Maxwell School history Ph.D. candidate Ian Glazman-Schillinger has been awarded a prestigious Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Emerging Scholars award to continue his dissertation research on late 20th-century hate movements.

Glazman-Schillinger is one of 11 doctoral candidates who received the award, which comes with $25,000. The funding supports researchers investigating the origins of serious violence as well as responses to it across historical and contemporary contexts in the U.S. and other countries. Recipients this year are studying a range of topics, including political extremism, gender violence and the use of political rhetoric to undercut democratic movements. 

Glazman-Schillinger’s dissertation is titled “White Supremacy Goes Online: The Early Digital History of White Power Activists and how they Shaped the Internet, 1984-1999.” His research examines how far-right white power groups used digital technologies and computer networks in the 1980s and 1990s to recruit, communicate, and evade government surveillance and infiltration. He traces white power groups’ transition from the traditional hierarchical organizations of the early-to-mid-20th century to current, more diffuse digital formations. His work builds on scholarship in the fields of information studies, computer mediated communication and the digital humanities, and utilizes methodologies that acknowledge the unique qualities of born-digital materials.

A fifth-year doctoral candidate in the History Department, Glazman-Schillinger is a graduate research associate in the Campbell Public Affairs Institute (CPAI). He has taught courses on American history to 1865, early modern European history and modern European history. His advisor, Margaret Susan Thompson, is associate professor of history and political science, and senior research associate for CPAI and for the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.

“His dissertation project, focusing on born-digital primary materials from the earliest years of online communication, will profoundly illuminate our understanding of hate groups and the radical right in the United States as both historical phenomena and ongoing foci of intellectual, political and even moral concern,” says Thompson. “Ian's work is not only original but undeniably crucial in 21st-century political and scholarly contexts that acknowledge the salience and danger of extremism—although it is considerably less aware than it might be of how extremists organize, communicate and operate.”

Glazman-Schillinger was previously awarded Syracuse University’s Hotchkiss-Ketcham Fellowship as part of a multi-year fellowship package and previously held a nominated position as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. He has published work about online and internet hate crimes, the digital origins of the alt-right and far-right movements in the late 20th century. He has presented conference papers at the 2023 Organization of American Historians’ Annual Conference and the UK-based Historians of the Twentieth Century United States’ 2022 annual meeting.

Glazman-Schillinger received a master’s degree from the University of Aberdeen in 2017 and an M.Sc. in contemporary history from the University of Edinburgh in 2018.

By Mike Kelly