Penn State University
Candidate for Executive Council Graduate Student Representative (2026-28)
Candidate statement
My name is Richard Yoder, and I am a late-stage PhD candidate in history at Penn State University. I am a historian of gender and religion with a focus on the French Jansenists. In particular, I examine issues of gender, disability, and knowledge among the convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard, a millenarian sect of Jansenists in Old Regime France. My work has appeared in The Catholic Historical Review, Commonweal, and in a forthcoming edited volume with Brill. I recently co-edited Jansenism: An International Anthology (CUA Press, 2024) with Shaun Blanchard. ACHA has been essential to my development as a scholar, providing a warm community and intellectual home since I began my PhD program. Moreover, the financial support I have received from ACHA has made it possible for me to carry out much of my research. I am profoundly grateful for everything this community has given me.
In seeking the office of Graduate Student Representative, I hope to build on ACHA’s strengths in tandem with the rest of the Executive Council. Many of our members first joined as graduate students; I would partner with the Membership Committee to strategize outreach methods for drawing in new grad student members from across disciplines, including by reaching out to other scholarly organizations and conferences. I also think we can do more to emphasize the teaching of Catholic history (or a historical approach within Catholic Studies or Theology), as many grad students come from institutions where they don’t have the chance to teach on their research subject. I would like to work with the Virtual Seminar Committee to set up a series of pedagogically focused sessions designed especially for grad students. For instance, the first of these could unpack syllabus design for Catholic history courses, looking at examples as well as broad principles applicable for teaching across the Church’s history. I would formalize a mentoring program that would pair more senior scholars with grad student members. While similar connections already form at our annual and regional meetings, the inability to attend one or both may mean that some grad students miss their opportunity to form such links. The Presidential Travel Grant partially rectifies this issue, but for a more sustained mentoring relationship that does not strictly depend upon meeting at the conference, we can set up these connections ourselves through something as simple as a Google form (this worked well for us at Penn State, where our HGSA runs a similar program focused on peer mentorship within the department).
My hope through these initiatives would be not just growth of the graduate student cohort within ACHA, but also offering that cohort a series of professionalization and networking opportunities that complements what we already provide in terms of financial and scholarly support. All in all, I would be excited to work on these projects—and any others that the graduate student members wish me to initiate—with the whole of the Executive Council and the ACHA community at large. Thank you for your consideration.