LSU Libraries has selected three scholars to receive travel grants from LSU Libraries to use the extensive historical material in the LSU Special Collections for their respective research and book projects. The purpose of the grant is to support the travel and lodging costs associated with a research trip to Hill Memorial Library in Baton Rouge.
Dr. Kathleen Hilliard, Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University, will consult dozens of collections at LSU, including papers of soldiers, officials, planters, and other Southern residents, with attention paid to observations about enslaved and freed people. Hilliard's book, Bonds Burst Asunder: The Revolutionary Politics of Getting By in Civil War and Emancipation, 1860-1867, examines the transformation of southern political economy during the American Civil War and African American emancipation, exploring how bonds were exploded in a revolution men and women neither aimed at nor anticipated. She is beginning the research phase of her book project with planned submission to an academic press in 2021.
Dr. William Cossen, humanities instructor at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology, will work on research for a peer-reviewed journal article about the lived experience of Catholic soldiers during the Civil War. He has published and presented extensively about Catholicism and Catholic identity. “Soldiers and Sacraments: The Lived Catholic Civil War" brings together several scholarly subfields, including military history, lived religion, Catholic studies, environmental history, and the study of the Good Death.
William Jones, Ph.D. candidate in history at Rice University, plans to consult a wide variety of materials from the LSU collections, including planters’ papers, local government records, and folklore and oral history collections. His dissertation examines region-of-origin based divisions among slaves in Louisiana. He will conduct research for his dissertation project, tentatively titled “‘Americans,’ ‘Creoles,’ and the Cultural Consequences of Forced Migration in Nineteenth-Century Lower Louisiana,” which investigates the interactions between English-speaking enslaved people and their francophone Louisiana creole peers to understand how the domestic slave trade, in Ira Berlin’s words, “remade black life.”
We look forward to hosting these scholars as they conduct research in our Special Collections.
The LSU Libraries includes the LSU Library and the adjacent Hill Memorial Library. Together, the libraries contain more than 4 million volumes and provide additional resources such as expert staff, technology, services, electronic resources, and facilities that advance research, teaching, and learning across every discipline.