Academic Advising and Mentorship
All students are assigned a professional advisor to assist them in developing academic plans. You can make an appointment with your advisor through MyGeorgiaSouthern or visit the College of Arts and Humanities Advisement Center for more information.
Meet Your Advisor
Statesboro Campus
Laurie Hartlett
Academic Advisor III
Statesboro Campus – Center for Advising, Retention and Completion
O: 912-478-7740
lhartlett@georgiasouthern.edu
Armstrong Campus
Whitney Sullivan M. Ed.
Academic Advisor I
Armstrong Campus – Center for Advising, Retention and Completion
912-344-2570 whitneysullivan@georgiasouthern.edu
Online
Noah Evans
Academic Advisor I
Center for Advising, Retention and Completion
O: 912-478-2527
nevans@georgiasouthern.edu
The Student-Faculty Mentorship Program
All incoming first-year history majors, newly declared majors, and continuing second-year students have the opportunity to participate in the history department’s student-faculty mentoring program. The mentorship program pairs students with a faculty mentor who will welcome them to the history department and serve as a resource upon which students can draw as they navigate the first years of the history major. While not mandatory, we strongly encourage students to participate actively in the mentorship program. Incoming students can expect to receive a welcome email pairing them with a faculty mentor. The mentor and student will then establish contact and develop the mentor-mentee relationship over the course of the academic year. Contact Dr. Chris Caplinger for questions about mentorship.
What can our mentorship program do for you?
Connect you with faculty members who will welcome you into the history department and help you navigate your pathway through the major.
Help you identify and explore your academic and professional interests.
Introduce you to opportunities available for history majors, like internships, research projects, Phi Alpha Theta (history honor society), and ways to develop marketable skills.
How to get the most out of mentorship
Keep communications open with your faculty mentor. Send them an email, schedule an informal meeting to chat about goals or questions, drop into office hours to check in.
Think of mentorship as a jumping off point! As you develop your academic interests, reach out to other faculty mentors who share similar research interests. While you can continue the original mentor relationship, you can also have multiple mentors during your time at Georgia Southern.
Don’t be intimidated–your professors are here to help you! All of the faculty participating in the mentorship program are eager volunteers.
What’s the difference between your faculty mentor and your academic advisor?
The mentorship program is not intended to replace student advisors, who help students familiarize themselves with university policies, develop academic plans, and fulfill requirements for graduation.
All students are assigned a professional advisor to assist them in developing academic plans. You can make an appointment with your advisor through MyGeorgiaSouthern or visit the College of Arts and Humanities Advisement Center for more information.
Curious to learn about internship opportunities? Contact Dr. Michael Van Wagenen (Statesboro Campus) or Dr. Kurt Knoerl (Armstrong Campus) with questions.
Scholarships
Georgia Southern University offers financial aid programs to meet the needs of its students who demonstrate financial need and/or academic and creative achievements. With the HOPE scholarship program, Georgia resident students are supported by state funding for good grades. Undergraduate students interested in scholarships and financial aid should visit the Financial Aid website.
History majors are eligible for various scholarships and honors awarded by the Department and the University. Criteria for receiving these competitive awards reflect the stipulations of the scholarship/award donors and the student’s academic achievement.
All applications are reviewed by Department faculty who are members of the department’s Scholarships Committee. Selections will be made early in the Spring semester of each year.
Scholarships are applied toward each recipient’s tuition and fees during the following academic year. Students who receive the scholarships must must be enrolled the following fall semester.
2025-26 Undergraduate Scholarships
Professional Organizations
- American Historical Association
- Organization of American Historians
- The Society for Military History
- Southern Historical Association
- Georgia Association of Historians
- Agricultural History Society
- Phi Alpha Theta National
- World History Association
- H-Net
- National Coalition for History
- National Council on Public History
Local Phi Alpha Theta Chapters
The Pi Alpha Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society, focuses on the intellectual and career development of students in the field of History. Founded in 1969, our organization currently has over thirty members, all of whom have excelled, academically, in the field of history. Through our organization, we offer enlightening history related documentary and game nights, secure guest speakers in the fields of history, and offer career outreach to fellow history majors. Phi Alpha Theta at Georgia Southern University provides a unique and open environment to discuss and enjoy history.
Graduate Students
Applying to PhD Programs
Helpful information on how to approach applications to doctoral programs and careers in the history profession can be found through the following resources:
- The American Historical Association’s Resources for Graduate Students
- The American Historical Association’s Careers in Public History section
Jobs Outside Academia
There are a number of links that can help graduates plan non-academic careers as a historian:
- Museums: American Association of Museums
- Archives: Society of American Archivists; National Council on Public History; Society for History in the Federal Government
- Historical Societies: American Association for State and Local History
- Federal, State, and Local Government Employment: 50statejobs
Graduate Course Offerings
The Department’s faculty members teach courses covering various time periods, regions of the world, and themes in history. The course schedules below show what has been offered in past semesters, the current semester, and what is tentatively expected to be offered in future semesters. For the current semester, you can also visit the Registrar’s Schedule of Classes and search for ‘HIST’ in the subject area. Future semester schedules are subject to change in order to fit the needs of the department, and may be revised without advance notice. No contract, either expressly or implied, is created by future schedules. Course Descriptions can be found in the catalog.
Student Success Resources
The following are a collection of links to resources that the department believes will be of significant benefit to history majors or anyone taking an upper division history course. For success, a history major should be familiar with all of these in some form.
- Georgia Southern University Writing Center
- Purdue Online Writing Lab: Developing a thesis statement
- The Writing Center of the University of Wisconsin – Madison: Conducting research, organizing material, and writing a research paper
- University of Maryland: Online guide to writing and research
- Purdue Online Writing Lab: General information and tips on writing, including grammar, punctuation, citation, different types of writing and other writing-related topics
- Turabian Quick Guide: The official University of Chicago Press short guide to citation according the rules found in Kate L. Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.
- Formal vs Informal Writing: Brief guide for students to help them differentiate writing styles for assignments.
- Zotero: The official site for downloading Zotero, a Firefox add-on that enables you to collect, organize, and cite (in Microsoft Word) bibliography found on the internet, whether from library catalogues, journal databases, or even Amazon. The site also includes tutorials—look under “documentation.”
- The C.R.A.P. Test: a guide to determining the Currency, Reliability, Authority, and Purpose of online sources.
- Online tutorial for JSTOR: Video tutorial for using JSTOR to find academic articles.
- Online tutorial for Project Muse: An online tutorial for using Project Muse to find academic articles.
- The National University Library System: Links to tutorials and other information on JSTOR, Project Muse, and other academic databases.
The History Lab at Georgia Southern is an experimental space for developing projects and installations related to historical research, which recognize the challenges of understanding and valuing history and historical methods in the digital age. The goal of the lab is to open the traditional classroom to the kinds of effects achieved in creative and cross-media knowledge spaces and to develop a model that can be replicated on a small scale with limited funding.
Projects like True/False: The Indigo Garden, The Waddie Welcome Archive, and Open Sea: Reflections from a Port City are currently being incubated in the lab. Student and faculty projects using WordPress blogging, Wiki sites, Google Maps and other widely available and public domain software applications are also facilitated and hosted through the lab.
The lab is also collecting of video recordings of interviews with local public artists and historians. These interviews are archived through streaming video to build up a database of localized practices of public history.
Below are several rubrics that will assist you while enrolled/completing the Methods and Senior Seminar courses.
- Citation-Bibliography Rubric for Historical Methods and Senior Seminar.
- Title Page for Papers (HIST 2630 and HIST 4635)
- Portfolio Review Rubric to assess the portfolio each student must submit for graduation.