2023 History Newsletter

Old Main Building with sunlight above fall trees

History Department Newsletter 2023

Table of Contents

Letter from the Chair

Looking through recent newsletters, I am struck by ongoing claims that the Humanities are not viable majors, and departments at many universities are under siege from administrators who have accepted this misguided rhetoric. Indeed, the number of degrees conferred nationally in these fields, including History, have decreased – as much as thirty percent since the early 2010s. This statistic is grim. 

I am happy to report that Western’s History Department continues to defy the trend. We awarded ninety BA degrees last year – only twice in the past decade have the numbers been higher. Four students completed their MA theses. Our students’ successes reflect and affect not just each individual but the family and friends who have supported them along the way. Last spring’s commencement was positively raucous with joy. Students and families have much to be proud of!

Costanzo

We tend to focus on majors and minors when determining a department’s relevance, but our impact reaches well beyond them. Many non-majors take our survey courses, and some students take more than one course. We strive to provide all students with the basic building blocks of historical analysis while exposing them to the myriad of historical developments that resonate in their own experiences. We also contribute to their ability to analyze and understand their microworlds so that they can make the best decisions for themselves. 

How do we buck this trend and continue to draw students? First, it’s our fabulous faculty. We’re young and vibrant. In the past decade we’ve hired over half of our tenure-line faculty. They bring to the classroom fresh ideas about teaching and their subject areas. More senior faculty tinker to adapt to evolving student needs. Our non-tenure track faculty are also vital, and they demonstrate the same commitment. All of us bring both excitement and care to our work with students. We cover a diverse range of courses that reflect the important scholarship in the field. As I tell Western Civ students, the only continent that I don’t cover is the one inhabited by penguins. No offense to penguins. I feel very fortunate to work with such engaging faculty. I can’t thank them enough for their efforts. 

Students themselves also contribute to our success. Whenever I meet with a potential colleague, I emphasize the enthusiasm of most students. New colleagues subsequently remark that they are impressed with our students, regardless of their ultimate grades. Western students are eager to learn and understand the world. Their engagement ultimately determines whether our courses are effective. Their commitment is infectious and has helped us attract and sustain a strong core of majors and minors. 

Together, students and faculty are doing a great job of maintaining student interest in history. If you want to help us continue to do so, please consider a donation. Another way you can help is by sharing your personal story of your career path with your history degree. Please drop me a line (susan.costanzo@wwu.edu) with a paragraph (and a photo if possible) about your career and the role your history education plays in it. We’ve also recently set up an Instagram account, and you can follow us there to remain current on our activities.

Best, 
Susan Costanzo
Chair and Associate Professor of History

Alumni Spotlight - Strangely Doesburg

Alumni Strangely hanging off boat in the artic.

For my entire adult life, I have enjoyed learning and sharing traditional sea shanties with people. I have always felt that my time aboard a variety of sailing ships added a dimension of interest to my nautical numbers, but my travels in the High Arctic in April 2022 proved there was infinitely more to experience. It is one thing to have sailed a time or two; it is quite another to play accordion while clinging to the mast of a tall ship, seventy feet above 30° water.

Ever since I was a child on family road trips, I have enjoyed reading up on the history of places I am about to visit. I continue to be compelled by the feelings I had at age 10, visiting the still-visible wagon ruts of the Oregon trail. What had previously been known only via words was rendered tangible, uncomfortable in its sudden proximity. It should come as no surprise that such interests led me to Western Washington University’s History Department.

My time at Western afforded me the ability to develop skepticism as a reader. Rather than hindering my decades-old love of anecdotes, it has allowed it to soar. When I encounter the rich experiential participation anecdotes of writers of popular histories like Craig Childs (House of Rain, Atlas of a Lost World), Neil Oliver (The Vikings: A New History), and Barry Lopez (About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory), it is now with an eye to their sources. A marvelous claim by an author need not be dismissed, if further documentation is provided. Thanks to Western I now find these searches a joy in their own right, allowing further trust in the value of some anecdotes: Childs’s and Oliver’s thoughts on sleeping in historical sites, or Lopez’s account of aiding the stoking of an Anagama Kiln. By verifying aspects of a narrative, I gain that richer perspective on history that is only available to those who have both studied and gotten their hands dirty (very literally, in Lopez’s case).

Literature, too, can benefit from such firsthand knowledge. Take for instance these lines from the 35th chapter of Moby-Dick, describing one’s perch upon the highest platform of a ship’s mast: “There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea.” The image is striking, majestic even, in its sense of wonder at this natural marvel, and yet still seasoned with the fairground levity suggested by the presence of stilts. I would argue that it is precisely firsthand experience which allowed Melville to evoke such rich imagery.

Srangely sitting in mast of boat in the Artic.

And so it was that in April of 2022, in search of my own experiential insight into nautical songs written at the edge of the world, I joined an interdisciplinary expedition to the High Arctic aboard the tall ship Antigua. In the hope that I could add something experiential to my reading, and spurred by a recollection of Moby-Dick, I asked the expedition’s coordinator if I might spend some time at the masthead.

I have spent time aloft in the rigging of several tall ships over the years, but I had never done so in cold weather, encumbered by the weight of gloves, parka, and polar boots, and the sting of windblown ice particles. The first climb was exhilarating; in temperatures well below freezing, I scrambled up the ratlins and managed to reach the foretop. This triangular platform, little bigger than the seat of a park bench, sits roughly halfway up the mast. Subsequent climbs saw me reach a further point some 25 feet above that to the masthead, or crosstrees, a slippery collection of planks similar in area to the seat of a kitchen chair. 

During our month-long expedition, I spent nearly 24 cumulative hours observing the Arctic Ocean from that lofty vantage. I witnessed icebergs calve from glaciers, humpback whales diving beneath our keel, and the arrival and subsequent departure of a whiteout blizzard during which I could not see more than ten feet in any direction. I got to be high in the rigging during that crucial first sighting of land after a three-day passage across the open sea. Grand adventures all, but it was the smaller details that contributed more to my understanding of what we colloquially call “sea shanties.” Whenever I assisted in raising and lowering the sails, or coiling loose rope on deck, I marveled at how much more difficult they were given the cold, the necessity of gloves, and the omnipresent light that rendered sleep difficult. Despite my best efforts I managed to contract frostbite in the two smallest fingers of “I witnessed icebergs calve from glaciers, humpback whales diving beneath our keel,” my right hand. Small wonder that the gentle climate of Hawaii was an oft longed-for reprieve for the singers of the traditional sea song, “Rolling Down to Old Maui.”

Naturally, I was compelled to eventually bring my accordion aloft. As I played a few tunes into a wind that carried the music away before anyone else aboard could hear it, I reflected. Had all my prior research enriched this moment? Perhaps. But thanks to organizational research practices I developed while studying at Western, I am confident I put my best foot forward into the opportunity. And more importantly, I knew this experience would enrich any future reading I did, especially regarding polar exploration, maritime music, or frostbite.

Strangely Doesburg is a writer, magician, accordionist, carpenter, and sailor, with a degree in history from WWU (2021). He is currently spending a year in Trøndelag, Norway studying traditional, clinker-built boat construction at Fosen Folkehøgskole.

Faculty Spotlight - Dharitri Bhattacharjee

Professor Bhattacharjee at Eilean Donan Castle Scotland
Professor Bhattacharjee at 12th century Godstow Nunnery, Oxfordshire, UK.

I am a historian of colonial India, modern south Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. While rooted in historical thinking, my doctoral training was interdisciplinary. I carry a diversity of intellectual interests with me today as a teacher and a researcher. I have four intersecting bodies of scholarship that I have been thinking, researching, and writing about. First, my primary scholarly interest, and one that I have pursued the longest, a provincial history of twentieth century decolonization. Second, a history of twentieth century archives and museums, as repositories of colonial anxieties and post-colonial legacies. Third, nineteenth century colonialism and the perplexing ideology of the civilizing mission. Fourth, the relationship between pedagogy and public history; the contemporary and future uses of the discipline of history really captivate me. 

Research and teaching go hand in hand for me. I research and publish so that I can teach better; the constant and persistent effort to make history relevant to college students helps frame the questions I ask of archival materials and shapes my interest in new projects. My overall teaching philosophy is to instill in students a sense of historical mindedness—whether it’s about their lives, families, the histories of their nations, or the ecologies they call home. I try to achieve this by assigning students a lot of primary source materials: be it images of ruins from Indus Valley civilization sites or a fourteenth century travel diary of Ibn Battuta or Gandhi’s writings on India’s case for independence. My students also get an opportunity to familiarize themselves with historiographical literature so that they can see how history is written, and when they discuss historians’ works in class, historical research comes full circle. Ten weeks is too short, but my students learn to think, speak, and write critically—like historians do.

As the only south Asianist in the History department (and one of the few scholars who introduces Western students to this diverse, but far away region of the world), I endeavor to help students cultivate a balance of compassion and critique as they read South Asian and Indian Ocean world histories. This balance is critical because I do not want students to essentialize cultures they are less familiar with, or even, generalize and exoticize it. However, I also do not want students to create artificial walls of deference and not critique this history. The answer to this conundrum lies in steady and exhaustive engagement with a variety of sources, and a deep contemplation of connected world histories and human experiences. By this I mean, I embolden students to identify with voices across oceans and centuries.

Many of my students have confessed to understanding what Buddhist theris (women monks) meant about loneliness and desire in their sixth century BCE poems. Students struggle with questions related to nationalism and modernity. They find it hard to comprehend caste violence. But struggle is a key element of learning. I see it as students taking a sense of curiosity with them outside the class and beyond the quarter—and I feel good about that. 

It is not traditional for a historian to direct a documentary—especially one focused on the future of history as a discipline, rather than a historical topic. However, my teaching experience has led me down this path. With support from Media Services, my colleagues in the History department, and the Majorie and Allen Hatter Fund, I am making my first documentary. The Limits of History interrogates how the societal value of a discipline can be so accessible to the public, yet hard to define its professional boundaries and, consequently, its niche value. Does it do any good? What does the future hold? You will have to wait to see the documentary when it is ready. Aside from the documentary, I am working on my first book on Muslim politics in Bengal called Ideology at Bay: Muslim High Politics in late Colonial Bengal (1937-1947). I am also writing an article on why histories of violence are so difficult to write. 

I joined Western in Fall of 2019. As I start my fourth academic year, I only feel gratitude for having wonderful students and supportive colleagues. I love my work, and I hope I will make a difference. Thank you for reading! 

Professor Bhattacharjee at the Quiraing Scotland

Department Updates

Recently Published Works

Uruguay in Transnational Perspective

Uruguay in Transnational Perspective Co-Edited by Pedro Cameselle-Pesce 

Clases Medias en America Latina

Mario Barbosa Cruz, A. Ricardo López-Pedreros, Claudia Stern, editores. Clases medias en América Latina: subjetividades, prácticas y genealogías. 2 tomos. 

Guerra Fria, Neoliberalismo Y Movilizaciones Sociales, II

Mario Barbosa Cruz, A. Ricardo López-Pedreros, Claudia Stern, editores. Clases medias en América Latina: subjetividades, prácticas y genealogías. 2 tomos.

Faculty and Staff

Anderson

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.

Emi Bushelle

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.

Chard

Daniel Chard - Prof. Chard is a historian of the United States and the modern world with a research focus on post-World War II politics, social movements, and political violence. This fall the WWU History voted to hire him to a position of Assistant Professor starting in Winter 2024. Chard is the author of Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) and other publications. He recently completed a community-based participatory research project with Prof. Anna Booker of Whatcom Community College and members of the Lummi Nation Cultural Commission on the history of the 1960s-70s Lummi Aquaculture Project. 

Elezovic

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.

Goosmann

Breann Goosmann - Breann Goosmann joined Western this 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, Samurai in Film, and Premodern Japan.

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.

Lopez-Pedreros

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).

Pihos

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. In addition to teaching and scholarship, Peter serves as the President of Western’s faculty union, the United Faculty of Western Washington and works in various other capacities to expand advance the interests of faculty and students in high quality, accessible, and affordable public higher education in Washington state.

Stewart

Mart Stewart - Professor Stewart is teaching courses in environmental, U.S. South, and Global South courses this year, as well as his usual GUR course in U.S. history. Professor 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 new volume spring 2022 and plans two more in 2023. A M.Sc. program, Climate Change Studies, that Professor Stewart helped develop while on a Fulbright Senior Specialist appointment at the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2016 enrolled its sixth 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.

Zarrow

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 in museums and schools. She is currently working on two projects: one, a book on Jewish Museum practices in Polish lands between the 1890s and World War II; and two, 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.

Dharitri Bhattacharjee

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 Gub.

Cameselle

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.

Costanzo

Susan Costanzo - Prof. Costanzo teaches courses in Russian history, Western Civilizations, film courses, and a methods course. As the chair of the department, she is busy helping students and faculty as well as attending many meetings. When she has a spare few minutes, she is completing a book on theater in the Soviet Union from 1957-1991 and has had articles published in the United States, Britain, France, and Russia.

Eurich

Amanda Eurich - This past summer, Amanda returned to the archives for the first time since the pandemic, working at the Archives Nationales and the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. She also attended the International Congress on Calvin Research, giving a paper on serial exile and emotional trauma during the wars of religion in France. This fall she is especially excited to be teaching the senior research seminar and using the role-playing game that she wrote in History 321, The Age of Religious Wars. With a measure of schadenfreude, she announced that she is retiring from teaching in December to have more time to finish up writing projects, enjoy family and friends, and train for her first 5K. She is also looking forward to finding new ways to serve Western students and alums.

Hardesty

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, will be 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.

Hutchins

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.

Neem

Johann Neem - Prof. Neem spent the past year editing the Journal of the Early Republic, teaching, and conducting research. In spring, he will offer 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 appeared 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.

Price

Hunter Price - Dr. Price is Associate Professor of History and has worked at WWU since 2014. His areas of expertise are the American Revolutionary and Civil War eras and early American religious history. His book Sacred Capital: Methodism and Settler Colonialism in the Empire of Liberty will be published by University of Virginia Press in June 2024 as part of the Jeffersonian America series. He is beginning a second book, which examines the prominent 19th-century scientists John and Joseph LeConte and their place in the legacy of environmentalism and slavery.

Thompson

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 articles have included ones on the building of China’s telegraph network (2015) and China’s protection of energy resources like coal (2011) during the Qing dynasty. His most recent article, the fourth in his Americal Journal series, “The Americal’s Japanese Americans: An American Tale from the South Pacific,” was the cover story for the Fall 2021 issue. The series is now available on Western CEDAR. (226 downloads through September 2023.) This series was inspired in part by his Pacific War seminar. He has added courses on the Boxer Uprising and World War II in Europe to the Department’s list of courses. In Fall 2023, some students in his World War II seminar are doing their special projects on six 16-mm reels of World War II-era films donated to Western in 2022 and digitized in 2023. Their research may lead to broader access via Western Libraries to these forgotten films, including ones produced by the German Army General Staff, ethnographers in Austria, amateur photographers in the U.S. Army’s 430th Fighter Squadron, and Battle of the Bulge combat footage taken by American pilots.

zimmerman

Sarah J. Zimmerman - Dr. Sarah J. Zimmerman’s research focuses on the experiences of women and the operation of gender in West Africa, French Empire, and the 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 attends to the gendered production of history and memory on Gorée Island—a UNESCO World Heritage site in Senegal. She has published articles in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and Les Temps Modernes.

Katherine Burge

Katherine Burge - Dr. Burge is an archaeologist and historian specializing in the ancient Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. Her research focuses on urban societies and socioeconomic organization in Bronze and Iron Age Mesopotamia and employs an interdisciplinary approach, integrating archaeological and documentary data. She has excavated at a number of sites in southeastern Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan and southern Iraq, including Arslantepe, Ur, and Lagash. She is also interested in the more recent histories of colonialism and internationalism in Middle Eastern archaeology, museums, and cultural heritage policy. Dr. Burge is visiting for the 2023-2024 academic year and will be teaching HIST 121: World History to 500, HIST 310: History of Ancient Mesopotamia, and HIST 313: History of Ancient Rome. 

Cerretti

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. Professor Cerretti’s most recent article “Vagrancy and Sex Work in Early 20th Century Bellingham” appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Pacific Northwest Quarterly. Josh also serves as a delegate to the Northwest Washington Central Labor Council and is the Board Secretary of the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center.

Diehl

Prof. Diehl - teaches medieval European history, offering the following courses this year: History 112 (Fall and Winter quarters); History 318 (Fall); History 316 (Winter); History 414 (Winter); History 499 (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.

Garfinkle

Steven Garfinkle - Prof. Garfinkle has taught ancient history at WWU since 2001. His research focuses on economic history, state formation, and violence in some of our earliest available historical records from the ancient Near East. Currently, he is finishing a book project on the origins of commerce. Prof. Garfinkle’s recent publications include a chapter on “Violence and State Power in Early Mesopotamia” in the Cambridge World History of Violence and a chapter on the “The Kingdom of Ur” in The Oxford Handbook to the Ancient Near East. Typically, he teaches a range of courses at all levels introducing students to the ancient past: HIST 121 and HIST 310 in the Fall, HIST 111 and HIST 311 in the Winter, and HIST 499 in the Spring.

Heslop

Madison Heslop - Prof. Heslop joined the department last year. 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. 

Johnston

Christine Johnston - Dr. Johnston is an archaeologist and historian of Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Western Asia. Her primary fields of research are political economy, exchange systems, and cross-cultural interaction between the different regions of the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. Dr. Johnston also specializes in the study of pottery, which is the primary data she uses for modeling trade networks. Currently she is conducting fieldwork on Cyprus. Outside of teaching and research, she is active in public education, particularly in bringing awareness to issues of looting, antiquities trafficking, and the destruction of cultural heritage. Dr. Johnston is a co-founder and video editor at Peopling the Past, a Digital Humanities open-access education project providing resources for teaching and learning about the lived experience of real people in the ancient world.

Owens-Plum

Brittany Owens-Plum - After moving across the country from South Florida to Bellingham, Brittany joined the History Department in February 2023 as the Office Assistant. Previously, in 2022, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing (specifically, poetry) 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.

Seltz

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.

Watkins

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.

Support Our Student Success

Our mission is to create and nurture a community of scholars who value historical thinking. We prepare students for thoughtful participation in public affairs and a wide range of careers by fostering an appreciation of the diversity of human cultures and experiences, the development of research and analytical skills, and the ability to communicate effectively, especially in writing. Your support will provide much needed support for scholarships, speakers, travel and research opportunities. Support Student Success Here!

The department is planning to strengthen its efforts to encourage students who may want to major in history but are concerned about future professional options. You can write to the Chair Dr. Susan Costanzo at Susan.Costanzo@wwu.edu. In a few sentences or a short paragraph, let us know how your history degree has helped you in your career. Please include your name, current job or profession, year of graduation, and photo. We’d love to hear from you. For examples, please visit our Alumni Spotlights page.

Drone view of WWU campus and Bellingham