Mellon Graduate Fellows in U.S. Law and Race

Funded by the Mellon Foundation, this three-week residential fellowship program supports four graduate students at the University of Nebraska's U.S. Law and Race Initiative. The Mellon Graduate Fellows have the opportunity to advance their own research and writing projects addressing race and racialization in U.S. law and history, contribute to an Open Educational Resource, and engage with faculty mentors aiming to understand racialized people's use of the law to advance personhood, citizenship, rights, and sovereignty throughout American history.

2024 Fellows

Avatar for Kasha Appleton
Kasha Appleton
Indiana University

Kasha Appleton (she/her) received her B.A in History and Classics from Monmouth College. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Indiana University in American History with an outside minor in Law. Her current research focusses on nineteenth-century Black mothers and the various ways they laid claim to their children and negotiated specific rights for themselves as mothers and citizens using habeas corpus. Her research braids together legal history, race, gender history, and family history. The women that she researches sit at various levels of oppression and privilege, yet each one found themselves at the mercy of the American court system. She is interested in uncovering the various experiences that women had while they navigated the court systems to negotiate the rights of themselves and their children. She is also a Graduate Editorial Assistant at the Journal of American History. 

Avatar for Emma Herman
Emma Herman
Harvard University

Emma Herman (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University. She is an Americanist with a background in carceral studies, currently studying U.S.-Native relations and the history of the American West. Her dissertation explores the social, legal, and spatial relationships of settlers and Natives in the area variously organized as Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, and the state of Oklahoma from break-up of treaty-making to the formal reconstitution of Native governments. Her other fields of interest include critical geography, political theory, environmental history, and the digital humanities. Prior to graduate school, Emma worked at the Wylie Agency in New York and with the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based journalism non-profit that documents the pattern and practice of police abuse, including the history of torture, in that city. She graduated with honors from the University of Chicago in 2017 with a B.A. in History and minors in philosophy and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Avatar for Taneil Ruffin
Taneil Ruffin
Princeton University

Taneil Ruffin (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and a certificate student in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is interested in the histories of slavery and emancipations across the African diaspora. Her dissertation project brings together African diaspora history and legal history to explore how free and freed people of African descent in Louisiana navigated their liminal legal status between slave and citizen in the period between the Age of Revolutions and the Civil War era. The project sheds light on how people of African descent engaged law as they struggled against the legal vestiges of slavery and the racism they experienced in their daily lives. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Taneil received an M.A. in History and Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a B.A. in History from Brown University. She has also worked on several community-engaged public history projects in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Springfield, Massachusetts.

Avatar for Hannah Simmons
Hannah Simmons
Northwestern University

Hannah Simmons (she/her) is a graduate student at Northwestern University where she studies enslaved womanhood and motherhood in the 18th and 19th-century United States. Her work focuses on how enslaved families used the legal system to claim generational freedom. She is particularly interested in how enslaved mothers in the modern Midwest used the legal system to recover their freedom and reconceptualize their families outside of the confines of enslavement. In doing so, her work attempts to reimagine people's agency and legal prowess. Before attending Northwestern, Hannah earned her B.A. from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Juneteenth Presentation

Three Mellon Graduate Fellows in U.S. Law and Race present their research on legal cases of enslaved people seeking freedom, along with a discussion about the importance of building research models that bring such stories into a broader conversation about American history.Dr. William G. Thomas III facilitates the discussion. This event was sponsored by the University Libraries.