Master of Arts in History

Kaci DeLisle came to Kentucky from Florida and completed the MA program fully online while living in Louisville. Kaci is now a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, which was ranked the #1 History Ph.D. program in the world by US News & World Report in 2021.

With funding from the WKU History Department’s Irene Olson Scholarship, she traveled to the Temple University archives in Philadelphia to carry out research for her M.A. thesis on the 1985 aerial bombing of the MOVE organization by the Philadelphia police department. MOVE clashed with city authorities over police violence, municipal regulations, veganism, and animal liberation, including an attempt to free animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. The bombing marked a dramatic escalation in violence that killed 11 people, including 5 children, and sparked a fire that destroyed 61 homes in the surrounding neighborhood.

At WKU, Kaci helped hundreds of students as an online tutor and coordinated the History Success Center, which offers free tutoring appointments for History students. She also taught HIST 102: World History since 1500 and helped launch a WKU chapter of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians as a graduate student fellow.

Mike Jones arrived at WKU as a winner of the prestigious James Madison Memorial Scholarship, which provides funding for high school history teachers to complete a master's degree involving the study of American legal and constitutional history. As part of this program, Mike participated in a summer institute at Georgetown University. Mike teaches history at Southwestern High School in Somerset, Kentucky.

In Mike's words, "As a teacher, WKU’s history graduate program checked all of my boxes. It provided the flexibility I needed to be able to perform at my job while offering the type of challenge I hoped for. A variety of interesting courses and personable and inspiring professors made it something I wanted to do rather than had to do. My teaching has been elevated, and I have tapped into a network of colleagues to lean on even after completing the program. I’m so glad I chose WKU."

Michael Rasak completed the MA program while serving as an intelligence officer in the US Army. On the strength of his groundbreaking thesis on the history of drone technology, Mike was recognized with the PCAL Outstanding Graduate Student Award in 2025. He also secured a prestigious fellowship from the Army Strategic Planning and Policy Program that will allow him to complete his PhD with full funding.

Drawing on archives from the Cold War, Mike's thesis demonstrates that that rise of the Predator drone platform was not an inevitable story of technological progress, but a messy chapter of administrative history that shaped US military doctrine and closed the door on an array of technological and ethical alternatives. His innovative work brings the field of Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) together with theoretical frameworks from cultural history, arguing that new technologies are "scriptive things" that can shape the behavior of military planners.