History Yearly Newsletter
Pick up a printed version of our newsletter in the History Department office (BH 364)!
2025-2026
Letter from the Chair
I have agonized over the chair’s contribution to this year’s newsletter. We are living in a historic moment, and the outcome is by no means clear. As a scholar of the Soviet Union and Europe in the twentieth century, I am keenly aware of the dangers of autocratic systems that ignore rule of law and dismantle civil liberties. Although demagogues often excel at appealing to members of the public who believe that modern democratic political systems do not serve their needs, usually by denigrating marginal members of society, the historical record reveals that autocratic governments are typically not interested in improving concrete circumstances for average disaffected people.
In an effort to appeal to disgruntled groups, rewriting history or emphasizing selective moments at the expense of a more complete and nuanced understanding is a common strategy. Downplaying, hiding, or erasing histories that reveal some people’s bad behavior does not change the impact that this behavior has had on our society. It does deprive society of the opportunity to understand the consequences that still exist. It also undermines the purpose of higher education: to teach critical skills to students so that they can be informed and effective participants in society.
Contrary to claims that a complete version of history is somehow one-sided, there has always been intellectual space for disagreements. If anyone imagines that I am brainwashing my students, then I’m a failure. I have found that students are savvy and not easily manipulated. And that’s good. Diverse viewpoints help students think more deeply. I am not adding anything profound here. Some of my colleagues have been far more eloquent.
In this environment, the methods of historians are more important than ever. I especially appreciate my department colleagues who are adapting their courses to expose students to historical questions and debates that belie current myths. Others are staying the course and not changing their courses even in the face of external pressures. In the process, their commitment to intellectual freedom serves as role models for students who learn to require concrete evidence and to critique narratives of the past and present.
I remain hopeful. The value of history and historical understanding continues to resonate beyond the classroom and university. I have been heartened by the recent gift by Kathryn Anderson, a former Western faculty member. She has created the Kathryn Anderson and Leonard Helfgott Memorial Lecture Series. While a faculty member in Fairhaven, Kathryn Anderson directed the Women’s Studies Program for many years. As some of you will recall, Lenny Helfgott was a member of the History Department and taught courses on the Middle East. He also offered our first courses in Jewish history.
The funds from this endowment will be used to bring speakers to campus. The series will alternate annually between the History Department and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department. In spring 2026, WGSS will host multiple events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of women’s studies on Western’s campus. These events will include a speaking engagement by Dr. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, a bioethicist, disability studies scholar, public intellectual, educator, and feminist theorist. If you are in Bellingham, I hope you will join us.
Best,
Susan Costanzo
Chair and Associate Professor of History
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Outstanding Graduates
For future students in the program...Go slow, take your time, & try to remember that the research you are doing is valuable even through the constant barrage of deadlines. History is an amazing field to pursue & there is a lot of joy & fulfillment to be found, so don’t forget to enjoy the process.
Megan FarrisOutstanding Graduate, MA
I am so proud of what I have achieved as a history student at WWU; I produced a flurry of papers, translated medieval recipes, held a cuneiform tablet, made paper, combed through hundreds of local newspapers, read a small mountain of books, and travelled to Senegal.
Edme GuetschowOutstanding Graduate, History Major
I’ve really enjoyed being a history student...I feel like the more I learn, the more I have to learn—The more I understand just how hard it is to create amazing works of history, the more I feel in awe of the people who have done so.
Chris GilbertOutstanding Graduate, History/Social Studies Major
2025 MA Defenses
- Megan S. Farris
- Andrew J. Johnston
- Jacqueline Kajihiro
- Marcos Valverde Silva
Alumni Spotlight
Taylor Russell
As a History and Geography double major at Western in 2013, Taylor Russell realized her love for “microhistory (digging deeply into a specific, narrow topic) and social history (capturing the experience of day-to-day life in the past).” During her studies, Taylor blended her passions for past and place through two formative approaches to history: "Alltagsgeschichte" (a German term for the history of everyday life) and landscape history. Now the founder of SnohomishWalks, she utilizes these concepts to study and share local history with her community.
Starting as a “Covid pivot,” Taylor used her newfound spare time to take photos of old Snohomish houses and post them with historically detailed captions on Instagram. Her posts received such a positive response from her community that Taylor realized people desired to understand and connect with their roots. Taylor’s mission (the same as the SnohomishWalks' tagline) is to “connect people, past, and place.” She says, “at its heart, the work offers reconnection in a world of rapid change.”
Building off the work of local historian Warner Blake and others published by the Snohomish Historical Society, Taylor “began pulling on threads and doing deeper dives” through archival property deeds, newspapers, notebooks, and diaries. She notes that most times, she works with historical people and places that have been examined before. However, Taylor aims “to craft a story that modern audiences can connect with—like sharing the details of a pioneer's very human and relatable life or pointing out the craftsmanship and local materials used in a building.”
Taylor designs the tours to be engaging for both locals and tourists by mapping out “4-5 visually interesting places with good stories” and connects them with a looped walking route. To make the stories even more tangible, she brings photographs and other artifacts. Taylor has developed several themed walking tours, including: a "Snohomish 101" course (the Downtown tour), Women's History, Historic Homes, and a 1950s history walk led by the son of Snohomish’s longtime newspaper editor.
The Blackman House, one of Taylor’s favorite stops, “is a time capsule” built in 1878 and fully furnished due to donations from the town's founding families. Taylor is grateful she can share these pieces of the town history with visitors. Aware of rising costs and shrinking funds, Taylor hopes her tours can help bring support and attention to the Snohomish historical society’s needs. She argues that “without them, we lose touch with who we are or where we came from (and more esoterically, a record of our human creative intelligence).”
When Taylor first started this project, the Snohomish historical society was inactive. She says SnohomishWalks helped renew community interest, “and now the society has a revitalized board of directors, a newly organized research room, growing programs, and regular open hours at their one-of-a-kind house museum.” Focused on transferring her programs and retail items to the historical society, Taylor hopes they can “reap the benefits of what [she’s] built.” She clarifies that these projects are more than “income streams.” Her effort to instill reverence for history, record-keeping, and story “has given people a deeper connection to place and past.”
“History grads make excellent writers and researchers with the discernment to separate fact from fiction—something our world increasingly needs.”
Partnering with other community organizations, like the downtown business association, Taylor features local shops on tours and offers coupons for visitors to stay in town and dine in local restaurants. She worked with the Snohomish Carnegie Foundation to raise funds for the foundation by collaborating on a book and documentary about Snohomish’s first library. The county tourism office often directs reporters and TV shows towards Taylor when making travel featurettes about Snohomish. The school district even books field trips with SnohomishWalks and Taylor takes on the role of the “fun teacher who gets students out into the world.”
Taylor later found another outlet to share local historic stories with her community through writing and self-publishing several books. She describes her most recent book, Lost and Forgotten: A True History of Snohomish’s First Cemetery, as “the ultimate Snohomish history tale.” The book explores the first official cemetery in Snohomish County sited on land formerly used by the native Coast Salish. After decades of disrepair, the Washington State Department of Transportation cut a highway through the middle of it in 1947. Years later, preservation efforts, “well-intentioned but mismanaged,” caused the loss of most headstones. Covered by buildings and a parking lot, the community "forgot" the cemetery existed until a descendant demanded to locate her ancestors and sued the city. Taylor says the story about the cemetery “has always been tragically misunderstood…[She] knew that with modern research tools, [she] could develop a fuller, more accurate picture of the truth.”
Taylor’s career mirrors her belief that there is more than one standard career path. When thinking about possible careers, she says it all depends on how history graduates apply their skills, and that students should “think beyond traditional roles.”
Most importantly, Western taught her to “think deeply and write clearly.” Taylor notes, “History grads make excellent writers and researchers with the discernment to separate fact from fiction—something our world increasingly needs.” For those with a narrow niche or passion, she suggests turning it into a purpose. Aside from her many projects, Taylor also works part-time as an administrator with the Snohomish Education Foundation. This helps keep her involved with the community while building skills in nonprofit operations, fundraising, and grant writing—all skills she views as “essential in the history field.” She adds, “Our chaotic, consumerist ‘content economy’ craves authenticity. Connecting people to their past is a great place to start.”
Check out Taylor’s Historic Homes of Bellingham coloring book on Amazon, at Village Books, or in the Whatcom Museum gift shop!
Faculty Spotlight
Dr. Sarah Ellen Zarrow
At an early age, stories of her great-grandmother’s experiences growing up in tsarist Russia (modern day Lithuania/Belarus) inspired Dr. Sarah Ellen Zarrow, Endowed Professor of Jewish History. She was fascinated by how everyday life changed as political borders shifted around her great-grandmother—despite never moving from her small town. Dr. Zarrow’s AP history teacher also had a profound influence on her and to this day, she remembers that he adamantly believed that “the key to understanding Europe is to understand the Balkans.”
These early influences of East European history, along with a growing love for the humanities and a need for a paid summer internship, led Dr. Zarrow to study Yiddish at the Yiddish Book Center during her first year of college. Building on this foundation, she studied two additional languages, Hebrew and Polish, in graduate school. Learning languages “opened up so many different worlds of literature and people’s lives” for Dr. Zarrow and played a critical role in her career.
In graduate school, to further investigate history and the ways religion, nationalism, and politics “play with each other,” she visited archives in a former Polish territory (now Lviv, Ukraine). Discovery of material about a museum that no longer exists sparked the beginning of over a decade’s worth of research that eventually culminated in Dr. Zarrow’s first book, Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891-1941 (Cornell University Press).
Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv. Like a lot of public institutions in the former Soviet Union, they're housed in a former religious building (in this case, the Bernardine Monastery).
Published in June 2025, Displays of Belonging investigates the traces of museums and the collections Jewish museologists curated within the shifting borders of Polish lands. Curious about the items that existed in these collections prior to being destroyed, transformed, or confiscated by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Dr. Zarrow attempts to reconstruct these museums and explore the history of museums in general. Considering the larger role museums play, Dr. Zarrow contemplates the social-political circumstances Jewish people faced during this period and what a museum might mean within that context.
The answers to those questions, says Dr. Zarrow, change over time—and geographically, because Poland wasn’t a unified state until after the World War and claimed independence from three different empires. In each empire “Jewish life and non-Jewish life looked different...different artistic, educational, and political traditions. So, what does that mean for museum creation?” While writing her manuscript, Dr. Zarrow scavenged through public reports, meeting minutes, advertisements, critics’ reviews of museums, and any other relevant document.
During this research for her first book, Dr. Zarrow stumbled upon the name of Cecylja Klaftenowa on a list of museum board members and learned that she was a single woman who was neither wealthy nor a member of high society. Because Cecylja’s involvement on a museum board would not have been typical during this era, Dr. Zarrow dived into Cecylja’s history and discovered she had a degree in biology, worked with WWI relief, and was an advocate for women’s economic independence.
Dr. Zarrow hopes to travel back to Poland and Ukraine to uncover more about Cecylja and the way she devoted her life to running vocational schools for Jewish girls (like the Lwów Girls’ Trade School) that taught young women trades, technical skills, and high-level craftmanship. Unable to travel there yet, Dr. Zarrow found ways to continue working on this project and spent most of her sabbatical last year reading online archives and background materials on feminism in Poland, vocational education, and Polish arts movements. While book two is still a work in progress, Dr. Zarrow has published an article, “Cecylja Klaftenowa’s Vision for Jewish Orphans in Interwar Lwów: From Relief to Emancipation,” and presented on her initial findings.
Over the summer, Dr. Zarrow traveled to Romania with her family for a two-week language program and continued work on a separate project on film and Polish Jewish Refugees in Romania. While she originally lamented not meeting a personal deadline to complete revisions before leaving, she luckily attended a lecture about film that gave her new ideas for her article. Dr. Zarrow says, “Life happens in seasons, and you can’t prioritize everything all of the time...There’s always more work to do.” As her draft continues to “marinate a bit,” Dr. Zarrow plans on writing to the scholar and revisiting when she can.
“Everything you do on a manuscript is worthwhile in some way, even if it’s not a sentence in the final book,” Dr. Zarrow says. Despite spending countless—sometimes frustrating—hours rummaging through archives, she finds ways to be truly present and creates experiences during her travels (which often end up as anecdotes in her classes). Dr. Zarrow enjoys taking breaks to observe those around her, “Talk to everyone you can. Even if somebody doesn’t have useful information now, they may later...All the connections I made were so helpful.”
Since starting at Western in 2017, Dr. Zarrow strongly advises that students should take language classes and study abroad. She recommends choosing a language based on where a student might need a visa or where they want to be in the world. Despite thinking on this kind of practical basis, Dr. Zarrow encourages students to remain open to where things may lead, “If you think you're maybe interested in German history, great, take German. If you end up being interested in something else, you'll still have a year of German.”
Dr. Zarrow acknowledges it can be difficult to learn a new language as an adult and suggests developing receptive skills by watching movies and listening to music in other languages. She believes that it’s not important to understand everything right away, and says, “Languages are all different from each other...Don’t try to translate. Just try to go with it.”
Students often believe they need to be part of an ethnic minority to study its history, Dr. Zarrow says. “There are a lot of students [in her courses] who feel that Jewish history is for Jewish students...or that because of what we teach, different professors will have political agendas.” She hopes students realize that’s not true once they take the course. She reaffirms, “French history is not just for French students.” You don’t have to have any prior knowledge, Dr. Zarrow says, “if the topic is interesting to you, then come to the class.”
2025 Faculty Books
Faculty and Staff
Charles Anderson
Dr. Charles 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. Dharitri 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. Dr Bhattacharjee’s first documentary, Limits of History has screened on several college campuses worldwide including USA, Canada, and India. It has also screened in film festivals in Berlin, Germany and Kolkata, India. 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.
Savannah Bishop
Dr. Savannah Bishop is a Visiting Assistant Professor specializing in Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History, with research focused on amphorae, shipwrecks, and ceramic production in the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine worlds. She integrates archaeological science and digital humanities, ceramic petrography, GIS, 3D documentation, and conservation technologies, to explore trade and cultural exchange across the Mediterranean. Trained in Classical Studies (BA, MA, Brandeis University), she has extensive field experience in Greece, Türkiye, and Italy. Her teaching combines material and textual evidence through courses focused on digital humanities, the history of technology, maritime trade, seafaring, art history, conservation, and periods from prehistory through the Middle Ages.
Lucas Burke
Prof. 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 104) and African American history (HIST 262).
Emi Bushelle
Dr. Emi Bushelle teaches courses on Japanese and East Asian history. She is currently also serving as Director of East Asian Studies at WWU. Prof. Bushelle’s research examines the intellectual and cultural history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Japan, focusing particularly on the religious tradition of Shinto and its role in Japanese identity formation. Her most recent research article, “Shinto and Ethnic Revival in Early Modern Japan,” is currently under review.
Pedro Cameselle-Pesce
Dr. Pedro Cameselle-Pesce 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
Dr. 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
Dr. Daniel Chard is a historian of the United States and author of Nixon’s War at Home: The FBI, Leftist Guerrillas, and the Origins of Counterterrorism (UNC Press, 2021). Over the summer he conducted research at the Frank Church Institute at Boise State University for his next book project on the politics of national security and terrorism from Watergate to 9/11. This year he’s teaching America since 1865, US & International Terrorism, History of the Pacific Northwest, a 20th century U.S. graduate course, and a senior capstone seminar on post-WWII U.S. history.
Susan Costanzo
Dr. Susan 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
Dr. Peter Diehl teaches medieval European history, offering the following courses this year: HIST 112 (Fall and Winter quarters); HIST 315 (Fall); HIST 499 (Winter); HIST 320 and HIST 414 (Spring). Dr. 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. Arna Elezović is a historian, writer, and Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Washington University for the History Department and the Honors College. 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
Prof. 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
Dr. Jared 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 piracy and the Dutch Golden Age. Dr. Hardesty published "Two Sisters and Their Suriname Plantation: Fairfield Estate, Absenteeism, and New England's Political Economy of Slavery" in the April 2025 issue of the William & Mary Quarterly. 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
Dr. Madison 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. Michael 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) Hutchins 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. Christine 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
Dr. 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).
Johann Neem
Dr. Johann Neem is currently editing the Journal of the Early Republic, teaching, and conducting research. Last year, he offered a new course on Early Modern England. In January, he gave the American Historical Association’s inaugural James M. Banner, Jr., Lecture on the State of the Discipline of History in New York City. His writings about history and culture have appeared in the New Republic, 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
Brittany Owens-Plum 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
Dr. Peter Pihos is the Interim Dean of Fairhaven College and an Associate Professor in Western’s History Department, where he teaches a two-quarter survey of African American history and a range of upper-level courses on civil rights and Black Power, twentieth-century social movements, legal history, urban history, and crime, policing, and punishment in the United States.
Hunter Price
Dr. Hunter 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 was published by University of Virginia Press in 2024 as part of their Jeffersonian America series. He is at work on a second book, which examines the prominent 19th-century scientists John and Joseph LeConte, the people they enslaved, and the legacies of both groups in the development of science, environmentalism, and slavery.
Jennifer Seltz
Dr. Jennifer 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
Dr. Mart Stewart's teaching responsibilities this year include a capstone 499 course and an Honors seminar, "Climate Change and the History of the Future." Dr 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, has two more scheduled for 2026, and several in the hopper. He was recently elected to a term on the Executive Committee of the Agricultural History Society. A M.Sc. program, Climate Change Studies, that Dr. Stewart helped develop while on a Fulbright Senior Specialist appointment at the Royal University of Phnom Penh in 2016 enrolled its eighth 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 and the environmental history of agriculture in the U.S. and in Southeast Asia.
Roger Thompson
Dr. 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. (1514 downloads from the series through August 2025.) This series, inspired in part by Dr. 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 Ellen Zarrow
Dr. Sarah Ellen 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, Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891-1941, was published in June 2025. She is currently researching her second book, a study of vocational education for Jewish girls in interwar Poland. Dr. Zarrow received her doctorate from New York University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Bucharest, Romania.
Sarah J. Zimmerman
Dr. Sarah 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.
