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A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z
Victor Bailey
Office: 3640 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9454
Email: vbailey@ku.edu
Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of Modern British History and Director of the Hall Center for the Humanities (Ph.D. Warwick, 1975; M.A. Oxford, 1978; M.Phil Cambridge, 1970; B.A. Warwick, 1969). Modern Britain, circa 1750 to the present; law and justice in Victorian and Twentieth-Century Britain; the social and cultural impact of industrialisation.
The focus of my research has been the origins, principles, and administration of the English system of criminal justice, from the early Victorian era through the twentieth century. I spent a year at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, under the direction of Sir Leon Radzinowicz, as preface to doctoral work at the Centre for the Study of Social History, Warwick, under the supervision of social historian, E.P. Thompson. At the Centre, I edited a collection of essays entitled Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (1981). My first professional appointments were essentially though not exclusively research-based. As a research officer at the Centre for Criminological Research in Oxford, I worked on what would become volume five of Radzinowicz's History, which dealt with penal policy and practice between 1830 and 1914. As a research fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, I received research funding to examine the history of modern criminal policy. The resulting study, published as Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender (Oxford, 1987), dealt with the formation and implementation of policy for young offenders between the important legislative milestones of 1914 and 1948.
For the next few years (following a year as a visiting professor at the University of Rochester, New York), I taught in the Department of Economic and Social History at Hull University in East Yorkshire. It was there that I stumbled upon an unworked seam of coroners' inquests on the thousands of violent deaths of the Victorian era, including completed acts of self-slaughter. I became enthralled by the paradox of suicide, the most private of human acts, becoming in the pubs where inquests were held, the focus of one of the most public investigations accorded any human behavior. I received funding to examine some 750 cases of suicide in Kingston-upon-Hull between 1937 and 1900, to provide the most detailed account yet of the workings of the Victorian coroners' court, and to seek the causes of suicide in the impact of the different stages of the life cycle. This inquiry eventually became 'This Rash Act': Suicide Across the Life-Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford, 1998). In the past years, I have turned to a book-length assessment of the principles and patterns of punishment (including the death penalty) in twentieth-century Britain. The main theme that will run through "The Rise and Demise of Rehabilitation: Punishment, Culture and Society in Modern Britain" is that historians and criminologists have misunderstood the guiding principles of modern punishment, and have exaggerated the dominance of the rehabilitative paradigm. An evaluation of the years 1895 to 1920, which appeared in the Journal of British Studies (July 1997), and which won the Love Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies for best article in 1997 by a North American scholar, will form the opening section of this book. This project has been funded by research grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the NEH. Oxford will publish the book in its Clarendon Criminology Series.
I have taught modern British history in English and American universities for thirty years. I have always taught across the entire educational spectrum, from freshman survey to graduate colloquium. I have received an excellence in graduate teaching award from the History department graduate students, and a University (Kemper) Fellowship for Teaching Excellence.
Karl Brooks
Office: 3626 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9464
Email: kbrooks@ku.edu
Associate Professor, History and Environmental Studies (Ph.D. Kansas, 2000; J.D. Harvard, 1983; M.Sc. London School of Economics, 1980; B.A. Yale, 1978). Environmental law and policy in North America; energy and environment; non-governmental organizations in American politics, especially environmental policy; and American social and political history since 1945. Teaching interests include environmental law; North American environmental history and policy; American legal history; and postwar American culture and politics.
A Boise, Idaho, native, Karl Brooks returned to Boise in 1983, where he practiced law until 1993 and served three terms in the Idaho Senate, 1986-1992. Before returning to graduate school, Brooks also worked for the Idaho Conservation League, Idaho's largest citizens' environmental group. Brooks has published numerous articles in the fields of environmental history and environmental law. The University of Washington Press published in 2006 Brooks' Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy in its Weyerhaeuser Environmental History Series. He recently published a commissioned article about current environmental historiography and Kansas history, "Environmental History as Kansas History: Review Essay," in Kansas History. He is currently working on "A Rising Wind: The Emergence of American Environmental Law, 1945-1980," under contract (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas). Brooks spent 2001-2002 in Washington, D.C., as a Supreme Court Fellow.
Jonathan C. D. Clark
Office: 3614 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-2124
Email: jcdclark@ku.edu
Hall Distinguished Professor of British History (Ph.D. Cambridge, 1991). Fields: British history from the earliest times to the present; religion in Britain since the Reformation; political thought; law; literature, cultural politics and the classical tradition; the 'long eighteenth century', 1660-1832; Anglo-American and Anglo-European relations; historiography, and the history of ideas. Publications include, The Dynamics of Change; English Society 1660-1832; Revolution and Rebellion; (ed.) Memoirs and Speeches of James, Earl Waldegrave; The Language of Liberty 1660-1832; Samuel Johnson; (ed.) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; (ed) Samuel Johnson in Historical Perpective.
Katherine Clark
Office: 3634 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-2145
Email: krpclark@ku.edu
Associate Prof. in History, Humanities and Western Civ. (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1998; M.A. Johns Hopkins, 1989; B.A. Duke, 1981). Professor Clark's research and teaching interests include Tudor-Stuart and Hanoverian Britain, and early-modern Europe. She is currently completing a book on Daniel Defoe and late-Stuart political culture.
Luis Corteguera
Office: 3630 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 785-864-9469
Email: lcortegu@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. Princeton).
Fields of Interest: Early Modern Europe
My research has centered on early modern Spain. My first book, For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580–1640, examines how popular politics shaped the relations between Madrid and Barcelona in the decades leading to one of the greatest crises in Spanish history, the Catalan Revolt of 1640.
Other topics I have examined include: “The Painter Who Lost His Hat: Artisans and Justice in Early Modern Barcelona,” Sixteenth Century Journal (1998), 1021–40; “The Making of A Visionary Woman: The Life of Beatriz Ana Ruiz, 1666–1735,” in Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, ed. M. Vicente and L. Corteguera (2004); and (with Sherry Velasco) “Authority in the Margins: Reexamining the Autograph Letters between Sor María de Agreda and Philip IV of Spain,” in J. L. Eich, J. L. Gillespie, and L. Harrington, eds., From the Convent Cell to the Imperial Court: Women’s Voices and the Politics of Spanish Empire (2008), 223–48.
More recently, my forthcoming book Seeing the Invisible King: Myth and Monarchy in Early Modern Spain examines real and fictional face-to-face meetings between ordinary people and their monarchs. These dramatic tales of royal encounters were not products of royal propaganda. They drew on powerful myths that governments sought to co-opt for their own interests, but which also inspired men and women to defy their rulers. Royal encounters with ordinary people also inspired some of the most famous works of early modern Spanish literature, such as Lope’s Fuenteovejuna or Calderón de la Barca’s El Alcalde de Zalamea. Coming before the ruler stood as an ideal of good government that shaped how men and women imagined the bond between fathers and children, the soul’s desire for God, even the wisdom hidden under the garb of folly.
Current projects examine the intersection between politics, religion, and visual culture. I am completing Death by Effigy: The Power of Images and the Mexican Inquisition in the Sixteenth Century. It recounts a tale of dishonor and revenge that reveals how ordinary men and women appropriated religious symbols for their own purposes, and the terrible consequences of getting caught by the Inquisition.
I am also working on another book project, Talking Images in the Spanish Empire, about the ways in which men and women interacted with God and the king through sacred and royal images.
If you are considering graduate studies under my direction, I strongly urge you to contact me before you apply.
Gregory T. Cushman
Office: 3631 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9449
Email: gcushman@ku.edu
Assistant Professor, History (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin, 2003, M.A. 1999; B.A. La Sierra University 1995). Environmental history (esp. climate, disasters, oceans); Latin America since 1750 (esp. Andes and Cuba); history of science and technology (esp. meteorology, oceanography, ecology, transportation, agriculture), global history.
Cushman came to KU in Fall 2003. He has an ongoing fascination with “all things foul and ugly, all creatures short and squat”--and their ecological and historical importance. He is currently completing a book titled The Lords of Guano: Global Ecology and Peru’s Marine Environment. It focuses on the role of experts in managing “The Most Valuable Birds in the World” and the earth’s largest marine fishery to produce guano and fishmeal. His article “Environmental Therapy for Soil and Social Erosion
: Landscape Architecture and Depression-Era Highway Construction in Texas” won the 2001 Robinson Award for best published article in public works history. It gives prominence to the humble culvert, drainage ditch, and native plants in modern landscape engineering.
But his interests extend far beyond these regions. The Lords of Guano describes the formative impact “local” events in Peru exercised on major global trends, particularly the advent of input-intensive agriculture after 1840, the roots of neo-Malthusian fears of global overpopulation after World War II, and the division of the world into a “fat,” overconsuming North and “starving,” underdeveloped South after 1960. He teaches ecological history from a “big history” perspective, transcending the geographical, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries traditionally set by the historical profession. He is also researching the history of international understanding of the El Niño phenomenon
, and its “invention” as a global disaster, by which he hopes to learn how humans came to envision environmental problems on a scale that spans, not only the Pacific Ocean, but the whole earth.
Robert DeKosky
Office: 3620 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9462
Email: rdekosky@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. Wisconsin, 1972). History of physical sciences, esp. chemistry; institutional development of the sciences; scientific revolution of the 16th-17th centuries. Research on history of chemistry; life and works of William Crookes; 19th-century spectroscopy; early-modern scientific revolution.
Publications include:
Knowledge and Cosmos: Development and Decline of the Medieval Perspective (University Press of America, 1979)
Jacob S. Dorman
Office: 3613 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9453
Email: dorman@ku.edu
Jacob S. Dorman (Ph.D., UCLA) is an Assistant Professor at KU who holds a joint appointment in History and American Studies with specialties in African American history, black religion, and 1920's Harlem.
Dorman received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2004 and has held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities. He has published in the journal Nova Religio and in anthologies on new religious movements, alternative African American religions, and the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford University Press will publish his manuscript, "Chosen People: Black Orientalism, Black Israelites and the Harlem Renaissance," which examines the way African Americans used Orientalist ideas to create new religious movements that critiqued racism and the discourse of civilization. Research fellowships from Yale's Beinecke Library and the Gilder Lehrman Institute have supported a second project, a cultural history of everyday life during the Harlem Renaissance, told partly through the letters and diaries of its artists. Dorman's interests include race, music, Rastafarianism, whiteness, and contemporary black and Jewish identities. He has also contributed to National Public Radio and to the online religious studies journal The Revealer.
Recently
Syllabus for HIST 696: Topics in Religion and Race
Syllabus for AMS 802: Theorizing America
Syllabus for AMS 805: Black History and Theory
Syllabus for AMS 101: Blackness, Whiteness, and Racism
"I Saw You Disappear with My Own Eyes": Hidden Transcripts of New York Black Israelite Bricolage" Nova Religio August 2007, Vol. 11, No. 1, Pages 61-83
Jonathan Earle
Office: 3642 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9446
or (785) 864-1422
Email: jonearle@ku.edu
Jonathan Earle grew up in suburban Washington, DC and was educated at Columbia University (BA 1990) and Princeton University (MA 1992, PhD 1996). He is the author of numerous books and articles including Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil (UNC Press, 2004), winner of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic’s 2005 Broussard prize and co-winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize; John Brown’s Raid: A Brief History With Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2008); The Routledge Atlas of African American History (Routledge, 2000) and co-author of Major Problems in the Early American Republic (Houghton-Mifflin, 2007). He is currently working on a book on the election of 1860 for Oxford University Press. His primary interests are the antislavery and democratic movements of the 19th Century and political history more generally. In support of his research, Earle has received major fellowships from the NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies. He spent the 2006-7 academic year as the Ray Allen Billington Chair in U.S. History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library and the 1999-2000 academic year as an NEH Fellow at the Huntington.
Earle’s teaching interests are broad in their scope and approach, and include courses on the nation’s sectional crisis of the 1840s and 50s, the early republic, and a popular undergraduate class on the history of conspiracies and paranoia in the United States. Prof.
Earle also directs programming for the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas.
Steven A. Epstein
Office: 3622 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-2146
Email: sae@ku.edu
Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor of Medieval History (Ph.D. Harvard 1981, MA Cambridge 1980, BA Swarthmore College 1974) medieval Europe, economic and social history, labor, slavery, Italy.
Professor Epstein is the author of various books on medieval history, including Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (2001) and Genoa and the Genoese 958-1528 (1996), and articles on diverse topics in the broad field of the medieval Mediterranean world. He teaches a general survey of medieval Europe, as well as more specialized courses on the Mediterranean, Venice and Florence, slavery, and economic history.
"My current research includes a few small projects on city government in the Middle Ages, slavery in Italy, and family life in urban medieval Italy. The book in progress concerns the broad subject of ethnogenesis in the eastern Mediterranean in the later Middle Ages. I am looking at the wide area stretching from the Black Sea down to Egypt with an eye toward explaining how the various peoples living there defined themselves in contrast to their neighbors. I am studying treaty and contract making, colonies, slavery, physiognomy, and ethnic identity as ways to explore how people crossed the boundaries of culture, language, and creed to form relationships with others."
J. Megan Greene
Office: 3632 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9473
Email: mgreene@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. Washington University in St. Louis, 1997; M.A. University of Chicago, 1988; B.A. Cornell University, 1984). Professor Greene's field of study is the history of the Republic of China under the KMT both in China and on Taiwan. Specific research interests include nation and state-building projects in the areas of science and the economy, academia, and ideology. She teaches courses on modern China and East Asia. She is currently working on a book on contemporary narratives of Taiwan's history. She is the author of The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization (Harvard University Press, 2008), a study of industrial science policy in China and Taiwan under the KM. She is co-editor with Robert Ash of Taiwan in the 21st Century: Aspects and limitations of a development model (Routledge, 2007). She also collaborated with William Bowman and Frank Chiteji on Imperialism in the Modern World: Sources and Interpretations (Prentice Hall, 2006).
Sheyda Jahanbani
Office: 3611 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9459
Email: sfaj@ku.edu
Assistant professor, history of the U.S. and the world (1776-2001), modern U.S. history, the history of international cooperation, the cold war at home and abroad, the U.S. and the "third world," social science in the European and American traditions, global poverty, social policy, social reform, and social protest in 20th century America, U.S.-Latin American relations.
Dr. Jahanbani is an historian of American foreign relations specializing in the post-1945 period. She is especially interested in the legacy of the liberal internationalist tradition in American foreign policy. This includes the history of U.S. relations with the "Third World," the history of the social sciences, (particularly the history of modernization and development), and the emergence of distinctly "global" problems in the post-World War II period.
In addition to her pursuits as a scholar, Prof. Jahanbani is also interested in national politics and contemporary policy issues. She has served as an intern to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education & Welfare (1996-97), and the Office of Public Affairs, National Security Council, Office of the President (1998-99). She also worked as an organizer for the United Auto Workers in their campaign to advocate for academic workers, particularly non-tenured faculty and graduate teaching assistants at public and private universities across the country.
Her current project, “‘A Different Kind of People:’ The Poor at Home and Abroad, 1935-1975,” seeks to historicize the origins of a global conception of poverty. This work shows how a transnational conception of poor people as ‘backwards’ and culturally distinct emerged from the nexus of intellectuals, activists, and administrators who shaped U.S. domestic anti-poverty and international development policies in the late-20th century.
Her next project will explore the democratization of American and Western European foreign policy in the post-World War II period, charting the rise and exploring the significance of the celebrity-diplomat, people-to-people diplomacy, overseas volunteer programs, and the non-governmental organization as major players in international relations. According to Dr. Jahanbani, "In plain language, I want to try to figure out how and why Angelina Jolie was elected to the Council on Foreign Relations before I was!"
Ernest E. Jenkins
Office: 3601 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-2144
Email: ej2@ku.edu
Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Kansas 2004; M.A. University of Kansas 1993; B.A. Furman University 1990). My area of specialization focuses on Medieval Iberia, Southern France, and the Mediterranean. I am particularly interested in social, ecclesiastical, and legal history. The social component of my work is leading me to examine families and kinship networks more closely, and this process is shaping the direction of my book in progress. It will concentrate on the activities and influence of the count of Barcelona's family, with particular emphasis on the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. I teach a range of courses from the introductory to upper levels, including the Medieval survey, historical methods, Iberia, the Crusades, and Medieval culture. I am happy to work with undergraduate and graduate students, and if you have questions about our program, please feel free to contact me.
Paul Kelton
Office: 3617 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9450
Email: pkelton@ku.edu
Professor Kelton’s primary interests are indigenous responses to colonialism. His latest book is Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); and he is currently working on a book entitled “Pestilence and Persistence: Colonialism's Biological Allies and the Survival of the Cherokee Nation." He is the author of “Avoiding the Smallpox Spirits: Colonial Epidemics and Southeastern Indian Survival”; Ethnohistory 51 (Winter 2004): 45-71; “The Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic,” in Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760, ed. Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson, (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002); and "'At the Head of the Aboriginal Remnant': Cherokee Construction of a 'Civilized' Indian Identity During the Lakota Crisis of 1876," Great Plains Quarterly, 23 (Winter 2003): 3-17.
Elizabeth A. Kuznesof
Office: 3610 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9433
Email: kuznesof@ku.edu
Professor and Director of the Center of Latin American Studies (Ph.D. Berkeley, 1976). Brazil, family history, quantitative methods, comparative social, colonial Latin America. Research on the history of the family in Latin America; women's work in Latin America. Author of Household Economy and Urban Development: Sao Paulo, 1765-1836. In progress: "The Family in Latin America: A Social and Political History."
Eve Levin
Office: 3638 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9463
Email: evelevin@ku.edu
Associate Professor. (Ph.D. Indiana University, 1983; M.A. Indiana University 1976; B.A. Mount Holyoke College, 1975).
My area of specialization is Russia and Eastern Europe, and my own research concentrates on the pre-modern period (9th-18th centuries). I am particularly interested in gender, sexuality, popular culture, Orthodox Christianity, and medicine, focusing on Russia and the Balkans, and I happily supervise graduate students whose interests extend into other areas. Major publications include the monograph Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700 (Cornell University Press, 1989) and the translation of Natalia Pushkareva's book Women in Russian History (M.E. Sharpe, 1997), which won the Heldt Prize for Best Translation in Slavic Women's Studies. I have a monograph on popular religion that appeared in Russian from the Moscow publisher Indrik in 2004. I am currently preparing a monograph on the experience of illness in 16-18th century Russia, examining folk therapies, Western medicine, and spiritual healing. In addition, since 1997, I have served as Editor of The Russian Review, a major interdisciplinary academic journal, now hosted by KU.
Thomas J. Lewin
Office: 3612 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9444
Email: tomlewin@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. Northwestern, 1974). West African socio-economic and political history; oral history methods and practices; international business history. Research on pre-colonial West Africa, development and expansion of U.S.-based multinational corporations. Author of Asante Before the British; and Keeping the Dream Alive: Managing NASA's Space Station Program, 1982-1986.
Adrian Lewis
Webpage
Office: 3603 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9467
or 864-1684
Email: arl0008@ku.edu
Professor of History and Director, KU Office of Professional Military Graduate Education (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1995). Research focus on U.S. and European military history.
Dr. Lewis has a dual role at KU as a professor in the History Dept. and as the director of the University's Office of Professional Military Graduate Education (http://www.opmge.ku.edu/). He is a distinguished military historian who comes to KU from the University of North Texas where he was the Department of History Chair. He received his Ph.D. in European and Military History from the University of Chicago in 1995. He is the author of The American Culture of War: A History of American Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom (2007), Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory (2001), and currently has a manuscript under review at KU Press titled The Vietnam War: The Failure to Explain Defeat.
Yang Lu
Office: 3621 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9445
Email: yanglu@ku.edu
Assistant Professor (Ph.D., 1999, Princeton) Chinese history.
The focuses of my research and teaching are mainly society and culture of pre-modern China. My areas of specialty range from history of Sui-Tang Dynasties, social and cultural history of Chinese Buddhism, history of and religions associated with the Silk Road, history of Chinese historiography, to intellectual history of modern and contemporary China.
I began my intellectual quest studying Sanskrit and Indian Buddhism in Peking University and University of Vienna. I taught for several years as an assistant professor of Chinese history at Princeton University after I received my Ph.D. there. I also was a visiting professor at Harvard University during the 2006-7 academic year. I recently finished my first book, which is entitled “Emperor and His Enemy in Tang China: A Study of Xianzong and His Age.” It explores the complex nature of political and institutional changes in the ninth century and their impact on the imperial system of later dynasties.
My current research concentrates on two projects. One is the called “Knowledge, Network, and Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism.” It is a monographic study focusing on the models of Chinese Buddhist learning that evolved between the 4th and the 10th centuries and the network of monastic institutions that supported such models. It also addresses the broader implications this development had on Chinese society and its complex relationship with other scholastic traditions that were prominent in medieval China. My second research project deals with the social and cultural imagination of writing and with the relationship between such imagination and the rise of literati- aristocratic families in late medieval China. Based on extensive research on literary works and epigraphic materials, I attempt to reconstruct the cultural psychology and the institutional mechanism that shaped the socio-political elite of late Tang and early Song.
When I teach, I place pre-modern Chinese history in the context of world history. I am currently designing a course on the Silk Road, in which I will examine with my students, the early history of Chinese contacts with the western world through the Inner and Central Asia. In my spare time, I enjoy visiting museums, taking photographs, updating my blog (that I keep in Chinese), and writing essays on culture and history for major Chinese and Taiwanese newspapers and magazines.
Elizabeth MacGonagle
Office: 3619 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9452
Email: macgonag@ku.edu
Associate Professor of African History (Ph.D. Michigan State, 2002; M.A. Michigan State, 1996; B.A. Trinity College, Hartford, CT, 1990).
Professor MacGonagle's research focuses on processes of identity formation in African and Diasporan settings. Her first book, Crafting Identity in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, examined four centuries of history from 1500-1900 in the Ndau region of southeastern Africa to challenge popular notions about tribalism. In the book she pushes the study of identity formation back several hundred years to argue that the Ndau were aware of their shared identity long before the arrival of European colonialism. Rochester University Press published the book in 2007 in their series on African History and the Diaspora. An earlier article, “Mightier than the Sword: the Portuguese Pen in Ndau History,” appeared in History in Africa in 2001 and discussed the rich material that Portuguese observers recorded about Ndau speakers in precolonial documents. A second article, “Living with a Tyrant: Ndau Memories and Identities in the Shadow of Ngungunyana,” was published in the International Journal of African Historical Studies in 2008.
In her current research on the Ndau-speaking region of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, Professor MacGonagle investigates recent meanings of tribalism among the Ndau living across two national borders in the twentieth century. She asks how a sense of being Ndau continues to exist into the present, despite different colonial histories, postcolonial trajectories, and official languages in Zimbabwe (English) and Mozambique (Portuguese). The book project, Between Borders in Southeast Africa, promises to reveal complex realities about identity formation by crossing historical, geographical, and theoretical boundaries to examine links of nation, culture, and ethnicity.
As part of her ongoing research agenda to consider changes in ethnic, national, and Diasporan identities over time, Professor MacGonagle is also engaged in analyzing intersections between history and memory across the African continent. She is examining several sites of memory steeped in history that UNESCO recognizes as World Heritage Sites for their outstanding cultural importance to humanity. They include: Ghana’s coastal slave forts from the era of the transatlantic slave trade; Robben Island prison where Nelson Mandela was jailed under South Africa’s apartheid regime; the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe built by a trading empire during the Middle Ages; and the city and slave market on Mozambique Island that served as Portugal’s trading post on the sea route to India. Her investigation examines the uses and abuses of history at these sites and questions how and why we remember—and forget—about the past. Her first publication of the project focused on the significance of Ghana’s slave forts in our collective memory since their use during the transatlantic slave trade. The essay, “From Dungeons to Dance Parties: Contested Histories of Ghana’s Slave Forts.” appeared in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies in 2006.
Professor MacGonagle speaks Portuguese and Ndau, a dialect of Shona. In addition to fieldwork in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Ghana, she has also spent time in Africa in South Africa, Namibia, Togo, Zambia, Swaziland, Kenya, and Zanzibar. Professor MacGonagle collaborated with Ken Lohrentz (KU Libraries) to digitize a portion of the Onitsha Market Literature collection held at KU's Spencer Research Library in 2003-2004. Selections of this popular Nigerian literature, along with a companion website, are on the Internet at http://onitsha.diglib.ku.edu/. In 2004, she received a Fulbright fellowship to teach African history at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík.
Professor MacGonagle teaches African history at KU in the departments of History and African & African-American Studies. She has training in Comparative Black history and interests in social and cultural history and gender studies. Her course offerings include: Sexuality and Gender in African History (HIST 598/AAAS 598), Modern African History (HIST 300/AAAS 305), Introduction to African History (AAAS 105/HIST 104), the Senior Seminar in African and African-American Studies (AAAS 550) and graduate seminars in African history and comparative women’s history.
At KU, Professor MacGonagle is an executive committee member of the Kansas African Studies Center and a member of the university-wide African Studies Council. She is also a member of the African Studies Association, Lusophone African Studies Organization (LAÇO), Association of Concerned Africa Scholars and Mid-America Alliance for African Studies.
Jeffrey P. Moran
Office: 3628 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9461
Email: jefmoran@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. Harvard 1996; M.A. Harvard 1990; B.A. Wisconsin, 1988). Modern US; cultural and intellectual history; history of education; public health; sexuality.
Associate Professor Moran is the author of Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century (Harvard 2000) and of The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford Books, 2002). He has published articles in the Journal of American History, Southern Studies, and Reviews in American History, and recently published pieces in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Southern History on the issues of race and evolution during the Scopes trial. He is currently working on a book about the social context of the antievolution impulse in modern America for Oxford University Press. In support of this project, Moran has received grants from the American Philosophical Society and the George and Eliza Howard Foundation. He won the Organization of American Historians' Louis Peltzer Prize in 1996.
Associate Professor Moran teaches the 20th-century graduate colloquium, the second half of the undergraduate survey, an upper-level course on the U.S., 1920-1945, and the History of Sexuality. He has advised senior honors theses on topics ranging from Robert Penn Warren to fights over development the history of sexuality and gender.
Rita Napier
Office: 3616 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9448
Email: rnapier@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. American, 1976). Social history of the American West, Native American history, history of Kansas. Research on the Plains Indians; the urban frontier; development of democracy in the American West; American land law and tenure. Author of several studies in frontier history. H. Bernerd Fink Distinguished Teaching Award, 1983, and other teaching honors.
Carolyn Nelson
Office: 3603 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9467
Email: canelson@ku.edu
Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Kansas, 1970; M.A. Harvard, 1963; B.A. Texas, 1961). My recent research interests have been in women on the Roman frontier, especially in Britain, including the wives of auxiliary soldiers and fort commanders' wives. In the future I plan to work on the wives of legionary centurions. Teaching interests at the undergraduate level include Roman military history, the early Roman empire (from Augustus to the mid-200's), and the freshman survey of the ancient world (ancient Near East, Greece and Rome). At the graduate level, Medieval Latin and readings in Roman history.
Roberta Pergher
Office: 3617 Wescoe Hall
Phones: 864-9468
Email: rpergher@ku.edu
Assistant Professor (PhD, University of Michigan, 2007; MA, University of Denver, 2000; BA, University of Denver, 1998)
Dr. Pergher’s research explores fascist Italy’s settlement policies in national borderlands and on the imperial frontier. By comparing and contrasting the fascist approach to national consolidation in the Alpine province of South Tyrol and to imperial expansion in the African colony of Libya, she shows how visions of national homogeneity and solidarity collided with the pursuit of a neo-Roman, multi-ethnic Mediterranean empire. Along the way Dr. Pergher explores the roots of fascism’s support, the character and limits of its violence, and the ways in which fascist state-building challenged or incorporated longstanding experiences of poverty, emigration, and clientelism. Dr. Pergher has published articles on the topics of Italian colonialism and fascist settlement and is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “A Tale of Two Borders: Fascist Settlement and Nation-building from the Alps to Africa.”
For her next project, Dr. Pergher plans to write a cultural and social history of World War I in the Alps. Relying on memoirs, military sources, photographs, and on-site visits, the study will analyze the ways in which Alpine combat was embedded in a military culture of trench warfare as well as in the nationalist ideal of mountain conquest. It will also explore the enormous impact which the form and ferocity of Alpine combat had on the lives of soldiers and on the people living in the valleys below.
Dr. Pergher was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and a postdoctoral fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. She has taught graduate courses on 19th and 20th Europe and on global and colonial history as well as undergraduate courses on modern Europe, comparative fascism, European imperialism, post-1945 Europe, and sports and leisure in modern Italy. In the spring semester she will be offering a course on Hitler and Nazi Germany as well as a thesis writing seminar on Europe and its empires.
Eric C. Rath
Office: 3624 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9470
Email: erath@ku.edu
Eric C. Rath, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Michigan, 1998; M.A. Michigan, 1992; B.A. Skidmore, 1989). Fields: Premodern Japan, social and cultural history especially traditional Japanese performing arts and foodways.
I am completing a book on Japanese cuisine entitled Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, forthcoming). Cuisine, which I define as a fantasy with food, had its origins in Japan in ancient rituals. These inspired medieval chefs who created rules for cooking and imagining with food that became popularized in the early modern period. One of the key findings of my study is what I call conspicuous non-consumption. Participants in medieval rituals identified the sacred and transcendent aspects of certain foods by not eating them, and early modern culinary writers described imaginary dishes and ideal meals that would have been impossible to create in real life due to cost and sumptuary laws. Thus, the most important ingredient for premodern Japanese cuisine was the imagination, albeit that it had to be expressed according to artistic conventions and accepted cooking styles. Besides offering a longer historical view and different way of conceptualizing Japanese cuisine than current studies, my book introduces dozens of medieval and early modern culinary texts to English readers with extended translations. These writings document the differences between modern and premodern Japanese cuisine that will probably surprise readers more familiar with sushi and tempura than snipe heads in eggplant, crane-leg soup, or dog on a half-shell.
My previous research focused on the masked noh drama, one of the highpoints of Japan’s traditional culture, which has enjoyed a continuous performance history of more than six centuries. “Noh” literally means talent, but since its origin actors have resisted the notion that noh rests on natural talent alone. My book, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2004) traces how definitions of noh, both as an art and as a profession, have changed from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on the development of noh’s most salient traditions including legends about masks, secret artistic writings, patriarchs, and rituals that constitute the "ethos of noh," the ideology that empowered certain groups of actors at the expense of others.
I teach an upper-division sequence of courses on premodern Japan: Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Japan. I also offer topics courses including the Samurai, Food in History, and Japanese Theater History.
Besides my interest in Japan, I teach courses on Tibetan history and I am principal investigator for a US State Department grant to help create a curriculum for a school for Tibetans in Qinghai, China. You can read about our project at our blog: http://mayulschool.wordpress.com/
Recent and Forthcoming Publications include:
Past and Present in Japanese Foodways, Co-edited with Stephanie Assmann. (Fourteen chapters on historical and contemporary foodways in Japan, forthcoming).
“Banquets Against Boredom: Towards Understanding (Samurai) Cuisine in Early Modern Japan,” Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal XVI (2008), pp. 43-55. http://hdl.handle.net/1811/36286
“The Significance of Large Servings of Food in Japanese Cuisine”[日本料理の高盛の文化的重要性, in Japanese] for Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kanshō special edition on Japanese foodways, ed. Haruo Shirane et al. (2008), pp. 278-82.
“Rural Life and Agriculture,” in A Companion to Japanese History, ed. William Tsutsui (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 477-92.
“Godzilla Meets Super-Kyogen, or How a Dinosaur’s Debut on the Classical Kyogen Stage Saved the World,” In Godzilla's Footsteps, ed. William Tsutsui and Michiko Ito. (New York: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 139-52.
Anton Rosenthal
Office: 2612 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9475
Email: surreal@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. Minnesota, 1990; M.A. Minnesota, 1984; B.A. Berkeley, 1973). Recent Publications: "Spectacle, Fear and Protest: A Guide to the History of Urban Public Space in Latin America," Social Science History, Spring 2000; "Dangerous Streets: Trolleys, Labor Conflict and the Reorganization of Public Space in Montevideo" in James Baer and Ronn Pineo, eds., Cities of Hope (Westview Press, 1998), 30-52; "Correo Mítico: The Construction of a Civic Image in the Postcards of Montevideo, Uruguay, 1900-1930," co-authored with Catherine Preston, in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 15 (1996), 231-259; "The Arrival of the Electric Streetcar and the Conflict over Progress in Early 20th Century Montevideo," Journal of Latin American Studies 27:2 (May 1995), 319-342; "Streetcar Workers and the Transformation of Montevideo: The General Strike of 1911," The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 51:4 (April 1995), 471-494.
Teaching Interests: Cultural and Social History of Modern Latin America; Popular Culture of Africa and Latin America; Urban Sociology and Urban History; History of Los Angeles; Labor History of Latin America; Nationalism and Revolution in the Third World. Professor Rosenthal is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including the Byron T. Schutz Award, the Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (2000) and the Center for Teaching Excellence Distinguished Teaching Fellow (2001-2002).Course syllabi can be seen at www.ku.edu/wcb in Spring 1999 and Spring 2000 or in "Topics in Third World History: Nationalism and Revolution," Radical History Review, No. 68, Spring 1997, 137-146. Professor Rosenthal was also trained in Sociology and African History in addition to Latin American History.
Benjamin Sax
Office: 2610 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9456
Email: bensax@ku.edu
Associate Professor (Ph.D. Chicago, 1978). Modern Germany, cultural and intellectual history of modern Europe, philosophy of history. Research on Modern European historiography and philosophy of history.
Publications include:
Images of Identity: Goethe and the Problem of Self-Conception in the Nineteenth Century
Hagith Sivan
Office: 3644 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9466
Email: dinah01@ku.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Fall 2009 Courses Offered
Professor (Ph.D. Columbia, 1983; M.A. Yale, 1978) Ancient history, Roman history, early Christianity, late antiquity, early medieval history, Judaica, women in antiquity.
Sivan is the author of Ausonius of Bordeaux: Genesis of a Gallic Aristocracy (1993); Between Woman, Man and God: A New Interpretation of the Ten Commandments (2004); and Palestine in Late Antiquity (2008).
William M. Tsutsui
Offices: 3606 Wescoe Hall / 200 Strong Hall
Phones: 864-3661
or 864-9435
Email: btsutsui@ku.edu
Professor of History and Associate Dean for International Studies, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (A.B. Harvard, 1985; MLitt Oxford, 1988; M.A. Princeton, 1990; Ph.D. Princeton 1995). Major interests in modern Japan, business and economic history, environmental history, Japanese popular culture, World War II, U.S.-Japanese relations.
He has served as Acting Director of KU’s Center for East Asian Studies (1999-2001, 2004), founding Executive Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Kansas (2006-2008), and Chair of the Department of History (2007-2008).
Professor Tsutsui is the author of Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan (Princeton, 1998), Banking Policy in Japan: American Efforts at Reform During the Occupation (Routledge, 1988), and Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Japanese edition, Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2005) as well as numerous articles on Japanese business, environmental, and cultural history. He has also edited Banking in Japan (3 vols, Routledge, 1999), In Godzilla's Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (with Michiko Ito, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and A Companion to Japanese History (Blackwell, 2006). He has received Fulbright, ACLS, and Marshall fellowships, and was awarded the Newcomen Society Award for Excellence in Business History in 1998, the John Whitney Hall Prize of the Association for Asian Studies in 2000, and the William Rockhill Nelson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2005. He has presented invited lectures at universities across the nation, including Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, UCLA, Princeton and Alaska-Anchorage. He is a past president of the Kansas State Historical Society, former program committee chair of the Kansas Humanities Council, a member of the national advisory committee of the Japan-America Student Conference, and an elected member of the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.
Professor Tsutsui’s research focuses on the business, environmental, and cultural history of twentieth-century Japan. His current projects include studies of the environmental impact of World War II on Japan, the globalization of Japanese popular culture, and sports in Japanese history. Professor Tsutsui has been a faculty fellow at KU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, received a 2001 William T. Kemper Award for Teaching Excellence, and has won KU’s Steeples Faculty Award for service to the people of Kansas and the Woodyard International Educator Award.
Professor Tsutsui teaches a variety of courses in modern Japanese history, including the lower-level survey (HIST 118 “History of East Asia”), two courses in the upper-level Japan sequence (HIST 588 “Japan, 1853-1945” and HIST 589 “Japan since 1945”), and topics courses (such as HIST 596 “Defining Japan: Marginalized Groups and the Construction of National Identity”). Since 1995 he has chaired twelve M.A. thesis committees in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department and two in the M.A. in International Studies program on topics ranging from the Yasukuni shrine and Japanese nationalism to the cultural construction of AIDS in Japan . He is currently the major advisor for seven Ph.D. and M.A. candidates in the History Department (who are pursuing research on topics as diverse as organizations for the blind in modern Japan , Japan ’s postwar military policy, and sexual education in contemporary Japan ).
Leslie Tuttle
Offices: 3637 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9455
Email: ltuttle@ku.edu
Assistant Professor, History and Humanities. (Ph.D. Princeton 2000, M.A. Princeton 1992 ) History of women and gender, feminism, family, sexuality, the history of France, and European social and cultural history.
Professor Tuttle's current research focuses on the role of gender and sexuality in the solidification and centralization of royal power in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. The book project she is working on, tentatively titled "Sacred and Politic Unions: Natalist Policy in Absolutist France," examines Old Regime policies that accorded privileged status to men who married and fathered large families. Connecting the policy to absolutist and patriarchal political theories, the study also emphasizes the ways that men and women interacted with government officials and sought to turn meddling in their familial and sexual lives to their own benefit. She teaches courses on women's history, the history of sexuality, European history, and Western Civilization.
Marta V. Vicente
Offices: 213G Bailey
Phone: 864-2235
Email: mvicente@ku.edu
Associate Professor History and Women's Studies (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1998; B.A. Barcelona, 1988). Research focus on women's history in 18th-century Spain. My teaching areas are European women's history from 1600s to the present, feminist theory and women and work.
My doctoral dissertation was about artisan families and early industrialization in eighteenth-century Barcelona. My thesis showed that the first factories were able to grow thanks to the work and forms of organization of work of artisan families. Two articles have grown out of this effort so far: "Artisans and Work in a Barcelona Cotton Factory (1770-1816)," International Review of Social History 45 (2000): 1-23; and "Images and Realities of Work: Women and Guilds in Early Modern Barcelona," in Alain Saint-Saëns and Magdalena Sánchez, eds., Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities (Greenwood 1996), 127-139. I am currently writing a book titled "Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Atlantic World, 1700-1815," and have co-edited, Women, Texts, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (Ashgate: 2003). Other research projects include the history of the relation between notions of women and work in the Spanish Enlightenment and the actual experience of ordinary women. In this project, I will analyze a variety of archival documentation from court suits to business letters that reveal how women constructed their public identity and whether such construction had any relation to the political, intellectual and cultural changes that Spanish society witnessed at the end of the eighteenth century.
I have taught the following courses on women's history: "History of Women and the Family in Europe: From 1600 to the Present"; "From Spinners to Executives: Women's History in Europe, From 1600 to Present"; "History of Feminist Theory", "History of Women and Work" and "History of Women and the Body".
Kim Warren
Office: 2004 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9451
Email: kwarren@ku.edu
Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Stanford, 2004; M.A. Stanford, 2000; B.A. Yale, 1994). U.S. Women's History. Professor Warren's research interests include the history of gender and race in African American and Native American education, Kansas, and the United States. Her teaching interests include women's history, citizenship and American identity, race and gender relations, and reform movements.
Jennifer L. Weber
Office: 3633 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9457
Email: jlweber@ku.edu
Assistant professor (Ph.D. Princeton, 2003; M.A., Princeton, 2000; M.A., California State University, Sacramento, 1998; B.S., Northwestern, 1984)
Dr. Weber is a native Californian who worked for several years in her home state as a journalist and political aide. Then she saw the light and went to graduate school. Her principal interest is the Civil War, especially the seams where political, social, and military history come together. Other fields that attract her attention include 19th century America and war and society. Her book, Copperheads, about antiwar Democrats in the Civil War North, was published in 2006 by Oxford University Press. To read an interview about the book, click here. Her children's book about the battle of Gettysburg will be published by National Geographic. Other current projects include books on executive power in wartime; comparing conscription and its consequences in the Union and the Confederacy; and a collection of essays in honor of her graduate adviser, James M. McPherson. Professor Weber is co-director of the Hall Center's seminar on Peace, War & Global Change. In addition to her work at KU, she serves on the advisory panel for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and the boards of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and the Abraham Lincoln Association. In her spare time she enjoys sports, music, movies, novels, and traveling. Dr. Weber is an avid follower of current events and politics—which is even more fun than sports because it matters.
Theodore A. Wilson
Office: 3604 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9460
Email: taw@ku.edu
Professor, Assistant Chair and Director of Graduate Studies (Ph.D. Indiana, 1966). 20th- century U.S. political, military, and diplomatic history. Affliated faculty member of Russian and East European Studies and American Studies.
Having trained with Robert H. Ferrell at Indiana University, Wilson joined the Department of History faculty in 1965. For some years his research dealt primarily with the history of American foreign relations. That focus yielded such works as The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay 1941 (1969, 1991), for which he was awarded the Society of American Historians' Parkman Prize; a co-edited volume, Makers of American Diplomacy (1974); and The Marshall Plan, 1947-1951 (1977). He also co-authored Three Generations in Twentieth Century America: Family, Community, and Nation (1976, 1981). Beginning in the 1980s, he shifted focus to the World War II Allied coalition and to military history more generally. That research program, supported by stays at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the U.S. Army Center for Military History, has yielded WW2: Critical Issues (1974, 1994, 1998); D-Day, June 6 1944 (1994); Victory in Europe 1945: From World War to Cold War (2000); assorted articles; and Building Warriors: Selection and Training of U.S. Ground Combat Troops in World War II (forthcoming). Wilson serves as General Editor of the University Press of Kansas series, Modern War Studies, which has published some 130 original titles on military history and related subjects.
Afflicted with what some term a impulse toward civic responsibility and others claim is an obsessive desire to meddle, he has held such administrative posts at KU as director of graduate studies and chair of the Department of History, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, director of the Hall Center for the Humanities, and arguably holds KU's record for number of academic committees served on. He currently is Director of INTL, an interdisciplinary M.A. program in international Studies. Wilson regularly offers a general interest course on World War II and undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. military history, the Cold War, and 20th century U.S. politics. He has directed approximately 40 M.A. theses and 30 Ph.D. dissertations, mostly treating aspects of U.S. foreign relations and the American military experience. Current research embraces Anglo-American cultural interaction during World War II, the U.S. Army and the early Cold War, and a long-gestating biography of Henry A. Wallace.
Nathaniel D. Wood
Office: 3641 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9458
Email: ndwood@ku.edu
Assistant Professor (Ph.D. 2004, Indiana) 19th and 20th-Cent. Eastern Europe, Poland, modern Europe, urban and cultural history, the popular press.
Professor Wood’s current research investigates Eastern European history from an urban and popular perspective, in an effort to broaden our understanding of an area whose modern history has been largely viewed in national and political terms. His manuscript, “Becoming Metropolitan: Cracow’s Popular Press and the Representation of Modern Urban Life, 1900-1915”, explores press representations of the city, including attitudes toward urban expansion, electric streetcars, automobiles, airplanes, and big-city crime and filth. He has published articles on urban self-identification in East Central Europe (East Central Europe/ L'Europe du Centre-Est
33 2006), Cracow's popular press (The Austrian History Yearbook 33 2002), and theories of nationalism and gender (Historyka [ Poland ] 30, 2000).
Professor Wood teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in modern European and Eastern European history and currently serves on the executive committee of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at KU.
Donald E. Worster
Office: 3608 Wescoe Hall
Phones: 864-9474
or 864-7828
Email: dworster@ku.edu
Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Prof. of U.S. History, Environmental Studies, Dir. Graduate Program (Ph.D. Yale, 1971). Environmental history of North America and the world; U.S. West; U.S. cultural and social history.
Professor Worster came to KU in 1989 to occupy the Hall Chair in American History, thus returning to his undergraduate institution and his home region. His most recent book, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell, is published by Oxford in 2001. Earlier books include The Wealth of Nature, Under Western Skies, Rivers of Empire, Dust Bowl, and Nature's Economy (now available in 5 languages). He is former president of the American Society for Environmental History and a member of the Western History Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association. Over the past two decades he has lectured extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as throughout North America.
Professor Worster is primarily interested in the emerging field of environmental history-the changing perception of nature, the rise of conservation and environmentalism, but especially the ways that the natural world has impinged on human society and provided the context for human life over time. He also has strong interests in comparative history (esp. U.S. and Canada), in American regionalism (particularly the West), in agriculture, and in science and technology.