Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Thought, lsvabek@missouri.edu
Larry Svabek is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Thought at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. His research program is rooted in the history of political thought with a focus on the study of African American thought, democratic theory, and political economy. His first book, A Real Revolution Within: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Lost Promise of African American Cooperation, explores W.E.B. Du Bois’s preoccupation with and involvement in African American cooperative movements as a key strategy of emancipation. A Real Revolution Within both recuperates the efforts of African American cooperative leaders to generate a new revolutionary subject and reframes Du Bois’s ongoing disillusionment with liberal programs of civil rights to reorient contemporary readers.

Larry holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Political Science, Economics, and Critical Theory from Northwestern University. Prior to joining the Kinder Institute, Larry served as a teaching fellow in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. You can read his writing in American Political Thought and the Chicago Sun Times.

Kinder Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in Political History, lauren.feldman@missouri.edu
Lauren Feldman is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. Her work centers on intersectional histories of intimacy, and investigating the broad intellectual question about how norms surrounding relationships in the U.S. have been created and reproduced over time. She is particularly committed to demonstrating how matters surrounding intimacy shed new light on conventional “big-picture” questions of U.S. history and historiography.

Feldman’s book project focuses on the contingent process by which marriage and state became intertwined in the U.S., from the period of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Through an examination of debates over early American marriage laws, she historicizes marriage’s centrality to the formation of United States governance, as well as the implications thereof surrounding the creation and maintenance of a U.S. privatized social structure. As part of this project, she also works on the history of slave marriage in the United States.

Feldman’s work has been supported by multiple institutions, including the American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, and New-York Historical Society, and has been published in the journal Law and History Review. She was previously a predoctoral fellow in the history of the Civil War era at Penn State’s Richards Center for academic year 2022-2023. From 2021-2024, she served as the project coordinator of JHU Hard Histories, a public history initiative examining the histories of racism and discrimination at Johns Hopkins University. Feldman received her PhD in history from JHU in 2023, and an AB in history from Harvard College in 2013.

 

DPAA Research Partner Fellow, crdkf9@missouri.edu
Chris Deutsch is the University of Missouri DPAA Research Partner Fellow. He provides historical research support for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and the Agency’s mission “to provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation.” He is working on a manuscript under advanced contract with the University of Nebraska Press, tentatively titled, “Beeftopia: The Red Meat Politics of Prosperity in Postwar America,” on the role of public policy and politics in the rise of beef production and consumption in the decades after World War II. The book will explore the government’s efforts to secure beef, which was a key metric of affluence and which Americans measured nightly on their dinner plates. He has previously taught history at the University of Missouri, including courses on food history, the 1980s, and the twentieth century. He earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in history at California State University, Sacramento, and a Ph.D. from at the University of Missouri.

Postdoctoral Fellow in Political History, austin.stewart@missouri.edu
Austin Stewart holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from Cleveland State University and a Ph.D. in Early American History from Lehigh University. He previously served as a Visiting Professor of History and Native American Studies at Northland College in Wisconsin during the 2022-2023 academic year. His teaching interests center on courses in the history of the Atlantic World, Native history, the Revolutionary Era, the Early Republic, and the nineteenth-century American West. Austin’s current research focuses on Native migrations, territoriality, and settler colonialism in the early nineteenth-century West. He is interested in comparative legalities and constructions of property, sovereignty, and identity in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americas. He joins the Kinder Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political History.