Fall 2024 MA History Graduate Student Highlights
MA History Student Highlights
The NAU History Department will be well-represented at the upcoming Arizona History Convention, which will be held in Tempe, AZ, on April 5, 2025. Of the twelve papers accepted for the one-day conference, two will be from graduate students currently in our MA History program. Harrison Davis will discuss how public education was used as a tool for the colonization of Phoenix in the early 20th century, while Ciaran Doherty will highlight how the forests surrounding Flagstaff changed form in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they transitioned from logging center to National Forest.
This past summer, graduate student Ashley O’Hara completed an internship at History Colorado. She has since used this experience to secure work as a contractor over winter break on an oral history project focusing on the Bea Roeder Folk Art Collection. This archive is particularly important because Bea Roeder dedicated much of her academic and professional life to interviewing diverse and marginalized cultural groups in Colorado history.
After spending two years with us at NAU, Daniel Mensah graduated from the MA History program in August 2024. His interest in West African environmental history led him to focus his master’s thesis on forest management in the Gold Coast (supervised by Professors Thomas Finger, Scott Reese, and Chris Boyer), entitled “’Dual System’: Forest Management in the Gold Coast 1920s-1940s.” Daniel is currently enrolled in the PhD program at the Department of History, at Brown University. His upcoming Ph.D. dissertation intends to show how forest management was deployed as a tool to respond to the colonial perception of West Africa as a “diseased environment.” With this, he aims to show the interplay between forest management and public health interventions in the Gold Coast.
