Christopher Bishop | Ph.D. Student, History

Christopher Bishop is a PhD Candidate in History at Texas A&M University. His research rests primarily with the cultural, social, and religious history of the Wehrmacht during World War II. His work explores how the Christian liturgical calendar, observed through everyday religious ritual practice, served as a beacon for war not just within the discourses of churches and chaplains but also within the private spaces of the soldiers themselves. In the dissertation, he argues that religious discourses found in everyday religious ritual practice within the Wehrmacht were used to construct an identity that was oftentimes distinct from the regime's archetypal soldier while at the same time reaffirming notions of racial superiority and the campaign against "Judeo-Bolshevism." 

Akshara Dafre | Ph.D. Student, English

Akshara Dafre (she/her) is a PhD student in English at Texas A&M University. Her research lies at the intersection of hip hop studies, transnational feminist studies, queer theory, and popular culture. Her dissertation focuses on queer and female hip hop artists from Mumbai, India to explore how hip hop constitutes a queer, gendered way of being, and praxis of self-making for them against the backdrop of urban cosmopolitan Mumbai. In particular, she examines how and why hip hop emerges as a meaningful cultural form in this context, offering ways to navigate questions of gender, sexuality, and belonging, thus exploring the queer potential of hip hop and hip hop feminism within a transnational framework. 

Mark Mallory | Ph.D. Student, History

Mark Mallory is a PhD candidate in History at Texas A&M University and an oral history volunteer with the Seminole Indian Scouts Cemetery Association. He received an MA in History from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2021. Working collaboratively with Black Seminole community members from Texas and Coahuila, Mallory’s research examines the contested representation and frequent erasure of Black Seminoles. Using English, Spanish, and Afro-Seminole Creole, Mallory has collected in-depth oral accounts from a range of community members from the Texas-Coahuila borderlands since 2021, primarily women and community elders. Drawing on contemporary oral accounts of Black Seminoles, WPA “slave narratives,” and transcripts of accounts from previous research, he explores the tension between lived experiences of Black Seminoles and representations of their lives and histories found in songs, films, children’s books, paintings, stage plays, school curricula, museum exhibits, tourism materials, public monuments, and government documents since the mid-nineteenth century. 

Madelaine Setiawan | Ph.D. Student, History

Madelaine Setiawan is a PhD student at Texas A&M University. She is a historian of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, Memory, and 19th-century Women and Gender. Her research has been supported by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, among others. For her dissertation, Madelaine is currently researching the individual and collective memories of southern unionist women during the Civil War.

Leslie Torres | Ph.D. Student, History

Leslie Torres is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at Texas A&M University. Her research centers Mexican American women in Texas-based and greater interwar reform movements. She is interested in unraveling how Mexican American women demanded cultural and political belonging through civil rights movements in and outside of Texas, while also navigating activism with a triple consciousness: race, gender, and citizenship. At its core, this dissertation is a story of women-led identity-making and acts of resistance amidst intense nativist and acculturation movements occurring across the United States. Torres received her Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in 2022 and her Master of Arts in History at Texas A&M University in 2024.