Dr. Lorien Foote | Professor, History

Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of four books, editor of three scholarly volumes, and writer of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and essays.  Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War (2021) was awarded the Organization of American Historians Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award; The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (2016), was a 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title; and The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (2010), was a finalist and Honorable Mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize.  Foote is the co-editor, with Earl J. Hess, of The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War. She is the creator and principal investigator of a digital humanities project that is mapping the escape and movement of 3000 Federal prisoners of war during the American Civil War.  The project includes contributions from undergraduate researchers at four universities: https://fugitive-federals.tamu.edu/. 

Dr. Jun Lei | Associate Professor, Global Languages & Cultures

Dr. Jun Lei is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Languages and Cultures at Texas A&M University, specializing in Chinese literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and digital media studies. Her research examines the interplay of gender, nationalism, and cultural production in China from the late 19th century to present. Her work bridges humanities and social sciences, combining literary theory with digital ethnography to address questions of gender and power in China. 

Dr. Lei is the author of Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s-1930s (Hong Kong University Press, 2022), which has received extensive positive reviews. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Modern China, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Men and Masculinities, and other leading journals focused on modern China and gender studies. She has served as guest editor for special issues in Men and Masculinity (2023-25) and Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images (2024-25). She is currently working on her second monograph examining digital governance and sexual politics in contemporary China. 

Dr. Stephen Riegg | Associate Professor, History

Stephen Badalyan Riegg’s research and teaching interests revolve around the histories of Modern Europe, Imperial Russia, and the Caucasus. His research seeks to understand how the Russian government in the 1800s engaged the Caucasus region, the crucial crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. 

His award-winning first book, Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and The Armenians, 1801-1914, traces the evolution of the Romanov government’s policies toward the Armenians of the empire. The study broke with conventional narratives of that story by embracing the complexities of this imperial encounter and moving away from the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians. 

His current book project, tentatively titled Civilization by Proxy: Western Expatriates in Imperial Russia’s Caucasus, studies how Romanov imperialists improvised a trial-and-error program of tolerating the settlement of Scottish missionaries, French silk barons, German schismatics, and Swiss evangelicals in the Caucasus. With both alacrity and apprehension, the Russian state hoped to secure the sociopolitical stability and economic vitality of its Caucasus dominion through the collaboration of foreign expatriates. 

Riegg’s work has been published in the journals The Russian Review, Ab Imperio, Nationalities Papers, Cahiers du Monde russe, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. He has won fellowships and grants from CLIR/Mellon, Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, American Councils for International Education, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.