Jacob Finegan

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Advisor: Manisha Sinha 

Research Interests: U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction; 19th-Century United States; Historical Memory; Historical Archaeology; Legal History; Digital Humanities; Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 

Education: M.A. in History, University of Connecticut (in progress); B.A. in History, Burnett Honors College, University of Central Florida, 2021 

Biography: 

Jacob Harold Finegan is a historian whose research examines how social memory is created, contested, and preserved through the commemorative landscapes of the nineteenth- and twentieth-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 investigates how political power, race, and memory converge on public lands, monuments, and memorials. 

His current research follows the lives of U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) and their families during and after the Civil War, tracing their movements, social mobility, and erasure from the historical record in commemorative landscapes. He also examines burial practices and veterans’ rights in the Grand Army of the Republic. More broadly, he is interested in the politics of national memory and how battlefields, cemeteries, parks, and statues become contested spaces of heritage and identity. Combining digital humanities methods, GIS, and archaeological sources, he works to recover overlooked histories and make the environmental and historical analysis of memorial sites more accessible. 

At UConn, he is a teaching and research assistant in the History Department. He is currently an Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection Fellow at the John Hay Library, Brown University. This fall he is also mentoring an undergraduate researcher through the Research Apprenticeship Program (RAP) on a project built around Civil War battlefield archaeology. 

In Florida, Finegan spent five years as a public educator and swimming coach. As a teacher in a Title I school, he focused on improving student learning outcomes and expanding extracurricular opportunities for low-income families. He also coached club and high school swimming and was selected in 2023 as an assistant coach for the Florida Swimming All-Stars and the Southern Zone Age Group Championships. 

He welcomes discussion about history, archaeology, public education, and swimming. 

Awards and Fellowships 

• 2026 Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection Research Fellowship, Brown University, John Hay Library 

• 2026 Human Rights Research Grant, University of Connecticut, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute 

• 2026 Research Apprentice Fellowship, University of Connecticut, The Graduate School 

• 2025–2026 Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, University of Connecticut, History Department and The Graduate School 

• 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 Presentations 

• 2026 New England Civil War Museum, Presenter, “Dignifying Death and the Making of Veterans’ Rights in the Grand Army of the Republic”  

• 2026 Society for Military History, Annual Meeting, Panel Discussant, “Reconstructing Black Civil War Memorial Landscapes: Honoring the US Colored Troops” 

• 2026 Barnes Conference, Annual Meeting, Panel Discussant, “Power of the Public Place: Universities, Monuments, Museums, and Courts” 

• 2026 Southern Perspectives, Annual Meeting, Panel Discussant, “Making and Unmaking Memories of the Civil War” 

• 2023 Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Lake County, Annual Meeting, Presenter, “Finding the Fallen: Battle of Olustee” 

• 2022 Florida Historical Society, Annual Meeting, Panel Discussant, “U.S. Colored Troops in Florida” 

• 2022 Florida Conference of Historians, Annual Meeting, Panel Discussant, “Finding the Fallen: Archaeology and Memory at Olustee Battlefield” 

• 2019 American Societies of Overseas Research (ASOR), Annual Meeting, Poster Presenter, “The Rise and Fall of Urartu: A Textual Geography of the Corpus dei Testi Urartei (CTU)” 

• 2018 Institutes of Ethnography and Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences in Yerevan, Armenia (IEA-NAS), Archaeology Workshop, Presenter, “The Pottery Piece that Could”