History Newsletter
History Department Newsletter 2022
Table of Contents
Letter from the Chair
When I sat down to write this welcome, I began by rereading last year’s newsletter. Many of us were so optimistic that the pandemic was behind us and normalcy would reassert itself. Gosh, that was mistaken.
How I wish that had been true! It was a hectic, some would say chaotic, year. Looking back, I much admire the enormous flexibility of both students and faculty. There was a time last January when some courses moved online with less than a day’s warning. Everyone adapted. I was deeply impressed by the faculty’s grit when faced with such sudden changes.
Students too had barely enough time to learn or relearn the rhythms of university life – attending classes, finding nooks to study in, the easy sociability while walking across campus or grabbing lunch – all the little things that are foundational for their educational experience and sense of belonging that they will cherish after they’ve moved on to the next phase of their lives. We hope they can settle in this year and learn and enjoy the many opportunities for intellectual and personal growth.
Rather than focus on the challenges, let me recap some of our best moments. Perhaps the most satisfying days took place last spring when the department hosted the annual Phi Alpha Theta conference. It was the first in person PAT conference since 2019. Undergrad and Grad students alike were excited to share their scholarship. I’d like to give a shout out to the Darling family who, through an endowed fund, supports PAT conferences.
Another resounding success was the search for a new historian of Canada with a joint appointment in Canadian/American Studies. Because of Covid concerns, we opted to conduct all interviews on Zoom. While we were all pretty tired of Zoom by then, we persevered and have been well rewarded. Dr. Madison Heslop has joined us! Welcome! She just completed her PhD at University of Washington and grew up in Puget Sound. Her scholarship focuses on our own Salish Sea region. You’ll find more information about her here too.
What does the upcoming year hold for us? We don’t have any big projects: no hires or conferences. I think this will be a year of taking stock and looking ahead. What do our students need most during this phase and how can we help them adapt to more in-person education? What aspects of teaching during the pandemic do we want to incorporate permanently, and which ones can be left behind? What do they need most during this phase? And fingers crossed that we won’t have to revert to remote learning.
We’re also looking to continue to share with students some of the diverse career paths of our alums. We’re so proud of what each of you has accomplished! Please share your story with us. In a short paragraph, let us know how your history degree has helped you in your career. Include your name, current job or profession, and year of graduation. You can send them to me at susan.costanzo@wwu.edu. Add a photo if you’d like.
We’re also working to update our online presence. We’ve refreshed our website. Take a look! It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve made it more user friendly and more visually appealing.
You can also help us with a donation to help us provide more opportunities to our students. We are grateful for your generosity.
Best,
Susan Costanzo
Chair and Associate Professor of History
Alumni Spotlight - Gabe Harrison
History Department Chair, Susan Costanzo, sat down with Alumnus, Gabriel Harrison, to discuss his work, his life, and how Western helped prepare him for what came after graduation.
After graduating in 2004 with his undergraduate degree in History and Political Science, Harrison went on to receive his JD Degree from the University of Oregon School of Law in 2012. He has been working as an immigration lawyer representing individuals and families across Whatcom and Skagit counties since 2013, when he started his current practice with his partner, Holly Pai.
When asked what drew him to immigration law, Harrison shared the life experiences he had in the years between graduating from Western and enrolling in Law School.
After undergraduate, Harrison started volunteering at Sterling Meadows, a migrant housing community in Bellingham where he provided tutoring in the evenings. While engaging with the kids, he would hear phrases like “they went back to Mexico” in reference to where a person was and realized that these kids were experiencing the removal of community members due to their status as undocumented immigrants.
What solidified his desire to work in immigration law was his year in Guaymas, Mexico where he taught English and strengthened his own Spanish language skills. During that year, he heard many stories from people in the community and listened to their frustrations and challenges with the U.S. immigration system. After returning to the States and finishing law school, Harrison decided to come back to his roots and serve the migrant community that had inspired his passion for this work.
When asked about a typical day in his work, Harrison describes meetings with clients from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Venezuela, most of whom are farm workers and who often speak only Spanish or an Indigenous Latin American language. He credits his ability to listen to the stories of his clients, often tragic, as a critical part of building the strongest cases possible. Although the stories can be hard to hear, Harrison says he considers himself “lucky to have a job that I feel is beneficial to the world.” Helping people during what can feel like insurmountable obstacles has been the most rewarding part of the work. To feel like people can come in here and take a deep breath and say, ‘OK, I have someone who’s going to be with me,’ that’s important.”
Harrison expressed that one of his strengths in practicing law is his ability to build and tell a persuasive story, a skill to which he partially credits his history degree. Studying history at Western, he said, has helped him in his ability to “appeal to judges as readers, as humans” and has helped him argue for his clients many times. He also talked about the law being rooted in history, and how his work forces him to consider and explore the historical context in which his clients live. As an example, when he is working a with client who lived through the Guatemalan Civil War, he needs to have some understanding of the history of that country and that war. In addition, Harrison said his time at Western helped him build the skills he still uses every day when conducting research for his clients and sorting through and taking in the volumes of material he reviews for each case.
When asked if he had any advice for current history majors, Harrison suggests not to worry too much about what comes next. While in college, students are often pressured to know what their career path is going to be and Harrison shares that “if history is what you’re passionate about, do it! And don’t really worry about [your career path] so much.” And he adds, “History is something that teaches you how to understand people and cultures and society and politics and everything else. It gives you this great foundation for life.”
Phi Alpha Theta
Many alumni of the WWU History Department can look back on participation in a Phi Alpha Theta (PAT) conference as a highlight and culmination of much hard work in pursuit of their degree. Most years in spring quarter, WWU students and faculty board vans and travel to parts of Washington State or to Oregon, Idaho, or Montana to present student research. On April 22-23, 2022, we had the pleasure of hosting the Pacific Northwest Regional Conference of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society. This was WWU’s first in-person conference since the outbreak of Covid-19, and a welcome opportunity to host after the History Department reluctantly chose to cancel the 2020 conference.
Over 140 guests from 17 schools across the region ranging from small liberal arts colleges to flagship universities traveled to Bellingham. Students’ research spanned the regions and periods of world history. Eight Western undergraduate and graduate students presented their work. They are Petra Ellerby, Anthony Ray, Kenneth Meyer (graduate student), Alex Hutchinson, William Sclabassi, Julian Pritchard, Raven Klingele, and Katelyn Damron (graduate student). Four WWU students were nominated, out of 11 total nominations, for paper prizes. As in previous years, the eight student papers emerged from research assignments in upper-level history courses, as well as M.A. thesis projects. Their efforts testify to the rigor of our history curriculum and the hard work, curiosity, and intelligence of our students.
The schools representing the Pacific Northwest Region of Phi Alpha Theta are among “the strongest chapters in the nation,” according to Executive Director Jonathan Scott Perry of PAT’s national headquarters. We had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Perry, who traveled to Bellingham to see us in action. Dr. Perry not only observed the conference; he contributed to its success by moderating one panel and providing the faculty commentary on a second.
During the Friday lunch, Dr. Paqui Paredes Méndez, Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, welcomed conference participants to campus and introduced the keynote event. Dean Paredes supported the History Department during the planning of both the canceled 2020 conference and the 2022 conference, and we were thankful to have her join us to formally kick off the event. Professor Chris Friday of the WWU History Department provided the keynote address titled “Dialogics of Place: Homelands, History, and Settler Colonialism.” An expert on Indigenous and Asian American histories of the Pacific Northwest, Professor Friday has produced scholarship, designed curriculum, and provided expert trial testimony relating to Northwest Coast history and culture. From 1998 to 2008, he was also director of WWU’s Center for Pacific Northwest Studies. This keynote address was not a typical academic lecture. Instead, Professor Friday facilitated a performance of Indigenous memory and witnessing that featured both his own address regarding our region and a presentation and violin performance by Lummi storyteller Swil Kanim (swilkanim.com). They were joined by two honored guests, Adia Bowen (Upper Skagit Tribe) and Gillian Elofson (Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe). These WWU students joined Swil Kanim as witnesses of the keynote performance, explaining to conference participants their hearing and interpretation of the event’s message and pledging to remember and communicate the performance to their communities. A student delegate from each school volunteered to carry this important message of remembering and reporting to their communities. Afterwards, Dean Parades remarked that the keynote “created an experience that I am sure no one in that room will soon forget.”
Overall, the Pacific Northwest Regional Conference was a great success, and students from across the region felt energized by the opportunity to show off their hard work in person after two years of pandemic restrictions. The conference would not have been possible without the participation of history faculty from our history department and from the chapter advisers and panel chairs and commenters from visiting schools.
We were also thankful to receive financial support for the conference from the Darling Family Fund, an endowment from History alum Hoby Darling that is dedicated to supporting student participation in PAT. The department also received important financial assistance from the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
For the 2022-23 academic year, we look forward to traveling to Central Washington University for the annual conference, where our students will once again display their talents and show why we are proud to have one of the strongest history departments in the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Hunter Price
Assistant Professor and PAT Faculty Adviser
New Faculty Spotlight - Madison Heslop
This year, the History Department is excited to welcome a new full-time faculty member, Madison Heslop, as a Historian of Canadian American Studies. Dr. Heslop earned her PhD in History from the University of Washington earlier this year.
Q: Tell us a little about your background and where you are from.
Heslop: Explaining where I'm from is always a little difficult because there is no easy answer. Depending on how you divide the country, I have lived in just about every region of the United States but have spent the longest amounts of time in Washington, specifically the Seattle area, and Indiana. I've also lived in Scotland, Spain, and British Columbia over the course of my education.
Q: What led your pursuit of history as an academic interest and as a career?
Heslop: I decided I wanted to be a professor when I was 16. I was taking advanced placement high school courses in US history, American literature, and art history at the time and enjoying it so much that I started strategizing about how I could continue
doing it for the rest of my life. This meant that I went into college expecting to pursue a PhD—not at all the normal student experience—but I also took the time to explore how historians work in museum curation and within the National Park Service to evaluate other career options.
Q: What led to your interest in Canada? The Salish Sea?
Heslop: Many of my research interests come back to my experience volunteering as an undergraduate at the Skagway, Alaska branch of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park. While there, I became very intrigued by how the gold rush rapidly brought huge numbers of people from all over the world to the Pacific Northwest and Yukon, regions that had previously been relatively isolated. From there my interests grew and changed into pursuing training in the regional history of the North American West as a whole, but that original curiosity about the gold rush and its impact has continued to feed my research on migration, maritime transit, coastal environments, and the cities of the Salish Sea.
Q: What took you to the University of Edinburgh to study American History?
Heslop: Scotland voted on an independence referendum in fall 2015, and I wanted to be there to see that happen if I could. There were also boring considerations—pursuing a terminal Masters degree in the UK was cheaper than in the US—but it was exciting to go somewhere as beautiful as Edinburgh and be there to witness what seemed like it could be a pivotal moment in Scotland and the UK's history. It was also interesting to study American history in a program that really valued international perspectives on what we usually think of as domestic US stories.
Q: Tell us about your focus on “digitizing” history and where you see it going in the future.
Heslop: My work in this realm has mostly focused on two different aspects of what digital methods of history have to offer—one is in combining quantitative analysis with the qualitative, and the other is in the way that digital mapping projects can facilitated public history work that draw in and appeal to non-academic audiences. For the former, digital history has allowed me to synthesize and visualize trends across large quantities of data such as the demographics of thousands of prisoners' records in early twentieth century Vancouver. My work on the latter, which includes projects like "A People's Landscape" attempted to bring together activism and public history to serve underrepresented students and local populations in Seattle. In the future, I hope to bring both of these digital approaches to history into the classroom in order to teach students new ways to engage with the past and present.
Q: What are you most looking forward to about teaching here at Western?
Heslop: I am very excited to design new classes. I truly had not expected to land in a place where there would be enough student interest for me to get to teach about the Salish Sea or the history of the Medicine Line (US-Canada border)—so close to us here in Bellingham. Canadian history opens up a lot of possibilities to invite students to reflect on their own country and place in the world by learning about somewhere that is just different enough to create contrasts. The practicalities of teaching a class for the first time is always a daunting prospect, but having a student body that is ready and enthusiastic about engaging with these kinds of topics near (both geographically and metaphorically) to their interests makes the design process really exciting for me.
Department Updates
Recently Published Works
The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices and Genealogies.
Co-Edited by: A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
La Clase Invisible: Género, clases medias y democracia en Bogotá.
- A. Ricardo López-Pedreros
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 on Muslim politics in Bengal (India) for publication. Dr Bhattacharjee conducted a series of interviews, Stories To Tell, over Summer 2020 to document South Asian experiences of Covid-19, often marginalized as minority voices in archival collections.
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). This academic year, her courses include Modern Japanese History, Early Modern Japan, Early Modern Globalization, and Introduction to East Asian Civilizations. 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 an Assistant Professor at Western since 2017. Currently he is editing a volume on Transnational Uruguayan History, which explores interactions between local Uruguayan issues and global struggles, by emphasizing transnational actors and dialogues in Anti-fascist movements during the WWII era, student activism during the Cold War, and human rights advocacy during the transition to democracy. 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. Prof. Cameselle teaches several courses related to Latin America, including U.S.-Latin American Relations, Immigration and Ethnicity in the Americas, and Soccer & Latin American history.
Josh Cerretti - Josh Cerretti is an Associate Professor of History and the Interim Director of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He also serves on the bargaining team and executive board for the United Faculty of Western Washington. In the Fall of 2020, Josh created a virtual version of his Bellingham History from Below tour in collaboration with the League of Women Voters, Whatcom Museum, Ralph Munro Institute, and the video production company Talking to Crows. The hour-long video tour of downtown Bellingham has been viewed by over 1,000 people online and airs regularly on the public television station BTV.
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. His book, Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism, was published in September 2021 with University of North Carolina Press (Justice, Power, and Politics series). Prof. Chard is currently working on a community-based participatory research project with Prof. Anna Booker of Whatcom Community College and members of the Lummi Nation Cultural Commission to develop a lesson plan on the history of the 1960s-70s Lummi Aquaculture Project. This year Prof. Chard is teaching HIST 104, America since 1865 (F, W, S); HNRS 350, The American Right (F); HIST 390, US & International Terrorism (W); HIST 391, Pacific Northwest History (S); and HIST 499, Violence in US History Since 1941 (S). You can check out Prof. Chard’s writing and interviews at danielschard.com.
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.
Peter Diehl - Prof. Diehl teaches medieval European history, offering the following courses this year: History 112 (Fall and Spring quarters); History 315 (Fall); History 316 (Winter); History 490-Pandemics in European History (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.
Arna Elezovic- 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.
Amanda Eurich - Prof. Eurich continued her three-year term on the Bainton book prize committee, reading all kinds of recent publications on early modern Europe. For the second year in a row, a book on early modern French history will be awarded the coveted prize for best reference book of 2021. This year, she is returning to conference activity after a Covid hiatus, presenting a paper on early modern widowhood and the "third" gender in Minneapolis. The paper is based on the final chapter of her book project on the French judge, Jean de Coras. She is also finishing up a work of young adult fiction based on her grandmother's 1940 diary, written as the Eurich family left the Nebraska Dust Bowl for a new life in the Pacific Northwest. She still may be a novice at fiction writing, but her history skills have come in handy as she reads between the terse entries of the diary and tries to get a richer picture of the experience of Dust Bowl migrants and their integration into new communities in Oregon and Washington.
Chris Friday – Prof. Friday is on leave for the 2022-2023 academic year and is expected to return in the fall of 2023. Prof. Friday’s research into regional tribal histories continues as he is focusing on tribal treaty rights, tribal relations with the federal and state governments, and tribal histories generally.
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.
Jared Hardesty - Jared Ross Hardesty is Professor of History at Western Washington University and a scholar of Colonial America, the Atlantic world, and the histories of labor and slavery. This academic year, he will be teaching courses on colonial America, microhistory, and early globalization. Prof.. Hardesty released his third book, Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate in October 2021.
Madison Heslop- Prof. Heslop joined the department this 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.
Michael Hughes – Prof. Hughes joined the department two years ago. He teaches courses in early American history and in the Honors College. 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 and is enjoying the opportunity to engage more with faculty, students and other staff from across the campus through more face-to-face interaction. When not on campus, Becky can be found in a boat, on a trail, or in her garden. She holds a dual Master’s degree 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 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.
A. Ricardo López-Pedreros - A. Ricardo López-Pedreros professor of histories of Latin America. He was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. 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).
Johann Neem - Prof. Neem spent the past year editing the Journal of the Early Republic, teaching, and conducting research. He was recently one of twenty-seven historians nationally appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship Program. 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. Neem’s essay, “Turn Down the Volume!” was published in the edited collection From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History. His most recent books are What’s the Point of College? and Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.
Peter 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.
Hunter Price - Professor Price teaches early American history at WWU. During 2022-23, he is offering courses on early American religion, the Civil War and Reconstruction, a graduate seminar on the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, and a capstone seminar on the Works Progress Administration ex-slave interviews. He is finishing a book on the history of social capital, settlerism, and Methodism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and conducting research on the links between slavery and environmentalism in the 19th century. Prof. Price is also faculty advisor to WWU’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society.
Steve Renette- Dr. Renette is an archaeologist and ancient historian of southwest Asia and the eastern Mediterranean from prehistory to the 1st millennium BCE. His research explores the earliest history of mountain peoples, especially in the Zagros Mountains along the present-day border between Iraq and Iran, with a particular interest in anarchist histories of resistance of small-scale communities against expansive states. For this purpose, he combines ancient texts with archaeological data and visual representations in ancient art. In addition to teaching ancient Mediterranean history as a Visiting Assistant Professor this year, he also directs archaeological fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan.
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 – Professor Stewart is grateful that most of his friends, family, and colleagues were able to escape hospitalization or death in the pandemic that killed millions (and still counting) world-wide. The covid pandemic also deepened his commitment to teaching, and he continues to teach courses in the Department of History and the Honors Program in environmental history, the history of science, and on the history of the U.S. and Global Souths. He is the Faculty Host this fall for a visiting Fulbright Scholar from India, Dr. Rayson Alex, who is a specialist in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities and who is teaching a course on environmental justice and Indian film in Fairhaven College. Professor Stewart is working on several research and editing projects, and his next publication will be a forum (with Connie Chiang, Rosalyn LaPier, Lauret Savoy, and Tiya Miles), “Nature, Place, and Environmental Justice,” in Environmental History in January 2023. He continues his work as the co-editor of the Flows, Migrations, Exchanges book series at the University of North Carolina Press, which currently is nurturing a half-dozen manuscripts toward publication. 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. He and his wife, the Vietnamese writer and translator Lý Lan, spend as much time as possible in their garden, in which they grow more than a hundred edible species of plants over the course of the year.
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 Americal’s Japanese Americans: An American Tale from the South Pacific”--was the cover story for the Fall 2021 issue of the Americal Journal. This previously-un-ublished National Archives photo shows three Japanese American soldiers doing intelligence work in New Caledonia, supporting the Marines fighting on Guadalcanal. This is the fourth article in his Americal Journal series, which is now available on Western CEDAR. This series was inspired in part by his Pacific War seminar. This seminar, and his Ancient China survey, have been fixtures in the Department’s Summer Quarter offerings since 2014. He has added courses on the Boxer Uprising and World War II in Europe to the Department’s list of courses.
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 Jewish Museum practices in Polish lands between the 1890s and World War II; and secondly, 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 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.