PhD candidate, John Henshaw receives 2025 – 2026 Halleran Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Fifth-year PhD candidate John Henshaw was among the select cohort of William & Mary PhD candidates in the humanities (American Studies, Anthropology, History) to be awarded a Halleran Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the 2025 – 2026 academic year.
John’s research broadly focuses on the Indigenous people of the Great Valley and Potomac River during the Late Woodland period (AD 900 - 1600). His dissertation, provisionally entitled: Conveying Human, Converting Ideas: Contextualizing Exchange Spheres of Goods, People, and Ideas in a Late Woodland Chesapeake Frontier (AD 1300 - 1600), investigates, in his words: “the intersection of economy, climate, and migration along a pre-colonial frontier.” He continued, “Through a combination of radiocarbon dating, paleoclimatology, artifact analysis, and archaeometry techniques, I'm exploring how people chose to interact on an unsettled landscape. I do this by proposing the construction of several related exchange spheres that guide and stabilize exchange between different cultural groups.”
John has received additional support for his doctoral research from multiple institutions across the region, including the Archeological Society of Virginia's Speiden Scholarship, the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory Gloria S. King Fellowship, the Missouri University Research Reactor NSF Subsidy, and a Maryland Historic Trust Historic Preservation Non-Capital Grant.