Faculty: Human Conflict, Peace, and Diplomacy Constellation

Coordinating Faculty:

Mark Grimsley, Peter Mansoor, Jennifer Siegel

Affiliated Faculty:

Mollie Cavender is a specialist in Russian history, with interests in 18th- and 19th-century Russian cultural, social and intellectual history. Most recently, she has published Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia (University of Delaware Press, 2007), and "'Kind Angel of the Soul and Heart': Domesticity and Family Correspondence among the Pre-Emancipation Russian Gentry" in The Russian Review (2002).  Her research explores the appropriation of violence to the modernizing state, specifically through an examination of serf rebellion and the ways in which violence was used to maintain order in Russia and throughout Europe. 

Allison Gilmore is a military historian with a research focus on U.S. military history. She is the author of You Can't Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Allied Psychological Warfare against the Imperial Japanese Army in the Southwest Pacific, a study of Allied propaganda operations designed to undermine Japanese military morale during the Pacific War. Dr. Gilmore is currently working on a book analyzing the roles and mission of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section, an intelligence agency comprised primarily of Japanese-American linguists who performed a multitude of intelligence functions during the war with Japan and the occupation period.  She teaches courses on American history, military history, and modern Japan.

Mark Grimsley is a military historian specializing in the problem of moral judgment in war; war, race, and culture; and the struggle to maintain or overthrow white supremacy in the American South.  His works include The Hard Hand of War:  Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (1995); Civilians in the Path of War (co-edited with Clifford J. Rogers (2002); and “Why the Civil Rights Movement Was an Insurgency,” Military History Quarterly (Spring 2010).  Prof. Grimsley also maintains an internationally read blog concerning military history and national security affairs.

Peter L. Hahn specializes in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since 1940.  He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. diplomacy since 1776.  He is author of Historical Dictionary of U.S.-Middle East Relations (2016);  Missions Accomplished?: The United States and Iraq since World War I (2012); Crisis and CrossfireThe United States and the Middle East since 1945 (2005); Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961 (2004); and The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (1991).

Jane Hathaway is a historian of the Ottoman Empire.  Her publications include The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800; Beshir Agha, Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Imperial Harem; A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen; and The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis.  She has edited four volumes:  Mutiny and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire; Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective; Al-Jabarti’s History of Egypt; and The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era: Essays in Honor of Caesar Farah.  Professor Hathaway teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire, Islamic society, and Jewish communities under Islamic rule.

Tryntje Helfferich studies central Europe during the period of the Thirty Years War, with a particular focus on the diplomatic, military, and religious history of the time.  She has published The Thirty Years War:  A Documentary History, and is currently working on a book on the German princess Amalia Elisabeth of Hesse-Cassel.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries specializes in 20th century African American history and has an expertise in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.  He is the author of Bloody Lowndes:  Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black BeltBloody Lowndes explores the remarkable story of the local people and SNCC organizers who ushered in the Black Power era by transforming rural Lowndes County, Alabama from a citadel of violent white supremacy into the center of southern black militancy by creating the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all-black, independent, political party that was also the original Black Panther Party.  Dr. Jeffries teaches a range of courses in African American and American history, including courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

Robin Judd teaches modern Jewish history, German history, and Women's history.  She is the author of Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933.  Her current project is Love at the Zero Hour: European War Brides, GI Husbands, and European Strategies for Reconstruction.

Ousman Kobo is Assistant Professor of African History, focusing on 20th Century West African religious and social movements. He teaches a range of courses in African History, including History of Modern Africa and History of Islam in Africa. He is currently developing a course on History of Health and Healing in Africa, US Foreign Policy toward Africa since 1945 and History of Christianity in Africa.   He is completing a book manuscript titled “Unveiling Modernity: Islamic Reform in Ghana and Burkina Faso, 1950-2000. ”  His recent publications include, “Africa & China: New Alliance for Mutual Development?” African Advocate, vol, 1 no. 1 (February 2008) and “The Development of Wahhabi Reforms in Ghana and Burkina Faso, 1960-1990: Elective Affinities between Western-Educated Muslims and Islamic Scholars,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 57 no. 3 (July 2009): 502-532 and “We are Citizens too: The Politics of Citizenship in Independent Ghana,” Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 48 no. 1 (March 2010): 67-94. 

Mark Kwasny is a military historian with a specialty in Colonial and Revolutionary American wars.  He teaches classes on modern warfare (the Vietnam War, Imperial Wars of the 19th-20th century), Early Modern English warfare (Tudor-Stuart England, 18th-19th century England), and the History of Human Conflict (the History of War).  He is the author of Washington’s Partisan War, 1775-1783.  He is currently working on a history of the battle of Monmouth Courthouse in June 1778.

Mitchell Lerner is a diplomatic historian with a particular focus on US-Korean relations, the Cold War, and American policies in the 1960s.  He is the author of The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy, and editor of Looking Back at LBJ, and is currently at work on a history of US-Korean relations in the Cold War.  He serves on the governing council of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the advisory board of the North Korea International Documentation Project.

Scott Levi is a historian of Central Asia whose research focuses on the region’s early modern, pre-colonial socio-economic history.  Professor Levi has authored The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900.  He has also edited India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500–1800 and co-edited Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Sources.  His current projects include a history of the Khanate of Khoqand (1799-1876) that seeks to connect the Khanate's rapid rise and fall to larger Eurasian and global historical patterns.

Peter Mansoor is the General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History. He specializes in American military history in the 20th and 21st centuries and in particular the U.S. military in World War II and the Iraq War.  He is the author of The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945, winner of the Society for Military History distinguished book award and the Army Historical Society distinguished book award; Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander’s War in Iraq, winner of the Ohioana Library Association book of the year award; and Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War, a finalist for the inaugural 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Military History Prize.

Geoffrey Parker is a Distinguished University Professor and Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History, as well as Associate of the Mershon Center and a Profesor Afiliado de la División de Historia del Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico City.  He specializes in the social, political, and military history of Europe between 1500 and 1650. Professor Parker has directed more than 30 doctoral dissertations to completion, and is the author or editor 34 books, including The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road. The logistics of Spanish victory and defeat in the Low Countries Wars, 1567-1659 (1972; revised edition 2004); The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (1988; third edition 1996), winner of the “best book prize” from the Society for the History of Technology; The Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998), winner of the Samuel E. Morison Prize from the Society of Military History; and  The Global Crisis: war, climate change and catastrophe in the 17th century (2013; updated edition, 2017), winner of the “Best Book Prize” from the Society of Military History and a British Academy Medal for a “landmark scholarly achievement.”  He also edited The Cambridge History of Warfare. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2012 he won the biennial Heineken Prize for History.

R. Joseph Parrott is an international and transnational historian, specializing in Cold War diplomacy and global political movements. His current work examines how Portuguese African liberation movements built solidarity networks to aid their revolutions in the United States and the impact of this movement on the foreign policy agenda of the Western left. His writings have appeared with Race and Class, History New Network, and OZY. He teaches classes on U.S. foreign diplomacy, the Cold War, and global politics. 

Randolph Roth is a professor of history and sociology who specializes in the history of the United States from colonial times to the present, with an emphasis on social and cultural history, the history of crime and violence, environmental history, the history of religion, quantitative methods, and social theory.  He is the author of American Homicide, an interregional, internationally comparative study of homicide in the United States from colonial times to the present.  This work argues that homicides rates in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world are determined by factors such as the feelings that people have toward their government, the degree to which they identify with members of their own communities, and the opportunities they have to earn respect without resorting to violence.  Professor Roth is currently completing a companion volume, Child Murder in America, a study of homicides of and by children from colonial times to the present.

Stephanie Smith’s work examines the relationships between the state, society, and culture during moments of revolutionary crisis in Mexico.  Central to her first book, Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy (The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), are questions of state formation, gender, and ethnicity during the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent few years. Smith’s second book, The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico (The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), incorporates both the study of history and art to analyze the complex interactions between Mexico’s postrevolutionary state and radical artists/intellectuals from Mexico, Europe, and the United States during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Smith has taught graduate seminars on the theories of the Mexican Revolution and Latin American Revolutions. Her undergraduate courses, Modern Latin America and the History of Mexico both incorporate an analysis of revolutions, and she plans on developing new courses, such as Film in Latin America.