, often resulting in a thesis. Using primary sources from archives, records repositories, and digital databases that they locate, organize, and analyze to produce new findings in their field. Their investigations are supervised by Department faculty, and the final theses are available via the ODU library and/or ODU's Digital Commons.

Some of the most recent examples of student research theses are listed below:

2022

• Southerners on New Ground: The Battle for Civil War Memory Since 1993 by Andrew William Hoffman

2020

• "Pueblo Sovereignty and Voting Rights: Miguel Trujillo and a New Tactic for Self-Determination," by Alexander Bright
• "'In-Betweening' Disney: An Animated History of Hollywood Labor and Ideological Imagineering, 1935-1947," by Bradley Moore
• "Peaceful Collaboration: The Truman Administration's Response to the Costa Rican Revolution of 1948 and the Costa Rica-Nicaragua Crisis of 1948-1949," by James Wilkerson

2019

• "Interpreting the Other: Natives, Missionaries, and Colonial Authority in New England, 1643-1675," by Violet Galante
• "'Mixed Up in the Coal Camp': Interethnic, Family, and Community Exchanges in Matewan During the West Virginia Mine Wars, 1900-1922," by Lela Dawn Gourley

2018

• "'For the Homeland': Die Deutsche Hausfrau and Reader Responses to World War I," by Julie Sliva Davis

2017

• "Black Gold: Molly Maguireism, Unionism, and the Anthracite Labor Wars, 1860-1880," by Samantha Edmiston
• "Changing the Message: Battered Women's Advocates and their Fight Against Domestic Violence at the Local, State, and Federal Level, 1970s-1990s," by Clara Amy Van Eck

2016

• "Displaying Race at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition," by Bryan Patrick Bennett
• "Boys of the Maple Leaf," by Maggie Kontra Emmens
• "See and Hear James 'Catfish' Cole: Identity, Manhood, and the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, 1952-1967," by John School Hinton
• "Achieving Sourdough Status: The Diary, Photographs, and Letters of Samuel Baker Dunn, 1898-1899," by Robert Nicholas Melatti
• "'Elite Assault': The 85th Infantry Division in Italy, 1944-1945," by Charles Ross Patterson II

2015

• "Residential Segregation in Norfolk, Virginia: How the Federal Government Reinforced Racial Division in a Southern City, 1914-1959," by Kevin Lang Ringelstein
• "Employee Opportunism in Two Early Modern British Trading Companies," by Robert Franklin Unger

2014

• "Set Adrift by the Confederacy: the Civil War Occupation of Virginia's Eastern Shore," by Paige Kelly Solomon
• "The Role of Agricultural and Land Policies in the Failure of the British Mandate for Palestine," by Beth Ann Lynx
• "Bracero Families: Mexican Women and Children in the United States, 1942-64," by Rachael F. Delacruz
• "The World of Goods in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia," Ronald C. Merritt

2013

• "Strike a Pose: Propaganda in Augustus' and Mussolini's Imperial Imagery," by Coleen Syler Parker
• "Ecclesiastical Homogeny and Splintering Spirituality: White Ecumenical Christianity and the Church in Norfolk, Virginia's Civil Rights Movement," by Joshua Wesley Wilson

2012

• "The Pacific War Crimes Trials: The Importance of the 'Small Fry' vs. the 'Big Fish'," by Lisa Kelly Pennington
• "The Forgotten Sixty-Ninth New York National Guard Artillery Regiment in the American Civil War," by Christopher M. Garcia

2011

• "Richmond Iron: Tredegar's Role in Southern Industry during the Civil War and Reconstruction," by Lisa Hilleary
• "The Death of Jefferson Davis," by Kasey J. Dell
• "The Bound 'Giddy Multitude': Runaway Indentured Servants, Convicts, and Slaves in Colonial Virginia," by Nicole K. Dressler