Jennifer Mills
Jennifer Mills
Graduate Teaching Assistant
U.S. History: 19th-Century U.S. History; Civil War & Reconstruction; Labor History; Racial Violence & Political Terror; African American History; Military History; American Religious History; Digital Humanities
Jennifer Mills is a PhD student in History at George Mason University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history with a focus on the intersections of race, labor, and political violence during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. She is affiliated with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), where she works at the intersection of historical scholarship and digital methods.
Her dissertation in progress examines the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre in Louisiana, investigating how violence functioned simultaneously as a labor control mechanism and a racial project in the post-Reconstruction South. Her work explores how employers, state actors, and vigilantes deployed differential forms of violence against Black and white sugar workers during labor conflicts, and how print culture and public discourse worked to culturally legitimate massacre-level violence. She presented this research at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association.
Mills holds an M.A. and B.A. from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where she researched the Hare Krishna Movement, Sikh migration, and African American labor organizing during Reconstruction. Her broader research interests span the history of religion in America, the early labor movement, military institutions, and the relationship between racial formation and state power.
Education
M.A. History, 2023, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
B.A. History, 2020, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Recent Presentations
"Sugar and Terror: The Thibodaux Massacre and the Political Economy of Racial Violence," American Historical Association, January 2026.
"In Memoriam: Memorialization of the 1983 Beirut Bombing, a Digital Project," Marine Corps Museum, April 2025.
“An Injury to One Is a Concern for All”: Reconstruction, the Labor Movement, and the Fight for Civil Rights, 1865-1890," American Historical Association, January 2025.
“An Injury to One Is a Concern for All”: Reconstruction, the Labor Movement, and the Fight for Civil Rights, 1865-1890," Phi Alpha Theta Regional Conference, April 2024, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
"The Bellingham Riot of 1907: A Historical Analysis of Labor Unions’ Responses to Anti-Immigrant Violence," UCCS Graduate Student Conference, December 2023, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
"Saris, Dhotis, and Saffron Robes: The Hare Krishna Movement and the Challenges of Eastern Religious Traditions in the United States Since the 1960s," UCCS Graduate Student Conference, December 2022, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.