I want to highlight the accomplishments of one of our undergraduate students in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University, whose research experiences reminded me of my own experiences conducting research as an undergraduate History Major at the University of Texas at Austin and as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

NIU Newsroom recently published a nice feature on Jeremy Knoll, one of our undergraduate students in the Department of History.

Jeremy Knoll is a History and Economics double major and an Honors student who did a mentored research project with me on prisoners of war in the American Civil War his freshman year as a Research Rookie.

Jeremy then took my course, HIST 384 The History of War since 1500, which involves intense reading and writing on war and society in the early modern and modern world. The course considers wars and armed conflicts from the Renaissance to today comparatively.

He has gone on to write a paper on Civil War monuments constructed in the state of Illinois from 1865 to 1929, under the direction of Professor Aaron Fogleman. A revised version of this paper will soon be published as an article in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, the leading academic journal of Illinois history. The article contributes new perspectives on the historical memory of the American Civil War and the monument building in the United States.

It is incredibly rare for an undergraduate student to publish their research in an academic journal. So, I am very proud of Jeremy!

The article on Jeremy Knoll’s research is available on NIU Newsroom. I will update this piece when Jeremy’s article is published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.

The Research Rookie program at Northern Illinois University provides exciting opportunities for undergraduate researchers to engaged in directed research with faculty mentors. The Department of History at NIU regularly works with Research Rookie students to develop their research projects on themes in United States, European, Latin American, African, Asian, and World History.