Current Staff
Chuck Welsko, Ph.D.
Project Director
charles.welsko@ky.gov
Originally from Pennsylvania, Welsko earned his Ph.D. from West Virginia University under the direction of Jason Phillips. He specializes in the cultural, social, and political history of Civil War era, with a focus on border regions, loyalty, slavery, nationalism, and identity formation. Welsko has published in West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies with an essay on enslaved resistance in the edited collections Slavery and Freedom in the Bluegrass State: Revisiting My Old Kentucky Home (University Press of Kentucky, 2023) and a forthcoming essay in Playing at War: Identity & Memory in American Civil War Era Video Games (Louisiana State University Press). Prior to his time at KHS, Welsko worked as a Visiting Professor of Public History at the University of West Georgia.
Brian Trump, Ph.D.
Editorial Specialist
brian.trump@ky.gov
Originally from central Nebraska, Trump received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2022. A historian of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, his research focuses on the intersections between gender and sexuality, violence, community identity, and legal culture in rural spaces and the American West. Prior to joining CWGK and the Kentucky Historical Society, Trump served as an Applied Humanities Summer Fellow at Humanities Kansas and an Editor at NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality. His work has appeared in NOTCHES and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Daniele Celano, ABD
Editorial Assistant
daniele.celano@ky.gov
Celano is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia with a specialization in 19th Century American legal history. Her dissertation focuses on Civil War Kentucky to examine the larger Constitutional significance of military emancipation, and particularly on the intersections between civil liberties claims and fugitive slave law. Celano has been published in “America’s Civil War Magazine” with a piece about criminal litigation against Union military officers who provided safe haven to freedom-seekers. She also has a forthcoming essay in the special edition of The Register of the KY Historical Society about the relationships among fugitives from slavery and fugitives from justice. At UVA, Celano was a Jefferson Scholars Fellow and the J. Carl Sewell III Fellow through the Nau Center for Civil War History.
Former CWGK Staff
Patrick A. Lewis, Ph.D.
Lewis was a member of CWGK from May 2012 to July 2019, and served as a member of the KHS staff for over a decade. He is currently the Scholar in Residence at the Filson Historical Society. He is also the author of For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War (Kentucky, 2015) and of essays in Civil War History and the Register. Lewis is a seasoned public historian, having worked for the National Park Service at Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park. While at KHS, he helped develop the new KHS HistoryMobile Civil War exhibit. More information about Lewis’s work on slavery, politics, and Civil War Kentucky—along with some inside information about the CWGK project—can be heard in recent interviews on The Rogue Historian and Civil War Talk Radio.
Sarah E. Haywood, B.A.
A native of Harlan, Kentucky, Haywood studied English literature and history at Western Kentucky University, where she received her undergraduate degree in 2015. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in history from the University of Kentucky and served as a research assistant in the Department of History in 2018. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked in publishing and communications and comes to the CWGK team with editorial and writing experience.
Deborah J. Thompson, Ph.D.
Hailey Brangers, M.A.
A Louisville native, Brangers received her M.A. in History from the University of Louisville (2019), where she was part of the Public History program. Her thesis "The Tournament and Chivalry as Represented by Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Geoffrey Chaucer" examines the literal and figurative presence of women at the tournaments of romance literature produced between 1100-1400. Before joining CWGK, Brangers was part of the collections and curatorial department at the Frazier History Museum in Louisville, KY. At Frazier, she transcribed several Civil War diaries and developed them into an educational program that examined the Civil War through diaries from opposing perspectives. Prior to her graduate work, she earned a B.A. in History with a track in Humanities from the University of Louisville (2017).
Emily D. Moses, M.A.
A native of Birmingham, Alabama, and a 2018 recipient of an M.A. in History from Mississippi State University, Moses worked with CWGK from July 2018 to June 2019. Prior to her graduate studies, she served as a research intern and docent for Sloss Furnace National Historic Landmark in Birmingham. Moses conducts annotation research and amplifying CWGK's outreach efforts to audiences of formal and informal learners.
Anthony P. Curtis, M.A.
Curtis was a CWGK staff member from 2012 to 2018. A 2005 recipient of an M.A. in History (with honors) from Marshall University, he led research efforts for not only CWGK but also a variety of projects at KHS and has significant expertise in managing historical collections as well as database- and XML-driven online exhibitions.
Matthew C. Hulbert, Ph.D.
Hulbert was a CWGK staff member from 2015 to 2016. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of History, Political Science, and Philosophy at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. A 2015 recipient of a Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia, Hulbert won the 2016 C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize given by the Southern Historical Association. Hulbert is the author of The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West (Georgia, 2016) He has co-edited a collection of essays, The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth (Kentucky, 2015), and has published essays in Civil War History, Journal of the Civil War Era, and Common-Place.
Whitney R. Smith, M.A.
Smith was a staff member from 2012 to 2018. A 2011 recipient of an M.A. in English from Indiana University–Indianapolis, Smith joined CWGK in June 2012. Before joining CWGK, Smith was assistant editor for the Frederick Douglass Papers and served as research assistant for the Santayana Edition, both housed at the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI. Smith coordinated project editorial policy and digital publication through TEI-XML, FileMaker, Omeka, and Drupal systems.
Natalie C. Smith, MLitt
Smith was a staff member from 2018-2019. A 2017 recipient of a Master of Letters from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, Smith came to CWGK in 2018 from the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, where she was involved in civics educational outreach and gained archival experience working at the center’s Mitch McConnell and Elaine L. Chao Archives. Smith is an alum of the McConnell Scholars Program, the Kentucky Governors Scholars Program, and gained public history experience at My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Bardstown, Kentucky.
James Bartek, Ph.D.
Bartek was a staff member from 2019 to 2020. Bartek received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Kentucky under the direction of Mark Wahlgren Summers. His research focused on the connection between race and noncombatant immunity during the Civil War Era. He has published articles in the New Mexico Historical Review, Military History of the West, and North & South Magazine and teaches military history at the University of Kentucky.
Carl C. Creason, M.A.
Creason was a staff member from 2019 to 2020 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Northwestern University, where he specializes in American religious history and the Civil War Era. His dissertation project examines the development of Roman Catholic charitable institutions in the Ohio River Valley during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Creason has published articles on Border State prelates during the Civil War in American Catholic Studies and the U.S. Catholic Historian.
Web Development Team
Jeff Dycus, M.A.
Jeff Dycus is the Online Access Administrator for the Kentucky Historical Society. Trained in both computer science and library and information science, Dycus defined the processes for extracting and validating CWGK TEI-XML code and ensures that it continues to integrate well with Omeka.
Anneliese Dehner
Dehner is an independent digital humanities web developer from Portland, Oregon. Dehner designed much of the site, built the CWGK Omeka theme, and tailored many of the site's initial search and display tools. Much of her work is summarized in the 2016 report on Omeka for digital editions.
Brumfield Labs
Ben and Sara Brumfield are digital humanities developers from Austin, Texas. They have worked on many digital editing projects, and host From The Page, a platform for crowdsourcing transcription and hosting digital archives. Brumfield Labs developed the MashBill annotation tool, which allowed CWGK to provide intellectual access to its documents through linked entries on mentioned people, organizations, places, and geographical features.
Dazhi Jiao
Jiao made significant alterations to the Omeka interface to allow for the publication of annotated documents. He created viewer pages for entity records, modified the document viewer to show links between texts and entities, and overhauled the XML import system to accomodate the larger volume of records.