Jacob Finegan

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Advisor: Manisha Sinha

Research Interests: 19th century United States, U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, Social Memory, Legal History, Digital Humanities, Geographic Information Systems.

Education: B.A. in History, Burnett Honors College – University of Central Florida, 2021

Bio:

Jacob Harold Finegan is a graduate student in history with a research focus on the intersections of social memory and commemorative landscapes in the 19th and 20th-century United States. He holds a B.A. in History from the University of Central Florida, where he also minored in Anthropological Archaeology. His work draws on the utilization of interdisciplinary methods from historical archaeology, memory studies, and legal history to investigate how political power, race, and memory converge on public lands, monuments, and memorials.

His current research examines the lives of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) and their families during and after the Civil War, with particular attention to their physical movements, social mobility, and displacement from the historical record in commemorative public landscapes. Broadly, he is interested in the politics of national memory and the ways in which physical sites – battlefields, cemeteries, parks, and statues – function as contested spaces of heritage and identity. He is committed to integrating digital humanities methodologies, geographic information system (GIS) technologies, and archaeological sources into his research, with the aim of recovering suppressed histories and making environmental and historical analysis of battlefields and memorial sites more accessible.

Aside from reading Union and Confederate battle accounts, Finegan also spent five years as a public educator and swimming coach in Florida before relocating to Connecticut. As a high school teacher, he served in a Title I school, where he focused on improving student learning outcomes and expanding extracurricular opportunities for low-income families. In his coaching career, he led a private swim club and coached two high school teams. In 2023, he was selected as an assistant coach for the Florida Swimming All-Stars team and also for the Southern Zone Age Group Championships in Cary, North Carolina, where Team Florida earned second place overall, competing against eleven states and fourteen local swimming committees. He invites discussion about any of his work, including history, archaeology, public education and swimming.

 

Awards and Fellowships:

2019 Summer Fellows Institute Fellowship, University of Georgia

2019 Conference, Registration and Travel Grant, University of Central Florida – Student Government

2019 Foundation for Biblical Archaeology Scholarship, American Societies of Overseas Research

2018 Burnett Research Scholars Grant, Burnett Honors College – Office of Honors Research

2018 Student Research Grant, University of Central Florida – Office of Honors Research

2017 Student Research Grant, University of Central Florida – Office of Undergraduate Research

 

Conferences and Workshops:

2023 Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Lake County, Annual Meeting, Presenter

2023 American Association of University Women, Annual Meeting, Presenter (declined)

2022 Florida Historical Society, Annual Meeting, Panel Discussant

2021 Florida Conference of Historians, Annual Meeting, Panel Discussant

2019 Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence, BHC-UCF, Presenter (postponed due to Covid-19 pandemic)

2019 American Societies of Overseas Research (now called ASOR), Annual Meeting, Poster Presenter

2018 Institutes of Ethnography and Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences in Yerevan, Armenia (IEA-NAS), Archaeology Workshop, Presenter