Department of History

The eleventh annual Honors Thesis Conference is the culmination of a process that students in the History Department’s honor’s seminar have been working on since last summer.

In the summer of 2019, students began collecting and reviewing primary source material from a wide range of archives. Some students, used documents UF’s own Smathers Library. Others traveled to archives at the United Nations, Harvard University, the University of New Mexico, in Cuba and in Europe. Others used online resources, from Netflix to digitized collections from around the world.

They found a wide-range of sources to use in their theses: Princess Willhelmine of Prussia’s personal letters, Navajo Times newspaper articles, a Haitian literary triptych, and the expedition narratives of Spanish Conquistadors working their way through the area that is modern day Columbia.

Last fall semester, the students met together in the weekly Honor’s seminar, led Dr. Sheryl Kroen. There, they began to pull their research together and write their theses. While thesis writing is an independent project, the students in the seminar talk through their research together in the seminar. The mix of students and interests helps make those discussions rich, and this years’s seminar brought together History majors, and students from African American Studies, Anthropology, Art and Art History, Dance, English, Health Sciences, and Political Science. And the papers they are working on cover everything from race and religion in Muslin and Christian scholarship in the seventeenth century; to gender and politics in Cuba from 1930 to 1960; to the intersections of mass incarceration and higher education by comparing American universities usage of slave labor to prison labor.

This spring semester, the students are at work writing their theses. Then, at the Honors Thesis Conference, they will present their work  to other students, family, and friends at the Honors Conference.