Jennifer Mills
Jennifer Mills
Graduate Teaching Assistant
U.S. History: 19th- & Early 20th-Century U.S. History; British Empire & South Asia; Comparative Labor & Empire; Civil War & Reconstruction; Labor History; Racial Violence & Political Terror; African American History; Military History; American Religious History; Digital History Humanities
Jennifer Mills is a PhD student in History at George Mason University, where she specializes in comparative labor and empire, focusing on race, coerced labor, and state violence in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States and British South Asia. 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, tentatively titled, "Sweet Tea: Militia, Sirdars, and the Making of Coerced Labor after Emancipation," is a comparative study examining why two empires, the United States after the Civil War and Britain after the 1857 Rebellion, turned to the same legal tool to control plantation labor: statutes that armed private actors with police and military power over their own workers. The project compares the 1887 Thibodaux Massacre, in which an all-white Louisiana militia and a self-organized vigilante committee crushed a Black sugar workers' strike, with British Assam's tea plantations, where sirdars and chowkidars were recruited from within the same worker communities they were sent to police. Tracing a legal-institutional genealogy from the Fugitive Slave Act through Louisiana's Black Codes, and reading it alongside Assam's Inland Emigration Act, Mills argues that the same coercive legal architecture produced two starkly different relationships between the state and the community turned against, depending on whether enforcers were recruited from outside or inside the controlled population. The project also makes a disciplinary intervention, bridging labor history and the study of war and society by treating the composition and recruitment of enforcement apparatus, militia, sirdar, and police alike, as a central object of historical analysis. She has presented research from this project at the American Historical Association and at the North American Labor History Conference.
She 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.
Grants and Fellowships
AHA-Lepage Center Internship, Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, American Historical Association, Summer 2026
Courses Taught
HIST 125: Introduction to Global History (Recitation) — Fall 2026
Education
M.A. History, 2023, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
B.A. History, 2020, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Recent Presentations
"'God Almighty Has Drawn the Color Line': Black Labor, Deputized Violence, and the Thibodaux Massacre, 1874–1887." Paper presented on Panel 6B, "No Safe Space: Violence and Repression in the Workplace," North American Labor History Conference, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, October 16, 2026.
Moderator, "We Want More History – Exploring Opportunities for Public Engagement." Session presented at the Virginia Conference on Introductory History Courses, American Historical Association, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, VA, August 29, 2026.
"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.