Advisor: Matt Simmons Dr. Kay Edwards

Pronouns: He/Him/His

Education: BA in History, University of South Carolina

Bio:

Dylan is a first-year History MA student researching cultures, memory, and interconnectivity between social class and race in the Antebellum South. Primarily focusing on the lives of enslaved people, he is currently working on an analysis of magical and religious practices of the Edisto River Valley. This work examines relevant literature from southern writer William Gilmore Simms, alongside local personal correspondences, plantation records, and other manuscripts. The project’s goal is to broaden the real context in which many fictions of Simms’ southern stories, like The Lazy Crow (1846), take place, illuminating their stories of magic and class interconnectivity. His undergraduate work at USC focused on the dispersion of magical practices from West Africa into the Southern United States in the late 18th to 19th century."

My bachelor's thesis, "The Magical South and Its Origin: A Study on the Hybridization, Origins and Practices of Slave Religions from 1750 to 1865," focused primarily on how West African and Afro-Islamic diasporas were influenced by their origin points in their usage of the occult.