Students
Amelia Blakely
Graduate Research Assistant
Amelia has Bachelor's degrees in Journalism and Philosophy from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. As she pursues her M.A. in Public History at MTSU, she is working with the Center on a preservation assessment of the Coomer Barn in Rutherford County.
Amelia is interested in rural American history, environmental history, and economic history. Visit her Web site at www.ameliablakelywrites.com.
Elizabeth Webb
Graduate Research Assistant
Elizabeth is in her first year with the Center. She began working on the Teaching with Primary Sources-Southern Region program in the summer of 2025. Elizabeth creates content for the monthly newsletter and the TPS Teachers Network, and assists the program in a variety of other areas.
Elizabeth received her B.A. in History from MTSU in 2025. Her research interests include women's history, craft history, socio-economic history, and history education.
Graduate Research Assistant
Kate is working on documentation of Stony Point, an 18th-century house in Hawkins County in East Tennessee, which is also the focus of her dissertation. In her work with the Center she is also assisting with the Cherokee Removal Memorial Museum at Blythe Ferry, various African American history projects, including the Merrill-Williams House in Williamson County, the collections of the Matt Gardner Homestead Museum in Giles County, and a number of Civil Rights sites in Alabama. In 2022, she completed an exhibit for the Tanner Rosenwald School in Newport, Tennessee, and assisted with a building survey for the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail. Additionally, she has a close working relationship with the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive, founded by Center alums Dr. Tiffany Momon and Dr. Torren Gatson.
Kate previously served as a historic preservation fellow at the Center, assisting with Trail of Tears research and examining new directions at East Coast museums in interpreting southern material culture, particularly with respect to enslaved life and post-emancipation history.
Her research focuses on the 18th- and 19th-century material culture of the American South, with an emphasis on exploring marginalized and ignored histories through objects, architecture, and place. Kate has previously worked at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Historic Charleston Foundation, the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she contributed to the landmark exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina.
Kate has a B.A. from the College of William and Mary and an M.A. from Sotheby's Institute of Art. Visit Kate’s LinkedIn page.
Stephen Simmons
Graduate Research Assistant
With a B.S. and an M.A. from MTSU in hand, Stephen is a doctoral student in the Public History Ph.D. Program. He is working on a historic cemetery survey of Cannon County. He is also providing assistance for the Trail of Tears project that the Center is doing with the Georgia Department of Transportation. Stephen's interests are in cemeteries, the roots of southern violence, ethnohistory, and southern Indigenous history. See his LinkedIn profile for more information.
Joshua Brown
Graduate Research Assistant
Joshua is a graduate of Anderson University, where he majored in History and Spanish. He is currently assisting with a historical assessment of the Morton Funeral Home in Columbia, Tennessee. Joshua's research interests are in African American history, slavery, and Caribbean history.
Joshua's LinkedIn profile can be found
here.
Liz Nahach
Graduate Research Assistant
Liz received her B.A. in History from Truman State University. She is working at the Heritage Center of Murfreesboro & Rutherford County and working on architectural descriptions for the National Register nomination of The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. Her projects have included the Auburntown Bank National Register nomination, the Carothers House in Franklin, the enslaved workers cemetery at Laurel Furnace, and the Orange Mound driving tour.
Liz is interested in the experience of Black travelers in the Jim Crow era (segregated travel); for her thesis, she is surveying and analyzing Green Book sites in Missouri. Her other research interests include vernacular architecture and small-town Black neighborhoods.
Paige Hurley
Graduate Research Assistant
Paige has degrees from Columbia State Community College and Eastern Mennonite University, where she majored in History and Political Science. Based at the Heritage Center of Murfreesboro & Rutherford County, she is working on the Toussaint L'Ouverture Cemetery preservation plan and the Merrill-Williams House interpretive panels. She recently completed the adaptive reuse section of a historic structure report on the Lawrenceburg Cumberland Presbyterian Church.
Paige is interested in Nashville's 1970s feminist movement, post-Civil War Franklin and Middle Tennessee history, and women's history.
Ashli Townsend
Graduate Research Assistant
Ashli has both an Associate's degree (Education) and a Bachelor's degree (Interdisciplinary Studies: History/English) from Cumberland University. At the Center, she is working on Tennessee History Day and the Teaching with Primary Sources-Southern Region program. Ashli's research interests include African American history, American crime, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
Aisha Karamustafic
Graduate Research Assistant
Aisha is a recent graduate of MTSU, where she majored in History. She is working on an African American history tour for the Heritage Center of Murfreesboro and Rutherford County and on a walking tour of Red Boiling Springs. Aisha's research interests are in the Bosnian genocide and the World War II home front in Middle Tennessee. You can learn more about her here:
https://ak8a11.wixsite.com/aisha-kara.
Blaine Howard
Graduate Research Assistant
Blaine graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2024 with a major in Law, History, and Society and a minor in African American and Diaspora Studies. She is currently working on a variety of projects with Drs. Gatson and West. Her research interests include African American women's history and racialized sexual violence in the 20th century.
Travis Horn
Graduate Research Assistant
Travis has degrees from Eastern Kentucky University (B.A. in Anthropology and History), Austin Peay State University (M.A. in History), and the University of Kentucky (M.S. in Library and Information Science). He is working on a variety of historic preservation projects at the Center.
Travis's research interests include southern, women's, and African American history, as well as the significance of space and place, historic preservation, architectural history, material culture, local history, community archives, collective memory, and oral history. You can learn more about him here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-horn-a34b004a/.
