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New Faculty Join History Department

August 22, 2016

New Faculty Join History Department

New Faculty

We're excited to announce three new faculty members who have joined our History Department:

Sara Butler

Sara Butler earned her honors B.A. in history from York University (1995), her M.A. from the University of Toronto (1996), and her Ph.D. from Dalhousie University (2001), where she worked with C.J. Neville. She spent twelve years at Loyola University New Orleans, attaining the rank of Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor and where she founded the Legal Studies interdisciplinary minor program and co-founded the History Pre-law major, before joining The Ohio State in autumn of 2016. 

Sara’s research publications lie in the social history of the law.  She has authored three books:  The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England (Brill, 2007), Divorce in Medieval England: From One to Two Persons at Law (Routledge, 2013), and Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (Routledge, 2015), and co-edited a volume of articles with Wendy J. Turner, entitled Law and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2014). She has also written on subjects such as suicide, abortion by assault, coverture, medical malpractice, and more recently on singlewomen. In 2007, Sara was awarded the Sutherland prize by the American Society for Legal History for her article, “Degrees of culpability: Suicide verdicts, mercy, and the jury in medieval England,” (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.2, 2006). Her most recent endeavor is an online blog entitled “A Legal History Miscellany,” co-written with Katherine Watson (Oxford Brooke’s University) and Krista J. Kesselring (Dalhousie University), with the goal of making England’s early legal history accessible to a broader audience (https://legalhistorymiscellany.com/). Sara’s teaching interests are in criminal law, medicine, Christianity, persecuted groups, and women.

Sara’s interests outside the classroom involve reading Scandinavian murder mysteries, running and walking, travel in Europe, and hanging out with her family and two dogs (named for Vikings: Ragnar and Floki). As a recently naturalized citizenship, she is very much looking forward to voting in her first American election.


Jennifer Eaglin is an assistant professor of environmental history/sustainability at The Ohio State University. Her work focuses on the history of alternative energy in Brazil with particular focus on ethanol development in the twentieth century. She completed her doctorate at Michigan State University and is currently transforming her dissertation, “Sweet Fuel: The Socio-Political Origins of the Ethanol Industry in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, 1933-1985” into a book manuscript. 
 
Eaglin received her Master’s at Johns Hopkins University-School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Latin American Studies and International Economics with a specialization in Emerging Markets and her Bachelor’s from Spelman College.

Bart Elmore earned his B.A. in history from Dartmouth College in 2004 and his M.A. (2007) and Ph.D. (2012) from the University of Virginia, specializing in global environmental history and American history. In 2012, he accepted the Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. He then served three years as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Alabama beginning in 2013 and helped start the department’s environmental history program before joining the OSU faculty in 2016.

In addition to serving in the history department, Bart is a member of the Sustainable and Resilient Economy Discovery Group at OSU. His first book, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) won the Axiom Business Book Award for best business commentary in 2015. The project, which examines the environmental impact of Coca-Cola’s worldwide operations, grew out of his dissertation at the University of Virginia, but the roots of Bart’s interest in Coca-Cola run deeper, as he grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, the heart of Coke country. Continuing his research at the nexus of business and global environmental history, Bart is completing a manuscript that details the international ecological history of the Monsanto Company. He currently edits the Histories of Capitalism and the Environment Series at West Virginia University Press.

In addition to these pursuits, Bart works to reach beyond the academy and has contributed to The Huffington Post, Salon, and other popular media outlets. When not at his desk or teaching, he spends his time paddling down streams, biking up whatever hills he can find, and trekking to nearby mountains. (Visit Bart Elmore's web site.)