Current War & Society Graduate Students

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For a listing of former Dale Center graduate students and their current placement, see our graduate placement page.

	James M. Berry (Ph.D., U.S. History) MA in Military History, Norwich University, 2016; MEd in Education, Anderson University, 2011; BA in History, Pensacola Christian College, 2008. Email James is a PhD candidate focusing on US Army history, specifically Army logistics between the Spanish American War and the First World War. He is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest. James' previous graduate research focused on the military history of South Carolina. He is a native of South Carolina and an active duty U.S. Army logistics officer with previous assignments in Fort Stewart, Fort Lee, Germany, Kuwait, and Iraq. James has traveled extensively through Europe and speaks French proficiently. James is currently serving as an academic instructor in the History Department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Prior to joining the U.S. Army, James was a high school history and geography teacher.
	Lucas Campbell (MA, Military History) BA, History, Texas A&M University, 2023. Email Lucas Campbell is an Master's student from Katy, Texas who graduated cum laude from Texas A&M University with a major in history and minors in both English and anthropology. For his senior research project as an undergraduate, Lucas explored the battlefield maneuvers and conditions that led to the French defeat at the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. At at Southern Miss, he will focus on the First World War, specifically on the development of military technology during the conflict. He is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest.
	Gaines Cleveland (MA, History) BA, History, University of Southern Mississippi, 2022. Email Gaines is an Master’s student focusing on contemporary American military doctrine and defense policy. He is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest. Gaines graduated magna cum laude from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Park campus in 2022 with a BA in History and a minor in Political Science. His senior thesis, “Disease and Disaster: The Decisions Which Devastated Vicksburg’s Garrison Before and During the City’s Siege,” evaluated the choices made by Confederate generals and government officials as they pertained to the health of the Army of Mississippi in the summer of 1863 and their significance to the siege’s outcome.
	Oscar J. Coles (PhD, US History) MSc American History, University of Edinburgh (UK), 2018 ; BA Hons, Contemporary Military and International History, University of Salford (UK), 2015. Email Oscar is an international PhD candidate from the United Kingdom. His previous research focused on military psychiatry and the psychological experience of combat during the Second World War. Under the supervision of Dr. Heather Stur, Oscar’s current research focuses on the material culture and lived experiences of the North Vietnamese Army/ People’s Army of Vietnam, during the conflict with the United States. Oscar has twice been the recipient of the John E. Gonzales History Study Abroad Scholarship and has spent time in Hanoi and Da Nang learning Vietnamese. Prior to beginning his PhD studies, Oscar spent two years in China teaching English.
	Bearington Curtis (PhD, US History) MA, History, Texas A&M University-Central Texas, 2020; BA, History, Texas A&M University-Central Texas, 2013. Email Bear is a PhD candidate whose primary interest in history is the U.S. Army, with a focus on how the Army has historically prepared for future conflicts. His MA thesis, "A Sisyphean Task: Reevaluating Reconstruction in Texas," examined the U.S. Army's role in Texas during Reconstruction. Bea is currently interested in the development and changes made to the National Guard and Army Reserve in the period between the World Wars. He is working under the direction of Drs. Kevin Greene and Andrew Wiest. In 2024-2025, Bear Curtis is serving as the Dale Center/Center for Military History Fellow in Washington, DC.
	Daniel Driss (Ph.D., U.S. History) MS, Organizational Leadership, Columbus State University, 2019; BA in History, Northern Arizona University, 2012. Email Daniel is a PhD candidate focusing on US Army history, specifically army cavalry and armor formations. At USM, he is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest. His previous graduate research focused on the practical application of Servant Leadership while serving as a Commanding Officer in a Combat Arms formation. He is a native of Arizona and an active-duty U.S. Army armor officer with previous assignments at Fort Stewart, Fort Riley, Fort Benning, Fort Irwin, the Republic of Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Daniel served as an enlisted infantryman for ten years, including three combat tours; while serving he pursued his undergraduate degree and was admitted to Officer Candidate School, where he was commissioned as an armor officer and subsequently assigned to a series of tank units. He has finished graduate coursework and his comprehensive exams at USM. Daniel is currently serving as an academic instructor in the History Department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
	Nicholas Garrett (MA, War and Society; Graduate Certificate in Public History) BA, History, Arkansas Tech University, 2021. Email Nicholas was born in Wyoming, Minnesota, but spent most of his life in Judsonia, Arkansas. He graduated summa cum laude from Arkansas Tech University in 2021 with a BA in History and a minor in German. His senior research project compared the experiences of British and Commonwealth medical personnel and soldiers on the Salonica Front of World War I. Nicholas is working on a MA thesis on the 409th Regiment of the 103rd Infantry Division in World War II under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest.
	Sarah Anne Hogue (PhD, U.S. History) MA in U.S. History, University of Southern Mississippi, 2021. BA in History, BA in English Writing, minor in Public History, summa cum laude with honors, Mississippi College, 2019. Email Sarah is a PhD candidate at USM, whose interests focus on 17th- and 18th-century colonial American history with a specific focus on gender. Her research examines how and to what extent the legal doctrine of coverture—a legal classification that severely limited married women’s legal rights to own property—functioned in the colonial period in New England. She is working under the direction of Dr. Kyle Zelner to expand on the research in her Master’s thesis, “Women Under Colonial Coverture: Divorce, Property Rights, and Inheritance in Early Massachusetts, 1630-1690.” Specifically, Sarah wants to examine the effect that various colonial wars had on coverture, women’s property rights, and the availability of divorce. In 2020, Sarah won an American History Education Award from the Mississippi Chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America for her work on colonial American history. Sarah is the 2024-2025 Pat and Jean Welsh Dale Center Graduate Fellow. She is also the Project Director of the Dale Center's 103rd Infantry Division Digital Humanities Project.
	Riley Houston (MA, History) BA, History, Millsaps College, 2022. Email Riley Houston is an Master’s student from Madison, Mississippi, who graduated magna cum laude from Millsaps College, where she majored in history with a minor in anthropology. Her undergraduate honors project, “Civil War Nurses and the Cult of True Womanhood,” examined female nurses during the American Civil War and the ways in which they inverted Antebellum gender ideology. For her senior thesis, she researched the militant women’s group Cumann na mBan, their contributions during the Irish Revolution of 1916, and the state of women’s rights in Ireland after the end of the Irish Civil War. For her Master's thesis, Riley plans to examine the ways in which the backlash to women's antiwar movements in America have contributed to women's rights being restricted in the post-war era.
	Caleb Lead (PhD, History) MA, World History, SUNY College at Brockport, 2022; BA, History, Saint John Fischer College, 2019; AD, Humanities, Finger Lakes Community College, 2017. Email Caleb is a PhD student from East Palmyra, New York. His current research interests focus on how Russia’s military culture and socio-cultural factors influenced its wartime brutality towards its opponents, especially against civilian populations, including in the current war in Ukraine. Caleb’s Master’s Thesis, “Forgotten Axis: A Motivational Evaluation of Swedish, Spanish, and Romanian Fighter on the Eastern Front of World War II,” explored the motivations of three non-German Axis formations fighting the Soviets in World War II. He argued that all three nations’ forces possessed unique internal and fundamentally different reasons for fighting the Soviets and that these often conflicted with their allies' dominant Nazi narratives of combat. In 2023, Lead presented a version of this thesis at the Pi Alpha Theta Conference at LaMoyne University. Caleb won the Terry Gore Prize Winning Paper Research Award in Military History at SUNY Brockport for his paper, “The Killing Field of 1864: How the Overland Campaign of the American Civil War Changed Warfare.” The paper focused on the development of tactics and approach that, while alien at the time, would come to dominate American wartime doctrine and thinking for decades to come.
	Andrew Leib (MA and PhD in Military History) BA in International Studies and Political Science, Virginia Military Institute, 2016. Email Andrew is a MA and PhD student studying in preparation for an assignment as a History Department academic instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His research interests include the study of the history of U.S. Army strategy and preparation for large scale combat operations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Andrew is a native of Pennsylvania and a 2016 Distinguished Military Graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. He is an active duty US Army military intelligence officer with previous assignments at Fort Stewart, the Republic of Korea, Fort Jackson, Fort Huachuca, and Fort Johnson.
	Justin Major (PhD, U.S. History) MA, U.S. History, University of Southern Mississippi, 2020; BA, History and Film and Media Arts, magna cum laude, Louisiana State University, 2017. Email At LSU, Justin won the McCormick Prize for the best undergraduate paper in military history at the 2018 Missouri Valley History Conference. His research focuses on the Vietnam War, particularly the history of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in the early 1960s. For his MA at USM, he examined the effectiveness of ARVN combat operations from 1962-1963, arguing that ARVN was more successful than previously believed. For his PhD, he will continue his research into ARVN under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest. In 2022-2023, Justin completed a historical research fellowship with the U.S. Army's Center for Military History in Washington, DC.
	Anamarie Rangel (MA. War and Society; Graduate Certificate in Public History) BA, History, Angelo State University, 2022. Email Anamarie is an Master's student from San Angelo, Texas. She attended Angelo State University where she earned her BA in History in 2022. During her undergraduate years, Anamarie served as co-editor and co-founder of an undergraduate journal in history and geography: The Santa Angela Review. She also interpreted Texas and U.S. frontier history as a living historian/reenactor at Fort Concho National Historic Landmark. Anamarie is studying the connections between navalism, nationalism, and imperialism in the U.S. and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Anamarie's research focuses on the role of Buffalo Soldiers in the Philippine-American War, comparing their nation-building efforts on the western frontier and in the Philippines. Anamarie is working under the direction of Dr. Heather Stur. After graduation, she hopes to work in the field of public history.
	Travis Salley (PhD, U.S. History) MM in Music History, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 2015; BA in Music (in cursu honorum), University of Nevada-Reno, 2013). Email Travis is a PhD candidate focusing on US military cultural history, specifically regarding US military marching cadences and their impact on military culture through a racial and gendered lens. He is studying under the direction of Dr. Heather Stur. Travis is a classical pianist and musicologist. His master’s thesis, “Sound Off! An Introduction of the Study of American Military Marching Cadences,” was featured in the NPR radio show "A Way with Words" and has been referenced in an article from the U.S. Embassy Japan official magazine. He has also presented a paper at the American Musicological Conference. Travis is active-duty Army Signal officer, with past assignments in Puerto Rico, Marshall Islands, Korea, Fort Stewart, Fort Jackson, and Fort Huachuca. Having finishing his coursework, Capt. Salley is currently assigned as History Instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
	Christian Singletary (MA, War and Society) BA, History, Louisiana State University of Alexandria, 2023. Email Christian graduated with a major in history and a minor in political science from Louisiana State University of Alexandria. While an undergraduate, Christian interned at the Southern Forest Heritage Museum in Longleaf, Louisiana, which furthered his research in the intermingling of war and society in the southern United States. Christian’s current research interests center on how American war and society evolved from 1860 to 1960, in particular how America changed between the Civil War and after World War II. Christian is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest.
	Abel Ugwu (MA, History) BA, History, University of Nigeria, 2021. %C2%A0Email Abel is from Enugu, Nigeria, and studied for his bachelor's in history at the University of Nigeria. Abel's BA thesis focused on the gender relations among academics in Southeastern Nigeria at the end of the Nigeria-Biafranan War in 1970. As an undergraduate, Abel worked as a research assistant for his undergraduate mentor: processing archival materials, arranging interviews for oral histories, and photocopying primary and secondary source materials. At Southern Miss, Abel plans to examine a significant aspect of Nigeria’s colonial history. Using colonial Eastern Nigeria as a case study, his research will focus on understanding how the colonial police were utilized as an administrative apparatus that provided coercive backing to the legal provisions that enhanced colonial consolidation and longevity in Nigeria as well as in wider British West Africa. he is working under the direction of Dr. Bafumiki Mocheregwa.
	Jackson Volkert (MA, History) BA, History and Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi, 2023. Email Jack Volkert is a Florida native and master's student whose current research interests primarily include military history topics of the mid- to late-twentieth century, with interests ranging from the Air War in the Pacific Theater of World War 2 to Warsaw Pact military doctrine and force organization theory from the 1960s-80s. Jack graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with two bachelor degrees, one in history and the other in political science. His undergraduate history capstone project was a unit history of the African-American 92nd Infantry Division during World War 2 and how its combat history in Italy was affected by racism.
	Daniel Ward (PhD, U.S. History) MA, History, SUNY University, 2019; BA, History and Political Science, SUNY Fredonia, 2015. Email Daniel is a PhD candidate from Buffalo, New York. His area of study is war and society in the 20th Century United States. As an Master's student at the University at Buffalo, his thesis, “Armed Services Unification on Trial: The 1949 National Defense Program Hearings and the Development of Cold War Defense Policy,” analyzed civilian-military relations in the Truman administration and the development of the modern national security state. Daniel's current research examines marriages between American GIs and Vietnamese women throughout the Vietnam War. His project concentrates on the development and implementation of marital policy in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Daniel has presented research at many academic conferences. He is working under the direction of Dr. Heather Stur. Daniel was recently awarded the prestigious 2024-2025 U.S. Army' Center for Military History's Dissertation Fellowship. Daniel was the 2022-2023 Pat and Jean Welsh Dale Center Graduate Fellow.
	Brian Washam (PhD, U.S. History) MA, History, University of Southern Mississippi, 2022; BA, History, University of Oklahoma, 2019. Email Brian is from Vinita, Oklahoma and is a second year Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Mississippi. He received his BA in History from the University of Oklahoma and his M.A. in history from the University of Southern Mississippi. Brian's Master's thesis examined at the motivation of Vietnam veterans to return to Vietnam as tourists and their experiences during their trips. As a Ph.D. student, Brian is interested in exploring the ways that Vietnam veterans may have fostered improvements in international relations between the US and Vietnam in the aftermath of the conflict by returning to Vietnam on good-will missions. He is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest.
	Dallas Williamson (MA, History) BA, History and English, University of Southern Mississippi 2023. Email Dallas is a Master’s student focusing on British and American War and Society from 1870 – 1950. Her current research focus is centered on the active role of American and British women in World War I, both on the home front and abroad. She is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest. Dallas’s senior capstone project at USM concerned the impact of WWII on the community of Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as how its home front experience differed from that of the continental United States.
	James Witkoski (PhD, U.S. History) MA, History, Rowan University, 2022; Certificate of Graduate Studies in Holocaust and Genocide Education, 2022; BA, History, Rowan University, 2017. Email James is a PhD student from Marlton, NJ. He attended Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ where he earned both his BA and MA in History, as well as a Certificate of Graduate Studies in Holocaust and Genocide Education. Most of his research has focused on Polish-Jewish relations during World War II. As a doctoral student, James plans to research the disconnect in the chain of command in the US Army from a bottom-up perspective during the Vietnam War, and how after-action reports and other intelligence was altered as it went up the chain of command (preferably from the company level upwards). Based on this flawed intelligence as it went up the chain of command, James hopes his research will make clear if divisional and other military commanders were hindered in their ability to adequately plan and respond to what was happening in the field at the tactical level. James is studying under the direction of Drs. Heather Stur and Andrew Wiest.