In addition to professorships and fellowships, recent graduates of the UVA History PhD Program have landed positions working in the field of documentary editing in Charlottesville. Documentary editors help preserve the historical record while making the past more accessible to the public, educators, and historians. Their work involves carefully transcribing, annotating, and finally publishing volumes of historical letters and other documents.
Lauren N. Haumesser was recently hired as the Associate Editor of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition, a born-digital edition of Madison's papers published by Rotunda Press. Haumesser is working on what will become volume 12 of the papers, which will cover the years between Madison's death in 1849 and the settlement of her will in the mid-1850s. Her work encompasses researching references to Madison in various archives and then imaging, entering, transcribing, and proofreading the documents, as well as drafting annotations and editorial essays planned for the volume. The volume will be useful to scholars studying topics as varied as antebellum politics, slavery and the economy, material culture, and women's history.
Jeffrey L. Zvengrowski has been an assistant editor at The Papers of George Washington since December 2016. He is working on volume 28 of The Revolutionary War Series, annotating and transcribing George Washington's correspondence from late August-October 1780 in order to contextualize those manuscripts and make them more accessible for the public and scholars. He is intrigued by continuities between the Revolutionary War and the U.S. Civil War as well as France's role in both of those conflicts. His book Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 1800-1870, which is derived from his dissertation at UVA, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press.