Project Team
Our team is composed of our staff of editors, graduate research associates (GRAs), and partners. We are grateful to all of our former staff, graduate research associates, and advisory board members.
Project 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 as well as with an essay on enslaved resistance in the edited collection Slavery and Freedom in the Bluegrass State: Revisiting My Old Kentucky Home (University Press of Kentucky, 2023) and another essay in Playing at War: Identity & Memory in American Civil War Era Video Games (Louisiana State University Press, 2024). He is currently working on a book manuscript about loyalty and identity, tentatively titled, Breaking and Remaking the Mason-Dixon Line: Loyalty in Civil War America.
Chase H. McCarter, Ph.D.
Editorial Specialist
chase.mccarter@ky.gov
Originally from south Alabama, McCarter earned his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico under the direction of David Prior. He specializes in the history of the Civil War era, with attention to histories of racism, the collapse of the Confederacy, and the Lost Cause. McCarter’s current book project examines the emotional underpinnings of ex-Confederate migration to Latin America after the U.S. Civil War. Prior to joining Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK), McCarter served as the managing editor of the New Mexico Historical Review and resource editor for H-CivWar.
Jacob T. Wood, Ph.D.
Editorial Specialist
jacob.wood@ky.gov
Jacob Wood earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky, specializing in 19th century political history with a focus on the antebellum era. Originally from Melbourne, Florida, Wood received his BA in History and Philosophy, as well as an MA in History from the University of South Florida. He has reviewed monographs for the Register of the Kentucky History Society and the Journal of Southern History, as well as contributed a chapter on the intersection of religion and electoral politics for The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States Since 1775 (Routledge, 2024). Prior to joining the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Edition, Wood taught US History at Georgetown College, the University of Kentucky, and the University of South Florida.
Graduate Research Associates
To learn more about CWGK's Graduate Research Associates prgram and the project's former GRAs, please visit Graduate Research Associates.
Petra Hokanson
Hokanson is a graduate student at Troy University in Alabama, working on her Master’s Degree in History Education. Her research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century antisemitism and the history of race and ethnicity. She has been published in The Alexandrian and The Bold Weevil as the author of two research papers and a literary essay respectively. While working for CWGK as a graduate assistant, Petra also interned as a lead instructor for the Brighter Generation summer program, teaching Ethiopian boarding school students remotely. She presently works as a substitute teacher and tutor in Enterprise, Alabama and volunteers for the Alabama Holocaust Education Center.
Nicole A. Ramsey
Ramsey is a public history MA student at Indiana University-Indianapolis. Her research interests include religious and educational history. Volunteering for the Tippecanoe County Historical Society, she wrote an essay on abolitionist physician Elizur Deming, published in the county's bicentennial book. While she is especially interested in nineteenth-century women's stories, she is happy branching into other times and fields, too, recently winning the Anne Donchin Women's Studies Award for creative scholarship on World War I. Before starting a graduate program, Nicole spent several years working as a birth doula, celebrating the fact that all human stories start small.
Jacob Sherer
Sherer is in his second year of graduate school at Indiana University - Indianapolis, where he is getting an M.A. in History, with a concentration in Public History. Receiving his B.A. in History from Butler University in 2024, Sherer has focused his research on the intersection of race and sports, particularly in Indianapolis, as well as research in urban history and the effects of a growing city. Prior to CWGK, he worked as an archival assistant at Butler University and at the Indiana Medical History Museum. Sherer also continues to do work at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum and the Indiana Historical Society.
Tyler Wilson
Wilson is a PhD student at Auburn University studying under the direction of Dr. Adam H. Domby. Wilson's research focuses on Hispanics in the US Civil War, specifically looking at the New Mexico Territory from 1860 - 1865. He seeks to understand how the Civil War mobilized the Hispanic population, how Hispanics remember the war, and how they contributed to US state building in the southwest. Prior to working for CWGK, Wilson worked as a K-12 Spanish teacher and received his M.A. in Hispanic Studies from Western Michigan University.
Partners
Kentucky Historical Society staff have been able to do the work of CWGK because of collaborative partnerships that they have built over the years of developing the edition.
Kentucky Department for Library and Archives
Kentucky Department of Military Affairs
Filson Historical Society
Mary Todd Lincoln House
Marker’s Mark Distillery
FromThePage
Anneliese Dehner
Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi
Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Alabama
Former Staff
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.
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.
Jeff Dycus, M.A.
Jeff Dycus was 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.
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.
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.
Patrick A. Lewis, Ph.D.
Lewis was a member of CWGK staff 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.
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.
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.
Brian Trump, Ph.D.
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.
Former Advisory Board Members
CWGK is in the process of restructuring its Editorial Board and will post the new board in the near future.
Edward L. Ayers
University of Richmond
Douglas A. Boyd
University of Kentucky
Lynda L. Crist
Rice University
A. Glenn Crothers
University of Louisville
Laura F. Edwards
Duke University
John E. Kleber
Morehead State University (Professor Emeritus)
James C. Klotter
Georgetown College (Professor Emeritus)
Mark L. Kornbluh
University of Kentucky (Professor Emeritus)
Glenn W. LaFantasie
Western Kentucky University (Professor Emeritus)
Thomas C. Mackey
University of Louisville
Stephanie McCurry
Columbia University
Leslie Rowland
University of Maryland
John David Smith
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Amy Murrell Taylor
University of Kentucky