Lucien Holness, an assistant professor in the Department of History, was awarded a short-term research fellowship by the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, for his research project titled “The Making of Free Soil, Free Labor, and Black Freedom in the Borderland of Southwestern Pennsylvania: 1754–1870.”

In addition, he published “Black Southwestern Pennsylvanians and the Politics of Free Soil in the Northern Borderlands,” Fugitive Movements:  Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World, ed. James O’Neil Spady (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2022), pp. 78–95.