VANDERBILT HISTORICAL REVIEW

Skyler Froese is a senior from Columbia, MO. She is studying American history and German language. Besides being a staff member for the Vanderbilt Historical Review, she is the Creative Arts Coordinator of the McGill Project and recently participated in the Buchanan Fellowship program.

Teresa Xu is a sophomore from Vancouver, Canada. She is planning to major in Sociology, Medicine, Health, & Society, and/or English. Her primary historical interests are 20th Century Europe, the impacts of colonialism, and the ethical dimensions of history. Outside of the Vanderbilt Historical Review, she is the Vice President of Narrative 4, the secretary of Grassroots, a site leader for Alternative Thanksgiving & Winter Break, and a peer mentor for VUcept. In her free time, she enjoys singing, writing poetry, traveling, and laughing with friends.

Edward Wright-Rios is Chair of the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. A cultural historian specializing in modern Mexico, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on colonial and modern Latin America, reform and revolution, popular culture, the social and cultural impact of the drug trade, and religious change. His first book Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887-1934 (Duke University Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Murdo J. MacLeod Prize from the Southern Historical Association, examines religious reformism in the Catholic Church and popular religious movements in southern Mexico. Professor Wright-Rios’ second book, Searching for La Madre Matiana: Prophecy and Popular Culture in Modern Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2014), scrutinizes the historical legacy of a legendary popular prophetess and her visions concerning Mexico’s tumultuous history. He recently completed a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018-2019), during which he researched a book on pilgrimage in southern Mexico – currently titled Devotion in Motion: Pilgrimage in Modern Mexico. 

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Thomas Schwartz is a Professor of History and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for History at Vanderbilt University. He is a historian of the foreign relations of the United States, with related interests in Modern European history and the history of international relations. He is the author of America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Harvard University Press, 1991), which was translated into German, Die Atlantik Brücke (Ullstein, 1992). This book received the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of American Foreign Relations, and the Harry S. Truman Book Award, given by the Truman Presidential Library. Dr. Schwartz has served as President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. He served on the United States Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee as the representative of the Organization of American Historians from 2005-2008.

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Lauren Clay is an Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She is a historian of Old Regime and revolutionary France and its empire, with particular interests in urban cultural and civic life and the emergence of a commercially oriented society. Her book Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2013) examines the establishment of professional public theaters in cities throughout France and the French empire during the pre-revolutionary era. Stagestruck was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2014 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research and was a named finalist for the 2013 George Freedley Memorial Award, for exceptional scholarship examining live theatre or performance, awarded by the Theatre Library Association.