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Research

A major in history is intellectually rewarding.

Research stimulates cultural awareness and enlarges and refines personal perceptions of the cultural conditions of human existence.

Departmental offerings are as varied as the diverse interests of history faculty members and include nearly all major areas and periods of historical study. Specialists in political, social, economic, intellectual, religious, constitutional, military, and legal history offer courses in these fields.

Our students and faculty spend countless hours delving into their research topics to produce publications and research data.

Faculty Publications and Recognition

2011-2017

Elena Albarrán, "The Three Faces of the Family, 1870-present," Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History [online], ed. William H. Beezley, September 2015, http://latinamericanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-22

Elena Albarrán, "Los niños colaboradores de la revista Pulgarcito y la construcción de la infancia, México 1925-1932" ("Child Contributors to Pulgarcito Magazine and the Construction of Childhood, Mexico 1925-1932"), Iberoamericana 15:60, 2015.

Elena Albarrán, "El niño proletario: Jesús Sansón Flores and the New Revolutionary Redeemer, 1935-1938" in Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme, and Power, eds. Stephen Neufeld and Michael Matthews, University of Arizona Press, 2015.

Elena Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2014.  Winner of the 2016 Maria Elena Martinez book award of the Conference on Latin American History.

Elena Albarrán, contributor and co-editor, with Susana Sosenski, Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina: entre prácticas y representaciones (New Approaches to the History of Childhood in Latin America: Between Practice and Representations), Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012.

Elena Albarrán, "Mexico on the Move: A Return from Timelessness," Smithsonian Institution, Archives of America Art Blog, December 2012.

Elena Albarrán, "En busca de la voz de los herederos de la Revolución. Un análisis de los documentos producidos por los niños, 1921-1940," Relaciones, estudios de historia y sociedad.  Special issue:  Infancia: Un archipiélago por explorar, Vol. XXXIII, n. 132 (Fall 2012).

Elena Albarrán, "A Century of Childhood: Growing up in Twentieth-Century Mexico," in William H. Beezley, ed., A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Sheldon Anderson, The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh: The Greatest Female Athlete of Her Time, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

Sheldon Anderson, The Politics and Culture of Modern Sports, Lexington Books, 2015.

Sheldon Anderson, "Soccer and the Failure of East German Sports Policy," Soccer and Society 12, no. 5, September 2011.

Renée Baernstein, "The Nuns of Early Modern Italy: New Directions in Anglophone Scholarship" in La storia di genere in Italia in etá moderna: Un confronto tra storiche nordamericane e italiane, Elena Brambilla and Anne Jacobson Schutte, ed., Viella, 2014.

Renée Baernstein, Miami University College of Arts and Science 2014 Distinguished Educator.

Renée Baernstein, Ohio Academy of History Distinguished Teaching Award for 2013.

Renée Baernstein, "'In My Own Hand:' Costanza Colonna and the Art of the Letter in Sixteenth-century Italy," Renaissance Quarterly 6 n. 1, 2013.

Renée Baernstein, "Regional Intermarriage Among the Italian Nobility in the Sixteenth Century" in Marriage in Premodern Europe: Italy and Beyond, Jacqueline Murray, ed., Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012.

Wietse de Boer, co-editor, with Giuseppe Marcocci, Aliocha Maldavsky and Ilaria Pavan, Space and Conversion in Global Perspective, Intersections 35, Brill, 2014.

Wietse de Boer, "The Counter-Reformation of the Senses," Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Mary Laven, Alexandra Bamji, and Geert Janssen, Ashgate, 2013.

Wietse de Boer, contributor and co-editor, with Christine Göttler, Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, Brill, 2013.

Wietse de Boer, "Trent, Saints, and Images: A Prehistory" in Trent and Beyond: The Council, Other Powers, Other Cultures, ed. Michela Catto and Adriano Prosperi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 121-41.

Wietse de Boer,"Reformations and Counter-Reformations: The Contested Terms of Reformation History" in Martin Luther: A Christian between Reforms and Modernity (1517-2017), ed. Alberto Melloni. 3 vols. (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 2017), vol. 1, 43-58.  Also appeared in German (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 2017) and Italian (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017).

Wietse de Boer, "Figments of the Imagination: Medical and Moral Discourses on Love in the Counter-Reformation" in Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700, ed. Walter S. Melion, Joanna Woodall, and Michael Zell (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2017), 28-56.

Wietse de Boer, "Die Disziplinierung der Sinne. Innenraum und Religion in Italien zur Zeit der Gegenreformation" Randgänge der Mediävistik, 6 (2016), 9-49

Wietse de Boer, "The Early Jesuits and the Catholic Debate about Sacred Images" in De Boer, Enenkel, and Melion, Jesuit Image Theory, 53-73.

Tammy L. Brown, City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York, University Press of Mississippi, 2015.

Nishani Frazier, "A MacDonald's That Reflects the Soul of a People: Hough Area Development Corporation and Community Development in Cleveland," The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America, Lara Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, eds., University of Rochester Press, 2012.

Nishani Frazier, Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rie of Black Power Populism, University of Arkansas Press, 2017.

Charlotte Newman Goldy, contributor and editor, with Amy Livingstone, Writing Medieval Women's Lives, The New Middle Ages Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Charlotte Newman Goldy, "Teaching Jewish and Christian Daily Interaction in Medieval England" in Miramne Ara Krummel and Tison Pugh (eds.), Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Matthew Gordon, President, Middle East Medievalists, 2013-15.

Matthew Gordon, "Ahmad ibn Tulun and the Politics of Deference" in Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone, ed. Behnam Sadeghi et al., Brill Publishing, 2015.

Matthew Gordon, "Ibn Tulun, al-Qata'i and the Legacy of Samarra" in Hundert Jahre Grabungen in Samarra (Beitrage zur Islamischen Kunst und Archaologie, Bd. 4), ed Julia Gonnella, Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2014.

Matthew Gordon, The Works of Ibn Wādih al-Ya’qūbī: An English Translation, contributor and editor with Chase F. Robinson, Everett K. Rowson and Michael Fishbein, Brill, 2018.

Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America, University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Kimberly A. Hamlin, "'The Case of a Bearded Woman': Hypertrichosis and the Construction of Gender in the Age of Darwin," American Quarterly 63, December 2011. Winner of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association's Emerging Scholar Award for 2012. Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, History of Science Society, November 2014.

Kimberly A. Hamlin, Public Scholar Award, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2017-18, for work on biography of suffragist Helen Hamilton Gardener.

Kimberly A. Hamlin, 2017 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics, from the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, Iowa State University, for her book project, "Woman Citizen: Helen Hamilton Gardener and Women's Suffrage in America."

Erik Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender and German Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Martin P. Johnson, Writing the Gettysburg Address, University Press of Kansas, 2013.

Wenxi Liu, "Laws of Ethelbert," Journal of Ancient Civilizations, Spring 2012.

Wenxi Liu, 2017 Southwestern Higher Council for Higher Education (SOCHE) Faculty Excellence Award.

Amanda Kay McVety, "Fear, Want, and the Internationalism of the Early Cold War," The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle, Routledge, 2014.

Amanda Kay McVety, Truman-Kauffman Research Fellow, Truman Presidential Library, 2013-14.

Amanda Kay McVety, Enlightened Aid: U.S. Development as Foreign Policy in Ethiopia, Oxford University Press, 2012.

Stephen M. Norris, Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism, Indiana University Press, 2012.

Stephen M. Norris, contributor and editor, Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, with Willard Sunderland, Indiana University Press, 2012.

Stephen M. Norris, "The Sharp Weapon of Soviet Laughter: Boris Efimov and Visual Humor," Russian Literature 74/1-2, 2013.

Stephen M. Norris, "Pliuvium's Unholy Trinity: Russian Nationhood, Anti-Semitism, and the Public Sphere after 1905," Experiment 19, 2013.

Stephen M. Norris, "Patriot Games: The Ninth Company and Russian Convergent Cultures after Communism," Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian, and Central European New Media 8, 2012.

Stephen M. Norris, "Landscapes of Loss: The Great Patriotic War in Central Asian Cinema" in Michael Rouland and Gulnara Abikeyeva, eds., Central Asian Cinema: Rewriting Cultural Histories, I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Stephen M. Norris, "A Kiss for the KGB: Putin as Cinematic Hero" in Birgit Beumers, ed., Russia's New fin de siècle: Contemporary Culture Between Past and Present, Intellect Books, 2013.

Stephen M. Norris, "Blessed Films: The Russian Orthodox Church and Patriotic Culture in the 2000s" in Christian Schmitt and Liliya Berezhnaya, eds., Iconic Turns: Religion and Nation in East European Films Since 1989, Brill, 2013.

Yihong Pan, "Locating Advantages: The Survival of the Tuyuhun State on the Edge (300-580s)," T'oung Pao, Volume 99, issue 4-5, 2013.

Yihong Pan, "Integration of the Northern Ethnic Frontiers in Tang China," The Chinese Historical Review 19:1, May 2012.

Yihong Pan, "Crafting the 'New Woman' in China's left-wing cinema of the 1930s: Sun Yu's three films," Frontiers of History in China, Volume 6, Number 2, June 2011.

Andrew Offenburger, "Cultural Imperialism and the Romanticized Frontier: From South Africa and Great Britain to New Mexico's Mesilla Valley," Amerikastudien / American Studies 59, no. 4, 2014.

Daniel Prior, The Sabdan Baatir Codex: Epic and the Writing of Northern Kirghiz History, Edition, Translation and Interpretations, with a Facsimile of the Unique Manuscript, Brill's Inner Asian Library 28, Brill 2012.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, "Early National Bro Culture in Daniel Parker's War Department," Common-place: the journal of early American life 17, no. 2, Winter 2017.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, "The World's Best Carpets: Erastus Bigelow and the Financing of Antebellum Innovation," Technology & Culture 59, no. 1, January 2018.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Robert L. Middlekauff Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2017-18.

Marsha Robinson, "The Unfinished Project of J.J. Bachofen and the Gender Wars on the Home Front," Swiss American Historical Review, February 2015.

Marguerite S. Shaffer, contributor and editor with Phoebe S. K. Young, Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Marguerite S. Shaffer, "A Transnational Wildlife Drama: Dian Fossey, Popular Environmentalism, and the Origins of Gorilla Tourism," American Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2, June 2015.

Helen Sheumaker, "True Collector: The Collecting Narratives of Alice Van Leer Carrick," Journal of the History of Collections, March 2012.

Helen Sheumaker, "'Downhill from There': Drunk History in the Classroom," Perspectives on History, 53:7, October 2015.

Helen Sheumaker, Artifacts from Modern America, Greenwood, 2017.

Susan V. Spellman, "Trust Brokers: Traveling Grocery Salesmen and Confidence in Nineteenth-Century Trade," Enterprise & Society, June 2012.

Susan V. Spellman, Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business, Oxford University Press, 2016.

Susan V. Spellman, "Where are the Managers? Reevaluating Large-Scale US Retail Systems and their Coordinators," History of Retailing and Consumption, November 2017.

Recent Student Research

Honors Students' Theses

2021

  • "Before the Numbers Disappeared: Media and Perception of the 1937 Soviet Census" Jessica Baloun, ( Stephen Norris, advisor)
  • "That's a Man's Job!: Soviet and American Airwomen at War, Taylor Bryan, (Stephen Norris, advisor)
  • "Biopolitics of AIDs: Framing Disease; Challenging Homosexual Marielito's Relationship to the State through United States Immigration Law, 1980-1990", Lyndsey Case, (Jose Amador, advisor)
  • "The Gendered Experience of French Women in Allied Media", Gillian Davis, (Erik Jensen, advisor)
  • "Sex, Comstock, and Subervsion: Obscenity as a Concept and Methods of Subversion, 1873-1965", Alex Gregory, (Kimberly Hamlin, advisor)
  • "Untitled", Peyton Rayburn, (Cameron Shriver, advisor)
  • "The Trial and the Temple: How Legal and Buddhist Perspectives Have Shaped the Commemoration of the Cambodian Genocide", Kari Savoie, (Erik Jensen, advisor)
  • "The Trial and the Temple: How Legal and Buddhist Perspectives Have Shaped the Commemoration of the Cambodian Genocide", Matthew Stork, (Amanda McVety, advisor)
  • "A Witch, a Sorceresse, an enemy to Parliament': Witchcraft Accusations and Factionalism is Early Modern England", Jaycee Streeter, (Renee Baernstein, advisor)
  • "People, Taxes and the Land: the Fiscal Administration of Arab-Islamic Egypt (7th-10th century)", Junyu Sun, (Matthew Gordon, advisor)
  • "The White Slave Trade and the Yellow Peril: Anti-Chinese Rhetoric and Women’s Moral Authority", Hannah Zmuda, (Kimberly Hamlin)

2020

  • "Silence and Complicity in an African Genocide: Examining the British Response to the Herero Genocide in German Southwest Africa."Justin Macke (Sheldon Anderson, advisor)
  • “Expelling Jesus: Catholic Reactions to the Ban on School Prayer." Bridget Dickens (Steve Conn, advisor)
  • "Power Foods: The Struggle over Ethnic Food Identity in America." Bon écrit! Spencer Green (Andew Offenburger, advisor)
  • “International Law Before International Law: The Development of a Legal Mindset"Noah Klinsky(Wietse deBoer, advisor)
  • "Skin in the Game: The Social and Economic Pressures of Prostitution in the Early American Republic."Karli Schivitz (Lindsay Schakenbach Regele & Kimberly Hamlin, advisors)
  • "Unheralded Champions: The Influence of the Suffrage Movement on First Ladies of the United States, 1889-1933" Meghan Murphy (Kimberly Hamlin, advisor)
  • "From Opium to Opioid: How Medicine’s Paramount Drug Spiraled Out of Control" Benjamil Kallen (Nishani Frazier, advisor)
  • "It's a Revolution, Dammit! The Revolutionary Qualities of Broadway's 'Hair' and '1776.'"Samuel Purkiss, (Nishani Frazier, advisor)
  • "A Revolution of Romance: How Romantic Love Influenced Patriotic Rhetoric and Early Identity in the American Revolution." , (Lindsay Schakenbach Regele & Kimberly Hamlin, advisors)
  • "Humanizing a Massacre: Diversity of the Victims of Kamianets-Podolsky, 1941." Jonathan Maxwell, (Francesca Silano, advisor)
  • "Polite Propaganda: Narratives of Progress and Stagnation in Brezhnev-Era Soft Power." Avery Comar, (Steve Norris, advisor)

Graduate Student Theses

2021

  • William Elgin, "The Influence of Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's Itinerario", 2021 (Wietse de Boer, advisor)
  • Nathaniel Hieber, "Changes on the Horizon: Evolution of Transportation Methods and Infrastructure in the American Southwest, 1870-1920." 2021 (Andrew Offenbruger, advisor)
  • Bre Madsen, "Universal Education and the Simultaneous Expansion of the Carceral State: The Institutionalization of Deaf African Americans as a Precursor to the School-to-Prision Pipeline", 2021 (Kimberly Hamlin, advisor)

2020

  • Louis Grun, "The Legacy of Quakerspeisung”, 2020 (Erik Jensen, advisor)
  • Patrick Mwanjawala, "Malawi's Invented Tradition: Kamuzu Banda and the Marginalization of Matricidal Power, 1964-1994", 2020 (Nishani Frazier, advisor)
  • Kristin Osborne, “The Last Abbey: Crossraguel Abbey and the Scottish Reformation”, 2020 (Renee Baernstein, advisor)
  • Zinaida Osipova, “Engineering a Soviet Life: The Continuity of Gustave Trinker’s Written and Material Practices Across 1917”, 2020 (Stephen Norris, advisor)
  • Min A. Park, “The United States’ Food Aid toward South Korea and the Changes of Korean Dietary Culture in the 1960s-1970s”, 2020 (Amanda McVety, advisor)
  • Danialle Stebbins, “Championing Labor: Labor Diplomacy, The AFL-CIO, and Polish Solidarity”, 2020 (Dr. Sheldon Anderson)
  • Ben Susman, “Washington Gladden’s Social Gospel and Public Health in Columbus, 1882-1908, 2020 (Steve Conn, advisor)
  • Zachary Logsdon, “Subjects into Citizens: Puerto Rican Power and the Territorial Government, 1898-1923”, 2020 (Amanda McVety, advisor)

Department of History

254 Upham Hall
100 Bishop Circle
Oxford, OH 45056