Alumni News!

Alumni Spotlight: Congratulations to Drew Baldasarre (A.B. history, '22), who was accepted into the graduate program at KY Leuven in Belgium this for 2025. Read about her journey here - 

After graduating in 2022, I moved to Budapest, Hungary to be a teacher of English and History. I have been able to travel the world and expand my historical knowledge beyond what I had learned before. After a couple of years in the classroom, I knew that I wanted to continue to further pursue my history education. I will be attending KU Leuven in Belgium the fall of 2025 to receive my master's in history. I will continue with my undergraduate studies which focused on the Bolshevik Revolution, more specifically focusing on Aleksandra Kollontai who was a prominent Russian activist at the time. As a master's student, I endeavor to further my interest in studying the emergence of feminist activism during the Bolshevik era in Russia through the activism of literary figures. By examining Kollontai's triangular relationship between her efforts to redefine gender roles in Russian society, the emergence of the "New Woman," and her efforts towards sexual liberation, my research aims to examine her impact on the Russian public through her literary authorship. My research proposes an approach that seeks to consider the impact of feminist ideals on both her literary and public essays and how they developed throughout her exile between 1924 and 1945. Furthermore, I seek to consider the impacts of Kollontai's years in exile by closely examining her perceptions of Stalin's rule both from within and outside of its direct influence and surveillance.

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Congratulations to Bill Kelson, recipient of the 2025 Graduate school Excellence in Research award.

Currently, Kelson is Visiting Assistant Professor, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

Bill Kelson is a historian of modern China and its place in the world economy. He was educated at Emerson College, Boston College, the University of Georgia, and IUP Tsinghua. His research has been supported by the Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the John E. Rovensky Fellowships in International Business & Economic History, and the Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program, as well as a UGA Graduate School Dean’s Award. Currently, Bill is a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor. In Hong Kong, Bill is busy turning his PhD dissertation, a wide-ranging history of the Chinese financial crisis of the 1880s, into a book manuscript. That study, researched at archives in Shanghai, Taipei, London, and Hong Kong explores the ways in which China’s integration into global capitalism in the late-nineteenth century made the Chinese financial system increasingly fragile, as well as the consequences of that financial fragility for Chinese society writ large. Bill’s first peer-reviewed publication, “Manias, Panics, & Land: The Property Bubbles of the Great Chinese Crash of the 1880s,” was recently published in a special issue of Business History titled The Global Economy & the Origins of Modern Chinese Business edited by John D. Wong, Ghassan Moazzin, and Kang Jin-A.

April 2025

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Jennifer Lynn Gross is professor of history at Jacksonville State University. Her latest book, Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South from LSU press was released 1 April 2025.

April 2025

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