Meet the team who helped create this website
Sylvester Abedi AkYEa
Sylvester Abedi Akyea is a second-year PhD student in history in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research intersects environmental history and the military history of British West Africa, from the 1800s to the mid-1950s. In particular, he focuses on forest ecologies and extraction in the context of the British Empire and Anglo-American military operations in colonial Ghana during World War II. Additionally, he is interested in digital humanities and public history. Sylvester holds an MPhil in history and a BA in history and sociology from the University of Ghana, Legon, where he served as a graduate teaching and research assistant.
Jonathan Cortez, PhD
Professor Cortez is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at The University of Texas at Austin. Their research, writing, and teaching focus on the history of immigration, social movements, and 20th-century U.S. history. Dr. Cortez has developed a relationship with the Carranzas over the last three years, seeking to reignite Chicano Movement historiography through the introduction of an exciting new collection of documents. Professor Cortez is facilitating the donation of the Carranza Archive to the Benson Library, establishing UT Austin and the Benson Library as the key site of research on the South Texas Chicano Movement.
Márcia Cecília Flexa Freitas
Cecília Flexa Freitas is a first-year PhD student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current project explores timber extraction in Eastern Amazonia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing Indigenous and Afro-Amazonian knowledge and labor, technological transformations, and environmental impacts. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Brasília (UnB) in Brazil, where she worked at the Social History Laboratory, collaborating on digital humanities projects on the history of Portuguese America.
Chloe Foor
Chloe is a second-year PhD student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current project focuses on how historical actors of varying identities understood the physical spaces surrounding them in the New Kingdom of Granada during the seventeenth century. She holds a Bachelor of Science with Comprehensive Honors in History, Computer Science, and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Chloe has been involved in a range of Digital Humanities projects, from the JapanLab to Virtual Angkor.
Tessa Mitterhoff
Tessa is a Master’s student in the iSchool at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on libraries and archives. She is a current fellow with the UT CONNECT program, where she is doing research on library usage and preferences. Previously, she worked on processing an oral history collection with the Portal to Texas History and helped create supporting digital materials for the collection. Tessa is currently a Visitor Services Associate with the Texas Science and Natural History Museum.
Eliana Pigott
Eliana is a second year PhD student in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include 20th Century U.S. labor, gender, and energy history. She received her BA from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Her undergraduate Capstone paper, Home Cooks, Red Cross, and Saboteurs: A Women’s History of the West Virginia Mine Wars, explored how World War I affected women’s participation in armed labor conflicts in the early 20th Century