Heather and Taylor have generously agreed to share their application materials with us as we talk through the job market process. We will be discussing the DOs and DON'Ts of job application materials.

Heather Menefee is the 2026–2027 Civil War Era history postdoctoral fellow. Heather completed her Ph.D. in Native American and U.S. history at Northwestern University, where she was a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies, a T.H. Breen Fellow in History, and a Presidential Fellow. Her dissertation, “Kinship in Daḳota Maḳoc̣e, 1815-1862,” demonstrates how conflicting settler and Dakota conceptualizations of kinship shaped the political development of the United States and the Dakota oyate (nation) throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Her research interests include transformations of Indigenous sovereignty and U.S. citizenship since the early nineteenth century, Dakota history, the relationship of federal Indian policy to U.S. imperialism, John Trudell’s political philosophy, and histories of the Great Lakes. As a non-Native historian, Heather is committed to supporting the return of Dakota land and the health of the Dakota language. She earned an M.A. in American studies at UNC Chapel Hill in 2019, and a B.A. (summa cum laude) from Northwestern University in 2015 with an ad hoc major in Native American Studies. She enjoys the White Sox, choral singing, studying languages, and befriending other people’s dogs. Heather’s family’s donkey is named Jackson and lives in Georgia, where he protects cows from coyotes. She is thrilled to join the Richards Center as a postdoctoral fellow and welcomes anyone to reach out.

Taylor Black, is a 2026–2027 Richards Center Predoctoral Fellow and a doctoral candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on religion, race, and U.S. imperialism and colonialism in nineteenth century America. His dissertation, “Between Faith and Force: Black U.S. Army Chaplains in the Age of Empire, 1865-1915,” recasts Reconstruction as a struggle over religious sovereignty that, for many African Americans, became entangled within larger processes of U.S. imperialism. The project centers the stories of the first five Black Christians to serve as Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal chaplains in the U.S. Regular Army from 1884 to 1920. After liberating themselves from slavery, they embarked on a mission to remake the world as Black religious agents of the U.S. imperial state in the South, the Caribbean, the trans-Mississippi West, and the Pacific world. Their story further reveals the complicated stakes of making modern, racialized subjectivities beyond the borders of former slave states in the long Civil War Era. Taylor’s work has been supported by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and the Reed-Smith Travel Research Fund.