Dr. Jacob K. Friefeld is the Director of the Center for Lincoln Studies. He came to the Center from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and his research has focused on Abraham Lincoln's western legacy. His recent book, The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration, tells the epic story of Black Americans homesteading in the Great Plains after the Civil War. The First Migrants was a finalist for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History book award and winner of the Nebraska Book Award for History. His first book, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, examines the Homestead Act of 1862, one of the most important social policies ever enacted in the United States.

When not busy helping everyone see themselves reflected in Lincoln's legacy, Friefeld most enjoys spending a summer day at Wrigley Field.

Jenny Harris is the Center for Lincoln Studies Office Administrator. She arrived at the Center with years of administrative experience. She is the heart of the Center. She has spent most of her life in the central Illinois area and has always had a fondness for local history including Lincoln’s heritage. She brings years of administrative experience in the healthcare industry to our unit. Jenny attended Robert Morris University when it was still in Springfield, Illinois. With her attention to detail and friendly disposition, you will feel you are in capable hands any time you need to reach out to the Center for Lincoln Studies!

Professor Michael Burlingame, holder of the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at University of Illinois Springfield, is the author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln and the Civil War, as well as the editor of many collections of Lincoln primary source materials. A graduate of Princeton University and Johns Hopkins University, he taught at Connecticut College in New London for many years before joining the faculty at University of Illinois Springfield in 2009. That year, The Atlantic rated Abraham Lincoln: A Life one of the five best books of the year, and in the New York Review of Books, the dean of Civil War historians, James McPherson, wrote that Burlingame “knows more about Lincoln than any other living person.”

Professor Graham Peck specializes in antebellum American political history, and particularly in Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and the origins of the Civil War, but he is also very interested in the intersection of scholarship and other forms of history. For this reason he wrote, directed, and produced a feature-length film on Douglas for use at the Douglas Tomb State Historic Site in Chicago. The film features performances by leading Douglas and Lincoln reenactors, interviews with five historians of the Civil War, and hundreds of nineteenth-century images. More recently, Prof. Peck co-directed Lincoln & Douglas: Touring Illinois in Turbulent Times, a 47-minute documentary road film about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which he made with art professor Nathan Peck during the tumultuous Covid summer of 2020. The film features five Lincoln or Douglas reenactors and several interviews, including one with a BLM activist in Springfield who successfully urged removal of Douglas’ statue from the grounds of the Illinois State Capitol.

Anna Newby is a recent graduate from Council Bluffs, Iowa enrolled in the UIS Public History MA program.  She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in American History from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa in May 2024.  Aside from her studies and research as a college student, Anna has had the opportunity to explore her passion through her involvement with the National History Day program over the last eight years.  Anna's historical interests lie in the realm of Social History and African American History, specifically in the Jim Crow era, the Long Black Freedom Struggle, women's history and U.S. presidents.  She is currently working as the Research Assistant in the Center for Lincoln Studies and as a pathways student at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site.  She hopes to work for the National Park Service in the future at one of their historic sites in the Midwest or the East Coast and to help the public understand how history got us to where we are and to make "hidden histories" more accessible!

Front from left: Sarah Watson, Barb Ferrara, Mary Beaumont, Kathryn Harris

Back from left: Dave Joens, Joe McMenamin, CLS Director Jacob Friefeld, Brian Mitchell, Christian McWhirter, Jeff Lorber