Originally from Wrexham in Wales, Rhian Davies graduated from Cardiff University in 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. She joins the Atlantic History and Politics MA cohort as the 2024-25 Kinder-BrANCH Fellow.

Rhian’s research interests are broad, having completed her undergraduate dissertation on tribalism in the postcolonial Kenyan developmental state, particularly its impact on Maasai communities. Her interests lie in global histories, having previously explored Kenyan, British, French, German, US, and Indian history. At Mizzou, Rhian would like to explore pan-African histories.

In her free time, Rhian enjoys reading political and social science books on black British history, listening to music, sports, and singing.

Barak Boswell is from St. Robert, Missouri. He graduated from Ozark Technical Community College in 2022 with an Associate’s Degree in General Studies and from Mizzou in 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a minor in Black Studies.

He is interested in a variety of historical topics from the colonization of the Americas to the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States as global superpowers in the 20th century. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, watching movies, and studying history.

Originally from Cambridge, Matt Bell studied history at the University of Oxford, receiving a First Class degree in Summer 2023. Since then, he has been teaching English as a Foreign Language at a language school in Cambridge.

While his studies at Oxford covered a wide range of history and geography, from the fall of the Aztecs to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, his main focus was on US history where possible. He took papers on civil rights pioneers of the late 19th early 20th centuries and US history from the American Revolutionary War to the Philippine-American War, and carried out an undergraduate dissertation on civil unrest in Detroit in 1967. His main areas of interest are popular unrest, the evolution of the civil rights movement, and economic history. He is particularly looking forward to studying the complex economic, cultural, and political links that have spanned and continue to span the Atlantic Ocean.

In his spare time, he listens to music, plays the piano and guitar, and reads in cafes and pubs.