Clements Undergraduate Fellow Kevin Powell receives [br]prestigious UT Undergraduate Research Fellowship[/br]

The financial award will go towards his travel to conduct a battlefield analysis of Saratoga Battlefield and for research at archive centers in Albany and Saratoga Springs, New York. His project will explore military innovation in the American colonies from the French and Indian War (1754-1763) through the War of Independence (1775-1783). In particular, he will address the evolution of an American hybrid military force which was able to negotiate its place within contemporary European military doctrine and discourse, tactics, and grand strategy.

Powell’s research stresses the importance of American military innovation on the world stage. He explains:

“I am ultimately searching for a uniquely American military experience formed by an exchange of European military ideas across the Atlantic as well as those ideas and innovations environmentally adapted to the North American colonial project. What were European reactions and responses to these revolutionary triumphs and how were these tactical developments exported back to the European metropolises? This period is commonly known as the Age of Revolution, and highly innovative ideas not just political and social, nor homogenously European, were sweeping Europe and the Atlantic world. This is why an analysis into Atlantic colonial contributions, in the military sphere, is long overdue.”

Powell is a UT History student and was awarded the fellowship under the recommendation and supervision of the Clements Center. He is a sophomore at UT and studies European and Atlantic history, with an emphasis on state militarization and its role in Early Modern statecraft and, by extension, Europe’s colonial projects. He will depart for Saratoga in the fall of 2014 and present his conclusions in 2015.

Click here to learn more about the Undergraduate Fellows Program.