The scholars will present their projects at a Department of History gala in April.
Mj Jones, Vy Nguyen, and Nicole Spangler have been named 2025 Living History Scholars by the Department of History. The program encourages undergraduates to conduct innovative research that engages with history in creative ways and aims to contribute knowledge beyond the university.
Professor Iver Bernstein directs the program, which is now in its fourth year. The hallmark history department initiative emphasizes “a broadly defined take on community engagement,” Bernstein said, and scholarship that yields a tangible contribution. So far, he’s been impressed with the efforts of the 2025 cohort.
“Each of these three highly original projects asks questions that challenge conventional wisdom, creates its own archive through innovative research, and provides new knowledge of value, not only to scholars but also to the communities with which it engages,” Bernstein said. “Each offers its own captivating model of what the Living History program can aspire to and accomplish.”
Mj Jones, a junior double majoring in history and women, gender, and sexuality studies, is producing a documentary about a late-1800s girls basketball team from a Native American boarding school in Fort Shaw, Montana. The team competed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and stayed at the Model Indian School pavilion, which showcased the residential school system. Jones will explore how their athletic success offered them a degree of independence within the Fair’s colonial environment.
Junior anthropology major Vy Nguyen is creating an online story map and digital archive of the oral histories and family photographs of Vietnamese refugees who resettled in Missouri after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam. Nguyen hopes to capture the emotional depth of the intergenerational refugee experience in the Midwest.
Sophomore Nicole Spangler’s research will examine the oralism movement in the United States following the 1880 International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, when the use of sign language was banned in schools. Spangler, who is majoring in history and classics, is studying the ways that the Missouri School for the Deaf responded to, complied with, and resisted the rise of oralism — a system of teaching people who are deaf to communicate by use of speech and lip-reading. The project will culminate in a visual archive of interviews and research, presented primarily through sign language.
Spangler described her experience in the Living History Scholars program as both challenging and rewarding, as it has pushed her out of her comfort zone. “The program has supported me in brainstorming and problem-solving, but it’s also encouraged me to figure out how to direct research on my own and manage where I want my project to go,” she said.
The scholars will present their projects to students and faculty at a Department of History gala in April.
Applications for the 2026 Living History Scholars program will be due in mid-November. Interested students are encouraged to contact Bernstein (icbernst@wustl.edu).
