Faculty
Greg Anderson: is a specialist in the histories of non-modern peoples and contemporary critical thought. His work uses history to press the case that humans have always lived in a “pluriverse” of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one. This work directly challenges conventional modern western ways of knowing and being, which consistently deny and suppress the realities lived by all non-modern peoples, past and present. His most recent book is The Realness of Things Past (Oxford University Press, 2018) and he plans to teach classes on “existential justice” issues in the future.
Nicholas Breyfogle: Breyfogle explores the history of social justice and water history, especially the ways in which access to sufficient quantities of useable water has long been deeply connected to questions of social hierarchy and social justice. He also teaches courses on the development of political and civil rights in Europe and Russia.
John Brooke: John Brooke’s current research and teaching is shaped by issues at the bearing importantly on contemporary social justice issues: rights and race in America and environmental history. His “American Political History to 1877” examines the politics of slavery, emancipation and Reconstruction, and he teaches in “Climate Change: Mechanisms, Impacts, and Mitigation,” a team-taught introduction.
Sara M. Butler: Sara M. Butler is King George III Professor in British History. Her research interests lay in the social justice of the law. She has written books on the subject of domestic violence, divorce, and forensic medicine in later medieval England. At Ohio State, she teaches a wide variety of courses relating to medieval and early modern society.
Joan Cashin: Joan E. Cashin has published on themes of race, gender, and related issues from the Revolution through the Civil War. In her courses, she addresses the complexities and ironies of these topics in specific contexts in the South, the North, the border regions. She assigns essays and monographs on these topics, as well as primary sources generated by women of all backgrounds, slaves, free blacks, and people of mixed race.
Kip Curtis: Curtis has been working at the intersection of social justice and ecology in his applied sustainability work since 2009 and he teaches two courses, US Environmental History and Global Environmental History, which wrestle with the social justice questions raised by environmental and environmentalist concerns. He currently leads a three-year research project launching and studying a sustainable urban food production system designed to capture food dollars to build wealth in low-opportunity, African American neighborhoods in Mansfield, Ohio.
Jessica Delgado: Jessica Delgado foregrounds social justice in her pedagogy and approach to teaching histories of coloniality, race, religion and gender in Latin America and the early modern world. She is also interested in the intersection of social justice and historical methodology and challenges students to think about the way sources and archives have been shaped by the kinds of inequalities and injustices that we seek to challenge today, and to imagine possibilities for liberatory practices in the ways we read, make, and “do” history.
Theodora Dragostinova: Theodora Dragostinova works on modern European and global history with a focus on nationalism, migration, communism, and the Cold War. In her research and teaching, she engages with the contemporary relevance of past events in current European and global contexts, from national(ist) heroes, commemorations and monuments to communist- and post-communist-era debates about social rights to the dilemmas of global mobility and migration in the past and today. She is also concerned how processes of state- and nation-building intersect with the rights of individuals and communities in a comparative perspective. She is considering developing a new class on Human Rights: A History for the new GE, which will address many of these questions.
Alcira Dueñas: Alcira Dueñas has developed extensive research on indigenous peoples of the Andes’s struggles for social justice in the context of Spanish colonialism in the eighteenth century, and during the nineteenth and through the twenty first century. The core themes of her approach include: indigenous critiques of Spanish colonialism, indigenous discourses of protest, Indigenous intellectuals, Indigenous litigation for the defense of communal lands, and their various roles as political and cultural intermediaries, translators, legal representatives of indigenous communities, and ambassadors of Andeans in Madrid. My courses History H 3106, H 2111, H 2110, and H 2125 focus on the social movements of indigenous peoples of the Andes and Mesoamerica during the colonial, national, and modern periods including the current phase of globalization.
Bart Elmore: Bart Elmore teaches classes on business and the environment, engaging with questions of environmental justice and business ethics. Elmore also explores the rise of the modern environmental movement and discusses how people in the past have mobilized to address pressing ecological problems. Course assignments include learning how to write op-eds, a skill students need as they look to shape public discourse beyond the academy.
J. Albert Harrill: J. Albert Harril, an expert on ancient slavery, studies the Greco-Roman environment of Christian origins in order to interpret the New Testament writings in their ancient context. His courses include the historical Jesus, Paul and his influence in early Christianity, and slavery in the ancient world.
Clay Howard: Clayton Howard is an associate professor of history. He researches and teaches the history of cities and suburbs in the United States. since 1945. His first book, The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California, uses the history of the San Francisco Bay Area to better understand the origins of recent debates over LGBT rights in the U.S. He is currently working on an urban history of gun control. the origins of recent debates over LGBT rights in the U.S. by looking at the history of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Jeffries is associate professor of history who specializes in contemporary African American history, with a particular emphasis on the civil rights and Black Power movements. He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt.
Robin Judd is a historian of Modern Jewish, gender, and migration history. Her current research focuses on marriage, migration, family reunification and national security, and she is especially interested in questions of community building and personal reconstruction in the aftermath of trauma. Her research and teaching interests are deeply concerned with the intersection of ethnicity, religion, and social justice
Mitch Lerner: Lerner is a historian of modern American politics and foreign policy, with a particular focus on the 1950s and 1960s. He works at the intersection of social justice, domestic ideology, and formal policymaking, and his modern American history courses emphasize the efforts to achieve social justice in many different realms of American society. His current research examines the relationship between the American wars of the 20th century and the African American civil rights movement.
Lucy Eldersveld Murphy: Professor Murphy teaches courses on Native American, U.S. women’s, immigration, antebellum American, and U.S. Midwestern and Western history. Her research focuses on intercultural, interracial, and gender relations on Midwestern American borderlands. Prof. Murphy helped to create Ohio State's American Indian Studies Program and the Ohio State Newark Earthworks Center and serves on their advisory councils.
Margaret Newell: Margaret’s recent research focuses on slavery and antislavery, the activism of people of color, and Native American history. Her courses address the history of European colonization in the Americas and its impact on Native American and Africans, capitalism, the and the battle over rights, citizenship and power at the heart of America’s experiment in democracy as well as other revolutions across the globe. Her courses include American Revolution and New Nation, Colonialism at the Movies: American History and Film, Slavery and Capitalism, Native American History from 1200 to Removal, and How to Stage a Revolution: Revolutions in Comparative Perspective, and the study abroad program Hotspots of the Global Early Modern World: Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Joe Parrott: Joe Parrott is an assistant professor of history at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on international, transnational, and American history, with an emphasis in the intersection of foreign policy, race, and domestic politics. He is currently revising a manuscript that considers Portuguese decolonization in Africa as a noteworthy component in transforming western engagement with the global south. It cuts across diplomatic, activist, and socio-political history to illuminate how questions of race and empire drove the policy choices of U.S. leaders, African nationalists, and Portuguese officials, as well as the agenda of a wider western Left. Joe is also working on an edited volume that examines the radical Third World ideology of Tricontinentalism and a second book-length project on transnational solidarity with the minority governments of southern Africa.
Randolph Roth: Professor Roth studies the history of violent crime and violent death in the United States. His course on the Criminal Justice History of the United States examines the history of policing, prisons, violence, drugs, criminal enterprise, white collar crime, sex trafficking, and prostitution—all with an eye to the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. He is the author of American Homicide, a comparative, interregional history of homicide among adults from colonial times to the present. He is now at work on a companion volume, Child Murder in America, a history of homicides of and by children from colonial times to the present.
Stephanie Smith: Through her analysis of gender, ethnicity, and culture, Prof. Smith’s research on Mexico and the Mexican Revolution focuses on issues of social justice, especially concerning the ways in which people demand change. Her courses, the History of Mexico and the History of Latin America Through Film take a similar approach to expand an understanding of social justice history through the study of the revolutionary process and social movements throughout Latin America.
Mytheli Sreenivas: Mytheli Sreenivas is a historian of modern South Asia with a focus on women’s, gender and sexuality history. Her current research focuses on reproductive politics and justice, and her teaching includes courses on the history of feminist thought and postcolonial/decolonial feminisms. She teaches in the departments of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies.
Birgitte Søland: Birgitte Søland teaches European women's and gender history, and the history of children and childhood in the Western world. Her research interests include the history of women, youth, and children, with special emphasis on children's rights and children's welfare.
David Steigerwald: David Steigerwald writes and teaches on Twentieth Century U.S. History. His primary focus in on the U.S. from WWII to 1980. All of his courses center on the many American inequalities. History 3017, The Sixties, particularly concentrates on the high Civil Rights movement, the emergence of youth activism in the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, and the proliferation of liberation movements.
Sarah Van Beurden: Sarah Van Beurden is an associate professor in the Department of History and the Department of African American and African Studies. She is a historian of colonial and postcolonial history with a focus on central Africa and Belgian colonialism. She writes and teaches on debates about the restitution of colonial collections, historical and contemporary debates about decolonization, and the history of violence and exploitation of central Africa.