For his dissertation, Mr. Curran is writing a microhistory on William Gregg, a mid-nineteenth-century South Carolina industrialist and the principal founder of the Graniteville Manufacturing Company. In the work, he examines Gregg’s life and memory to complicate our understanding of the relationship between southern industrialists and their mill towns and early nineteenth-century reform, prewar southern nationalism, Confederate nationalism, and memory and identity in the twentieth-century South.
