Deborah Beckel, Ph.D., has been awarded a Mohler grant for her project examining women and the Knights of Labor in the South.  She is the author of Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (University of Virginia Press, The American South Series, 2011). Originally from Georgia, Beckel received her undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, her masters’ degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her Ph.D. from Emory University. She has worked as a librarian and archivist, and as a documentary editor.  A resident of Virginia, she previously taught women’s and gender studies at Sweet Briar College and currently teaches history at Lynchburg College.

For his work examining the Protestant image in the Catholic mind William Cossen will receive a Mohler grant in 2013.  Mr. Cossen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and a member of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at The Pennsylvania State University, studying under the direction of Philip Jenkins and Amy Greenberg.  His dissertation is currently titled “The Protestant Image in the Catholic Mind,” and it will examine the construction of Protestant identity by American Catholics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.  Mr. Cossen is the recipient of a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science from Emory University in 2008 and a Master of Arts degree with honors in History from Penn State in 2012.

The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives accepts applications for Mohler Travel Grants every year.  For more information on the Mohler Grants, see: http://archives.lib.cua.edu/Mohler.cfm