2024 History Newsletter
Letter from the Chair
I want to focus this newsletter on my wonderful colleagues, both faculty and staff, who are so engaged in maximizing our students’ intellectual development.
The department has seen significant changes in the past decade. Since 2012, we’ve welcomed fourteen new tenure-line faculty, including Dan Chard last January. (You can learn about him in the faculty profile.) Representing almost seventy-five percent of the department, they have developed into seasoned teachers and scholars. A record number of us are taking professional leave this year to work on research projects, including fascinating books. We also have our first Senior Instructor, Michael Hughes, whose teaching and scholarship focuses on American Indigenous history.
At the same time, we have bid au revoir to Amanda Eurich and Chris Friday, who both retired this past year. As scholars and teachers, they remained innovative throughout their time at Western. I wish them all the best. Steven Garfinkle has joined the Economics Department and is now an affiliate faculty member in History. We’ll continue to benefit from his excellent teaching.
Thanks to our hard-working faculty, we have revised the History and History/Social Studies majors. Effective this fall, a new required course, HIST 301: “Doing History,” provides our majors the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the building blocks of history. Each version of the course will establish its own theme, but how history is created is more important than what history topics are covered. Students will grapple with diverse primary sources and will examine scholarship in order to learn the components of effective historical arguments. They’ll discover that they can evaluate an argument - even if they aren’t experts.
In essence, 301 is an empowering class that will give students the foundation to be historians and perform better in all their history courses. We are excited to see the results. If some of you are thinking that this course sounds rather like the former 401 or 398, you’re right! I deeply appreciate the faculty who have stepped up to teach critical courses, such as 301, so that students can smoothly move toward graduation.
Of course, faculty and students rely on the support of staff members Becky Hutchins and Brittany Owens-Plum. I, for one, would be lost without them. Becky has a deep knowledge of institutional operations. Often working behind the scenes, she’s a whiz at policies, procedures, and platforms. Becky is instrumental in annual course scheduling and Phi Alpha Theta conference planning, to give just two important examples. Her work is absolutely vital: the faculty could not serve our students without her.
Working at the department’s front desk, Brittany is often the first point of contact for students and parents. While wayfinding, circulating department information, making the website more user friendly, and other varied responsibilities, Brittany is empathetic, cheerful, and concerned about students’ learning and wellbeing. Always looking for new ways to improve our work with students, she is thoroughly knowledgeable about our programs and activities.
History has a fabulous team. It’s been a privilege to work with such capable and caring colleagues. If you want to help us continue to do the best possible job for our students, please consider a donation.
Best,
Susan Costanzo
Chair and Associate Professor of History
Alumni Spotlight
Quin McKinney
As a passionate student of history at Western, Quin McKinney was often asked, “What are you going to do with a History major?” Though her path wasn’t always clear, since graduating in 2020, Quin has successfully leveraged her degree to develop a fulfilling career in historic preservation. She credits her experiences with faculty in the History Department for giving her the necessary tools to pursue this vocation. “I feel very lucky to have [had] professors that got really excited about history and were able to get the class excited about [it],” she remembers. “That’s something that I definitely take with me...how one person can really make an impact on someone like me...because that’s what I want to do.
Quin, as an ADHD student, appreciated Prof. Price’s ability to connect students with history in an engaging way—infusing his lectures with humor and passion for the material. His warm and inviting classroom demeanor connected with Quin and made learning both easier and more enjoyable. The enthusiasm Prof. Price and other History Department faculty at Western shared with students left a lasting impact on Quin. “It made me be a better student of life,” she acknowledges.
Likewise, Prof. Price recalls being inspired by Quin. “[She] was a wonderful student,” he says, describing her as “intellectually curious” and “sensitive to the challenges and triumphs in past people’s lives.”
Though Quin wished to pursue work in the field of history after graduating, she knew teaching was not for her. Several of her friends were working for the Forest Service at the time and directed her to the Student Conservation Association, which helps place students and recent graduates in entry-level jobs. Willing to relocate, Quin applied for several internships until she was accepted into an interpretation position, welcoming guests and providing information at Medicine Wheel National Historic Monument in Wyoming. This internship taught Quin that she not only enjoyed providing historic interpretation, but also how important the hands-on aspect of historic preservation was to her.
Quin found an ideal position with the Massachusetts Historic Preservation Corps, calling her next internship a “perfect blend of history, talking with visitors, learning, educating, and working with [her] hands.” She leaned into hands-on work, learning how to use a variety of carpentry tools, and developing a whole new set of skills. “I don’t think I’d ever even held a drill, honestly, before that,” she admits. Through each of her diverse positions in historic preservation, Quin continued to develop skills seemingly outside the realm of her history studies, including carpentry, masonry, and woodworking—things she “wouldn’t have even dreamt of doing until now.”
While working for the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center, Quin and her crew helped restore the Wade and Curtis Cabin at the Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. “I got to sand and put linseed oil on the floor, and it just ended up really beautiful,” Quin recollects fondly. The team also repaired the daub (the mud between the logs) of the cabin and put in a new oak floor. She calls this project “an insane transformation...[back] to its period of glory,” distinguishing it from other types of preservation. Quin explains that sometimes the work of historic preservation is centered on stabilizing and preserving a building to represent its condition at a particular point in time, while other times the goal is to fully restore it to a new condition.
Before and After: Wade Curtis Cabin
Looking back, Quin did not realize historic preservation could be a career until after she started interning. Teaching is commonly suggested to students thinking about a career in History, but Quin wants students to know that there are other options outside of academics. Historic preservation can be a great career, especially for anyone who, like her, “would go to reenactment villages and museums as a child and get really excited about history."
Quin has found many historic preservation sites to be welcoming and inclusive spaces and hopes to keep interest and engagement in the skilled trades alive. “Historic preservation is a…unique thing that needs a lot of attention right now,” she emphasizes, “and if you’re interested in working with your hands and being part of a community, then that’s a good place to start.”
While Western may not have taught Quin how to repair masonry or carve ornate wooden details for historic houses, she feels the History Department prepared her to do something just as important—to keep asking questions. “I like to know more of a deeper history rather than just the surface level,” she says, “and Western inspired me to get more curious,…be more passionate about history, and to understand that there is a kind of connection between everything.”
Outstanding Graduates
As soon as I made the decision to become a history major as an undergrad, I knew my goal was to teach early American history at the college level. An MA was the next step, and the strength of WWU’s early Americanist faculty was a significant draw for me. I could not have made a better choice!
Aaron GibbsOutstanding Graduate, MA
I was always drawn towards the humanities but found it difficult to settle in a major. I ultimately chose history because it enabled me to combine my interests—namely political philosophy, geography, and literature—and understand them more fully by placing them within their historical context.
Marianne KellyOutstanding Graduate, History Major
I’ve always enjoyed learning about history, and this is one of the things that drove me to the Marine Corps. I became a history/social studies major because I wanted to continue to serve my community as a high school teacher.
Sophia CornellOutstanding Graduate, History/Social Studies Major
Presidential Scholar
The history major allowed me to fulfill my lifelong interest in the discipline while contextualizing my studies in philosophy and greatly improving my writing skills.
Max StonePresidential Scholar
2024 MA Defenses
- Alan Wheeler, Orientalism in Ancient Literature and its Transmission into Modern Popular Culture
- Alexis Nunn, Constructing Community: Heresy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
- Patrick Czichas, Iron Mixed with Clay, Partly Strong, Partly Brittle: Exploring Religious Cultural Exchange Within the Seleucid Empire
- Seth Frow, The Perils of Religion, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Violent Ruptures in Poland and Ukraine, The United States, and the former Ottoman Empire
- Peter Munsterman, The Defense of Dialectic and Ethics in Murray Bookchin's Philosophy of Social Ecology
- Phoenix Walker, Medical Necessities: A History of Transgender Care in Washington State and British Columbia from the 1950s to the Present
- Aaron Gibbs, Amity and Commerce: The Jay Treaty and Free Trade in the Atlantic World
- Brian Fleming Bleed, “Two Years in the Making and Ten Minutes in the Destroying.” British Communal Army Formation during the First World War
- Andrew Nelson, “In the Example of the Rich and Powerful Nations”: The Limitations of American Sovereignty in the Mediterranean and Atlantic between 1783-96
Support the History Department
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To contribute to our funds for scholarships, speakers, and travel and research opportunities, please visit WWU's Foundation Page.
Thank you for your generosity and partnership!
Faculty Spotlight
Dr. Daniel S. Chard
In January 2024, Dr. Daniel S. Chard joined the History Department as a tenure-track Assistant Professor after having served as a non-tenure track Visiting Professor since 2019. He holds a PhD (2016) and MA (2011) in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BA in History (2008) from the University of Southern Maine. While teaching at Western, Dr. Chard published his book, Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), along with book reviews in Terrorism and Political Violence and The Global Sixties and popular writings in several outlets including Jacobin and the Washington Post. He has also been invited to share his research through lectures, conferences, podcasts, and online forums.
Though his career appears on paper to have followed a straightforward path, Dr. Chard considers his route to becoming a historian far less conventional: through activism. He spent his late teens and early twenties heavily immersed in social movements, including the militant animal rights movement and radical environmental movement. After meeting an elder Black Panther and others formerly involved in the 1960s-era left, he dropped out of Southern Connecticut State University to continue participating in the “anti-globalization,” or global justice movement. After some time, however, Dr. Chard began to consider his future and realized he needed to return to school.
At the University of Southern Maine, he began to view history “as a way to reflect” on his understanding of the groups he’d been involved in and the people he’d met along the way. “Studying history involved having to confront my own romanticization of those movements while...putting some analytical distance between the study of history and my personal connections with people,” Dr. Chard says. It wasn’t until an advisor suggested graduate school that he seriously considered continuing his study of history: “I had never imagined it within my capacity, but it sparked an interest for me.”
Dr. Chard’s desire to work collectively to create meaningful teaching materials has led him to participate in projects such as his recent research collaboration with Prof. Anna Booker of Whatcom Community College and members of the Lummi Nation Cultural Commission. Together they developed a lesson plan using primary source documents from the Center for Pacific Northwest Study, WWU University Archives, and the Lummi Nation Archive. After much collaboration and review, three members of the Cultural Commission visited his HIST 391 “History of the Pacific Northwest” course to help pilot the resulting lesson plan—creating, what Dr. Chard calls “a fantastic experience of intergenerational, intercultural learning.”
“I think that my experience conducting oral history interviews with socialist former guerrillas,” Dr. Chard says, “who were very much committed to a collectivity and also concerned about the sensitivity of information and its impact on people, really informed my understanding of how members of the Lummi Nation and other Indigenous tribes are concerned about how information has always been used against them by those who want access to their lands and waters.”
Reflecting on his approach to research and writing, Dr. Chard quotes his dissertation advisor, Dr. Christian G. Appy: “Write with the rigor of an academic historian, but for a popular audience—make writing accessible.” In Dr. Chard’s view, “Writing to convey ideas to a popular audience can be just as important as getting the facts and analysis right.... Part of the reason we do this is to inform public discussions and speak to the questions of ‘how can we make our society better?’”
Hoping to “be part of some important conversations in our country today about political violence, social change, and the security state,” Dr. Chard is currently in the process of crafting his next book. While Nixon’s War at Home stemmed from studying leftist guerrilla groups and the FBI’s response, he’s now exploring political debates over civil liberties, terrorism, and national security from the mid-1970s through the 9/11 era. On a recent research trip to inform his work, Dr. Chard had the opportunity to search for primary sources in one of the world’s largest collections on conservative movements at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Now that he’s officially a tenure track Assistant Prof., Dr. Chard is excited for more opportunities to conduct public-facing research, bring research into his classes, and continue learning with students. “I try to hold humility for having the privilege of getting paid to do something that I really love,” he says, “while also letting students know there’s so many ways you can use your degree to influence the world around you in positive ways—and it doesn’t mean you have to become a history professor.”
A History degree can provide “transferable skills to a variety of careers—and there’s great value and enrichment of your life and your future career,” Dr. Chard explains. While he’s grateful for where he ended up, Dr. Chard notes his journey, like those of others, has included great uncertainty at times and significant challenges. He calls learning a “holistic experience.” Acknowledging this and “valuing students as whole people,” Dr. Chard says, “is one of the most important parts of being a teacher. And my students are constantly reminding me of that just by being themselves.”
2024 Faculty Books
Faculty and Staff
Charles Anderson
Prof. Anderson studies modern Arab history, with special interests in empire, anti-colonialism, political economy, and Palestine/Israel. He teaches undergraduate courses on premodern and modern Middle East history, Palestine/Israel, and Iraq; and for the MA program, historical methods. In 2019, he was the recipient of a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation grant which allowed him to take leave to work on his first book project, a history from below of the Palestinians’ attempted revolution in the 1930s known as the “Great Revolt.” His article on the growth of Palestinian landlessness before the revolt, published in Middle Eastern Studies, won the journal’s Elie and Sylvia Kedourie Prize for Outstanding Article in 2018.
Dharitri Bhattacharjee
Dr. Bhattacharjee joined Western in Fall 2019. She teaches courses on Indian Ocean, South Asian history, Modern India, decolonization, gender, cinema, and literature. Dr. Bhattacharjee’s work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and online publications. She is currently preparing her first book, Freedom at the margins: Muslim politics in colonial Bengal, 1937-47. She is also working on her first documentary, Limits of History. Dr. Bhattacharjee is a public scholar and has produced a series of oral history interviews, Stories to Tell, and a public podcast, Grit n Grub.
Lucas Burke
Lucas Burke is an instructor of United States history and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon. His dissertation research focuses on political and environmental changes in Washington State during the second half of the 20th century, specifically modern conservatism and the regional evolution of the Republican Party. He is also the co-author of The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016). This academic year, he will be teaching survey courses on U.S. (HIST 103, HIST 104) and African American history (HIST 262, HIST 263).
Emi Bushelle
Prof. Bushelle joined Western’s faculty in 2016. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Japan, with a focus on the poetic and philological movement known as National Learning (kokugaku). She is currently working on a monograph exploring the genesis of National Learning in the medieval and early modern Japanese Buddhist traditions.
Pedro Cameselle-Pesce
Prof. Cameselle has been at Western since 2015, teaching courses on U.S.-Latin American Relations, Immigration and Ethnicity, Student Movements, and Soccer & Latin American history. He is the coeditor of Uruguay in Transnational Perspective, published by Routledge in 2023. His other book project, Forgotten Neighbors: The Challenge of Uruguay-United States Relations During the FDR Era, 1929- 1945, explores the political and cultural influence of Roosevelt’s image in Uruguay. Most recently, Dr. Cameselle contributed a chapter titled “‘Fascismo No’: Uruguayan Anti-Fascist Movements During the 1930s and early 1940s,” which is part of a coedited volume on anti-fascist movements in Latin America under contract with Cambridge University Press. His new research project examines the subject of Sport and Society in Uruguay during the first half of the twentieth century.
Josh Cerretti
Josh Cerretti is an Associate Professor of History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, having arrived at WWU in 2014. His work focuses on how problems of state violence in the United States intersect with race, gender, and sexuality during the 20th century. Prof. Cerretti’s most recent article “Vagrancy and Sex Work in Early 20th Century Bellingham” won the 2024 Charles Gates Memorial Award from the Washington State Historical Society for the best article published in Pacific Northwest Quarterly last year. Josh also serves as the Recording Secretary for the Northwest Washington Central Labor Council and is the Board Secretary of the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center.
Daniel Chard
Prof. Chard is a historian of the United States with a research focus on post-World War II politics, social movements, and political violence. He is excited to have joined the History Department last January in a new position of Assistant Professor. This fall he is teaching the History 499 senior research seminar on the US in the World Since 1945. In the Winter, he’ll be teaching US in the Cold War and America since 1965, and in the spring, he’ll teach the latter course again along with History of the Pacific Northwest.
Susan Costanzo
Prof. Costanzo teaches courses in Russian and Soviet history, Western Civilizations, film courses, and a methods course. As chair of the department, she is busy helping students and faculty as well as attending many meetings. She has had articles published in the United States, Britain, France, and Russia. When she has a spare few minutes, she is keeping up to date on developments in Russia and Ukraine as best she can, given the lack of reliable information about current circumstances in Russia.
Peter Diehl
Prof. Diehl teaches medieval European history, offering the following courses this year: History 112 (Fall and Winter quarters); History 315 (Fall); History 316 (Winter); History 499 and History 515 (Spring). Prof. Diehl’s research interests include medieval heresy, Carolingian historiography, and the history of plague. He is translating a group of ninth-century annals and adding historical and philological commentary.
Arna Elezović
Dr. Elezović is a historian, writer, and Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Washington University for the History Department and the Honors Program. Arna’s Ph.D. is from the University of Washington, where she taught introductory and intermediate writing seminars for the UW’s Interdisciplinary Writing Program (2018 - 2021) and a comparative history course on rediscovering the ancient Mediterranean world (summers 2017, 2019, 2021). Her research focused on how the ancient past was constructed for western Europe by ethnographic travelogues and journalism in the 19th century. She is presently exploring the creation of narratives, identities, and time using historical texts. Prior to earning the Ph.D., she was a regulatory compliance analyst and technical writer in human subjects’ biomedical research. Her lifelong (and incurable) habit of writing genre fiction into the wee hours of the night is generously tolerated by friends and family. Her languages are English, French, and Croatian.
Breann Goosmann
Breann Goosmann joined Western last fall as an instructor of premodern Japanese history. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon, focusing on medieval Japanese social history with special interests in religion, law, and marginalized populations. Her upcoming dissertation examines the legal documents of one warrior family in Southern Kyushu to investigate the lives of commoners in early fourteenth-century Satsuma. This academic year, her courses include Introduction to East Asian Civilizations and Premodern Japan.
Jared Hardesty
Prof. Hardesty has taught at Western since 2014. He is a scholar of early America, the West Indies, Atlantic world, and the histories of labor and slavery. This academic year, he will be teaching courses on colonial America, the American Revolution, and early globalization. Prof. Hardesty’s fourth book, The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman, was released in early 2024. He is currently researching absentee plantation ownership in colonial and revolutionary New England and writing a microhistory of the final days of eighteenth-century pirate Thomas Anstis.
Madison Heslop
Prof. Heslop joined the department in 2022. She is currently teaching courses in Canadian History and the History of the Salish Sea. Her research examines the connected histories of Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. Into the 1930s, many of Seattle and Vancouver’s residents were coastal people whose lives were entwined with the water. United by the Salish Sea, the relationships of these cities to one another and to the Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are best observed at the site of the urban waterfront. To view her various digital history projects, visit her website.
Michael Hughes
Prof. Hughes has been teaching in the department since 2019. His courses include American History to 1865, The Indian in American History, Tribal Sovereignty and Washington History, North American Indigenous Histories to 1800, and Indigenous People of the PNW. His article “Within the Grasp of Company Law: Land, Legitimacy, and the Racialization of the Métis, 1815-1821” was published in Ethnohistory.
Rebecca Hutchins
Rebecca (Becky) joined the department as administrative services manager in August 2020. When not on the clock, Becky can be found in a boat, on her bike, or playing pickleball. She holds a dual M.A in Anthropology and Museum Studies from the University of Colorado and previously worked as a field archaeologist, museum curator, and non-profit administrator.
Christine Johnston
Dr. Johnston is an archaeologist and historian of the ancient Mediterranean, West Asia, and North Africa. She employs historical, anthropological, and network methodology to examine political economy and exchange systems in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly the roles of non-institutional actors and extra-palatial trade networks. Dr. Johnston also specializes in the study of pottery, which is the primary data she uses for modeling trade networks. In addition to the study of political economy, she is active in research on the environment and climate change in Ancient Egypt and is a Natural Environment Area Editor for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. She also engages in research on cultural heritage protection and the pedagogical value of integrating legacy material collections in the classroom. Dr. Johnston is also a co-founder and video producer for Peopling the Past, a digital humanities initiative that produces and hosts open-access multi-media resources for teaching and learning about everyday people in antiquity.
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros is Professor of histories of Latin America. He is currently writing a biography of the Colombian sociologist Gabriel Restrepo. He is also working on a history of domination in Colombia during the second half of the twentieth century. He is the author of Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia (Duke 2019) and co-editor of The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History (Duke 2012) and The Middle Classes in Latin America (Routledge, 2022).
Douglas Mangum
Dr. Mangum joined Western this fall, teaching ancient history. He studied Northwest Semitic languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA) and completed a PhD in ancient Hebrew at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His research draws on history, linguistics, literary theory, and Translation Studies to analyze how figures of speech from classical Hebrew were interpreted in ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible. His interests include the history of the Levant and the ancient Mediterranean, the interpretation of euphemisms and idioms, historical linguistics, and cognitive semantics.
Johann Neem
Prof. Neem is currently editing the Journal of the Early Republic, teaching, and conducting research. Last spring, he offered a new course on Early Modern England. He is currently one of the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lecturers. His writings about history and culture appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hedgehog Review, and other venues. His most recent books are What’s the Point of College? and Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.
Brittany Owens-Plum
After moving across the country from South Florida to Bellingham, Brittany joined the History Department in 2023 as the Office Assistant. Previously, in 2022, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from FIU. When she’s not on campus, you can find her reading, working on several manuscripts and collaborations, and exploring the PNW with her husband and dog.
Peter C. Pihos
Peter C. Pihos teaches African American and modern U.S. history at Western. His research, which has recently appeared in The War on Drugs: A History and Radical History Review, focuses on the relationship between race and the politics of policing in American cities from the 1950s to the 1980s. In addition, he also writes about civil rights activists’ use of history and documentary to argue for social transformation. He is on leave for fall and winter quarters, finishing a book on Black police officers in Chicago.
Hunter Price
Prof. Price is a historian of early America, religion, and the American South. In July 2024, his book Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty was published by University of Virginia Press as part of its Jeffersonian America series. He is working on a second book, an examination of the 19th-century American scientists John and Joseph LeConte and their place in the legacies of slavery and environmentalism. He will spend winter and spring quarters of 2025 conducting research for this project in multiple states.
Jennifer Seltz
Prof. Seltz’s research historicizes connections between medical and environmental knowledge and experience, mostly in the 19th and 20th-century North American West. She has published articles and book chapters on topics ranging from epidemic and endemic disease around the 19th-century Salish Sea to the cultural history of natural childbirth. Prof. Seltz is currently finishing her first book, Sickly State: Health, Identity, and Expansion in Nineteenth-Century America. She has a new project on the environmental and cultural history of mid-20th-century American pregnancy and birth. Prof. Seltz teaches classes on the American West, the Pacific Northwest, and the modern United States; on energy history; and on the history of health and medicine.
Mart Stewart
Prof. Stewart is teaching courses in environmental and agricultural history, and the U.S. South, this year, as well as his usual GUR course in U.S. history. Prof. Stewart continues his work as the co-editor of the Flows, Migrations, Exchanges book series at the University of North Carolina Press, which published a volume this last year and has two more scheduled for 2025. A M.Sc. program, Climate Change Studies, that Prof. Stewart helped develop while on a Fulbright Senior Specialist appointment at the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2016 enrolled its seventh cohort this fall. This program prepares students for careers in NGOs or government agencies in Cambodia who are confronting the increasing challenges of climate change. He continues research and writing on climate change in the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. The garden crops that he and his partner, the writer and translator Ly Lan, tend at home have been gracious in their abundance this last summer, and their cold frame winter garden is off to a good start.
Roger Thompson
Roger Thompson has been teaching Chinese and East Asian history at Western since 2003. His research and publications focus on the period between the Opium War and the Communist revolution. His most recent article, the fourth in his Americal Journal series, “The Americal’s Japanese Americans: An American Tale from the South Pacific,” is available on Western’s CEDAR platform. (605 downloads from the series through September 2024.) This series, inspired in part by Thompson’s Pacific War seminar, includes material from the unpublished South Pacific journal of Dr. Dale G. Friend, commanding officer of the 101st Medical Regiment. In August 2024, the Friend family gave the journal to Thompson for research, publication, and deeding to an appropriate archive.
Sarah Watkins
Sarah Watkins is a Visiting Assistant Professor of African history. When not teaching, she works as an independent academic editor, coach, and indexer. She also serves as a member of the Board of Directors and as a research consultant for the Traveling Memories, Silences and Secrets project at KU Leuven under the direction of Prof. David Mwambari. She holds a PhD in African History with an emphasis in Feminist Studies from UC Santa Barbara and has previously taught at Colby College and The Ohio State University. She is currently writing the biography of the Rwandan queen mother Murorunkwere that explores the intersections of monarchical power, motherhood, and sexuality in nineteenth-century Rwanda. Outside of work, she loves hanging out with her cats, baking cookies, cheering on the OL Reign, and watching Bob’s Burgers.
Sarah Ellen Zarrow
Prof. Zarrow’s scholarship focuses on Jewish life in Eastern Europe. She is most interested in the history of nationalism(s) and non-nationalism, and on the ways that culture is transmitted and shaped—especially through museums and schools. Her first book, about Jewish museum practices in Polish lands between the 1890s and World War II, will be out in June. She is currently researching her second book, a study of vocational education for Jewish girls in interwar Poland. Prof. Zarrow received her doctorate from New York University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Bucharest, Romania.
Sarah J. Zimmerman
Prof. Zimmerman’s research focuses on the experiences of women and the operation of gender in West Africa, French Empire, and the African Atlantic World. Her first monograph, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire (Ohio UP, 2020), historicizes militarization, marriage, and colonialism by focusing on tirailleurs sénégalais households in West Africa and across French Empire. Her new research investigates how matrilineality gendered authority and social order in Atlanticera Senegambia. She has published articles in the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Les Temps Modernes, Esclavages & post-esclavages, and the Journal of West African History.
