LSU Libraries has awarded Special Collections Research Grants to four scholars whose projects draw on unique materials housed in Hill Memorial Library. The 2025–26 recipients will receive funds for travel, lodging, and other essentials while in Baton Rouge. Their research topics range from francophone culture and identity to militia service among Black Louisianans and underrepresented voices in Louisiana’s Civil War, to ecological aspects of the Jim Crow South. Meet this year’s grant recipients and learn more about the research they will undertake in LSU Special Collections.

Catherine La Prairie is a master’s student in the Global, International, and Comparative History Program at Georgetown University, researching cultural memory and francophone identity in the Gulf South. Her current project, Peasants of the New World, examines how French and American authors portrayed the region’s Acadian population in the decades after the Louisiana Purchase, and how these depictions mirrored their own anxieties about national cohesion and imperial decline. At LSU, she plans to consult the Special Collections' archival manuscripts and personal papers to trace the ways that these portrayals used narrative framing to stabilize changing ideas about imperial governance and cultural belonging in both France and the United States.

Owen James Hyman, PhD, is an instructional associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Mississippi and a co-editor of the Journal of Mississippi History. His research grant will support his monograph, Cut Over Color Lines: Black Forests in the Jim Crow South, which examines the Lake Pontchartrain Basin and the Lower Pearl River Valley as crucibles for the evolution of Jim Crow. 

By analyzing the experiences of the African Americans who witnessed the forests of the Gulf South fall around them in the century after emancipation, Hyman’s project will reveal how forms of racial violence and economic exclusion evolved in relation to a rapidly changing landscape. In turn, he will show how African American political organization remained rooted in the region’s many waterways throughout the period of disfranchisement. The forest history collections at Hill Memorial Library shed crucial light on Louisiana and Mississippi’s coastal environments, the lumber firms that transformed the region, and the Black workers who mobilized environmental knowledge and waterborne connections to confront white supremacy. 

A. J. Blaylock is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation, “The Sons of Chalmette: Black State Militiamen and the Battle for Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana,” explores the central role state militia membership played in Black Louisianans’ fight for full citizenship across the long nineteenth century. 

Unlike any other slave state, Louisiana permitted Black men to serve in the state militia intermittently throughout the Antebellum Period. Drawing on the extensive sources held in LSU’s Special Collections, the project will take an interdisciplinary approach to explore why that was the case, examining the role of race, class, and historical memory in militia membership and service. It will expand on traditional studies of Black soldiering in the nineteenth century, many of which focus exclusively on the Civil War Era. In doing so, it will reveal how militia service allowed Black Louisianans to negotiate, contest, and shape racial ideologies, historical narratives, and the meanings ascribed to citizen soldiering in ways that influenced both the state and the nation.

John Sacher, PhD, is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida. He is writing an updated history of the Civil War in Louisiana tentatively entitled Louisiana’s Civil War. In the sixty-plus years since the standard text was written, many quality works have appeared.  

Sacher will synthesize those works and augment them with primary source research from LSU Libraries' Special Collections. In particular, he will add voices from the home front, especially women, ordinary soldiers, and enslaved and emancipated African Americans.  His work will be a narrative study and will delve into complex questions of nationalism, identity, and loyalty of Louisianans during the tumultuous years of the Civil War.