Digging into the Past: A Historian’s Path to Public Service

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 2018, Tristan Krause was working with the University of Wisconsin Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project to find the remains of a pilot who was shot down over Belgium in 1944. For Krause, this was the kind of work that allowed him to combine his passions for history and service.  

“This is more than history. This is about somebody getting closure back at home,” Krause said. 

Krause is currently getting his PhD in history at the Texas A&M University with the goal of working full-time for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), an organization that recovers the remains of American military members. The DPAA brings together teams of historians, archeologists, geneticists, anthropologists and more to help find, identify, and bring home missing American soldiers. 

I learned I could serve my nation as a historian by bringing closure to others by helping bring these people home that gave the ultimate sacrifice…This is a tactile, tangible form of how I can apply history and do good in the world. To do that work with the DPAA, I need to have a PhD.” 

Krause recently worked with DPAA over the summer and that he loves the interdisciplinary nature of the work that utilizes his skills as a historian. 

“The historian leads the archeologist to the site. The archeologist does the excavation and the anthropologist does the identifications,” Krause explained. “It’s really battlefield detective work and no other aspect of history has really given me that cross-discipline approach yet.” 

But he also saw how this role also allows him to be a historian while also giving back to his country. 

“I learned I could serve my nation as a historian by bringing closure to others by helping bring these people home that gave the ultimate sacrifice,” Krause said. “This is a tactile, tangible form of how I can apply history and do good in the world. To do that work with the DPAA, I need to have a PhD.”