Dale Center for the Study of War and Society
Current War & Society Graduate Students
For a listing of former Dale Center graduate students and their current placement, see our graduate placement page.
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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. James is a PhD student 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. His MA thesis was entitled “The Surrender of Charleston in 1780” and examined the American defense during the siege of Charleston and effect of the surrender on the outcome of the American War for Independence. 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. Following his graduate coursework at USM, 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. |
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Lucas Campbell(MA, Military History) BA, History, Texas A&M University, 2023. 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. |
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Gaines Cleveland(MA, History) BA, History, University of Southern Mississippi, 2022. Gaines is an Master’s student focusing on contemporary American military doctrine and defense policy. He 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. |
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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. Oscar is an international student from the United Kingdom. His research interests span numerous themes of 20th century military history. His previous research focused on military psychiatry and the psychological experience of combat during the Second World War. His other research interests include the Vietnam War, conflicts in East Asia and contemporary U.S. military culture. He is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest. Oscar has a fascination with travel and recently spent two years in China teaching English. |
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Bearington Curtis(PhD, US History) MA, History, Texas A&M University-Central Texas, 2020; BA, History,
Texas A&M University-Central Texas, 2013. Bear is a PhD student 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. |
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Julie Custer(Ph.D., History) MDiv., Biblical Studies, Liberty University 2022; BA, History, St. Francis College, 1986. Email Julie is a PhD student from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. While in Philadelphia, she was an interpreter at Independence National Historical Park, which sparked her interest in the nation’s founding and its founders, specifically Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Later, Gettysburg National Military Park became a favorite haunt as Julie began to study the Civil War. Her latest research has led her to study various roles undertaken by women on the American home front during World War II. She intends to continue this research at USM and expand it to include women who served overseas. In keeping with her research interests, her article “Nurses Shine in WWII: Among Thousands of Men, Only 4 Female Caregivers Received Silver Stars“ was published in the July 2023 issue of Army Magazine. |
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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 student 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. Now finished with graduate coursework and comprehensive exams at USM, Daniel is serving as an academic instructor in the History Department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. |
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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 my 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’ primary interest is World War I, but he also enjoys studying World War II, the Napoleonic Wars, and the American Civil War. He is working under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest. |
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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 student 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 2023-2024 Pat and Jean Welsh Dale Center Graduate Fellow. |
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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. 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. |
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Faith Omulu(MA, History) BA, History and International Studies University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 2021. Email Faith is from Enugu, Nigeria. Her BA thesis focused on women and gender in pre-colonial warfare in Igboland up to 1904. As an undergraduate, Faith worked as a research assistant to several of her professors: processing archival materials, conducting oral interviews, and participating in archaeological field work. For her Master’s program, Faith will be working with Dr. Heather Stur to examine Nigeria’s history, using Igboland, an Eastern part of Nigeria, as a case study into understanding the roles of women during the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. |
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Ted Racicot(PhD, European History) MA, History, Worcester State, 2019; BA, History, Worcester
State, 2017. Ted grew up in a military family and, despite moving around most of his childhood, he considers Monument, Colorado to be his hometown. He attended Worcester State University, where he earned both his BA and MA in History. He is interested in the intersections between popular culture and warfare. For his master’s thesis, he explored popular songs produced in Great Britain during World War I and how they fit into Britain's larger propaganda apparatus. As a doctoral student at USM, he plans to continue with this topic, looking beyond the songs themselves and focusing on British music halls as a location where British citizens of all backgrounds could hear about the war and understand their place within the war effort. |
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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. |
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Jerra Boatner Runnels(MA, War and Society) MS, Criminal Justice, University of Southern Mississippi, 1997;
BA, Criminal Justice, minor in Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi,
1995. Jerra, a native of Collinsville, Mississippi, recently retired from the State of Mississippi after a career as a court administrator for the 12th Circuit Court in Hattiesburg. She is pursuing a Master's in War and Society with an interest in race, sexuality, gender, and women’s issues during wartime, under the direction of Dr. Rebecca Tuuri. Jerra research focuses on the role of Black women in Hattiesburg during the remobilization of Camp Shelby in World War II. |
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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 student 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. Upon finishing his coursework, he will be assigned as History Instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. |
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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 plans to work under the direction of Dr. Andrew Wiest at Southern Miss. |
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Abel Ugwu(MA, History) BA, History, University of Nigeria, 2021. %C2%A0Email 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. |
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Brian Valimont(PhD, U.S. History) MA, History, Salem State University, 2018; MA, Anthropology, The
University of Alabama, 2002; BA, Anthropology, West Georgia University, 1997; Certificate
in Law Enforcement, Northern Essex Community College, 2013. Brian was an active field archaeologist for over two decades. His specialization is the archaeology of North America. His areas of special interest included Native American coastal adaptation, as well as 19th Century New England farmsteads. For four and a half years, Brian taught introductory anthropology and archaeology at Great Bay Community College in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He also worked for three seasons as a Park Ranger in both Minute Man National Historic Park and Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Brian is intrigued by the historical interrelationship between war and home fronts. He is presently focusing on a series of riots that occurred in the Union as a result of the military draft during the U.S. Civil War. |
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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. |
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Daniel Ward(PhD, U.S. History) MA, History, SUNY University, 2019; BA, History and Political
Science, SUNY Fredonia, 2015. Daniel is a PhD student 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. Most recently, he organized the panel, “Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century American War and Society,” for the 2022 Society for Military History Conference. Daniel is working under the direction of Dr. Heather Stur and he was the 2022-2023 Pat and Jean Welsh Dale Center Graduate Fellow. |
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Brian Washam(PhD, U.S. History) MA, History, University of Southern Mississippi, 2022; BA, History,
University of Oklahoma, 2019. 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. |
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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.
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