New Staff Members
Fiscal Officer
Sarah is the department’s Fiscal Officer – a new staff role within the department. In addition to overseeing the Fiscal Associates and ensuring that the fiscal side of the department is running smoothly, she also reconciles the general ledger, assists with budgets, and initiates fund transfers. That’s a lot of numbers work for someone with two foreign language degrees! Prior to joining the History Department, Sarah was a Fiscal Associate with the English Department for three years and an Office Associate with OSU Extension: Family and Consumer Sciences for a year and a half. She lives in Westerville with an enormous fluffy dog, two goofy cats, and a stubborn goldfish.
Events Program Coordinator
Amanda is occupying a staff position that is brand new for the department - Events Program Coordinator. She plans and runs all major department events and is the go-to person for creating promotional flyers to advertise courses and events. As a studio art major, former embroidery Etsy shop owner, and previous “resident balloon expert” of a local gift and party store, Amanda loves adding fun and appealing aesthetics to any project she touches. She is mother to her beloved, one-eyed orange cat named Edie, and in her spare time she loves discovering hidden gems while thrifting and antiquing.
Academic Program Coordinator
As the Academic Program Coordinator, Jen handles scheduling and curriculum issues for the department. Her favorite part of the job is helping faculty navigate the curricular approval process, because she likes being able to transform a difficult task into something more manageable and rewarding. Jen first came to OSU to earn a PhD in the history of art, where she wrote a dissertation on public sculpture in late 19th-century Paris. Since then, she has taught art history, worked as a barista at a Fair Trade coffee shop, and managed a local gift shop (where she first met her current coworker, Amanda!). She lives near campus with her husband and their dog, Lulu.
Fiscal Associate
Melissa, who goes by Missie, is one of the Fiscal Associates on the department's fully new fiscal team. Missie handles travel for all faculty and guests of the department, and files expense reports for reimbursement among other responsibilities. Her financial background is in the automotive industry, but she also has an artistic side that she expresses through her photography business. Missie commutes to Columbus campus every week from her home in Northeast Ohio where she lives with her husband, her 17 and 9 year old daughters, and her crippling popcorn addiction.
Office Administrative Associate
Alyssa is currently the Office Administrative Associate for the department, which means she is assistant to the chair and oversees many different areas. Before coming to the department, Alyssa worked at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, was shopkeeper at a small bakery, and catered thousands of events with her grandma. She has a bachelor's and master's degree in Atmospheric Sciences - her and her husband even got married next to Mirror Lake in the middle of a snow squall. Outside of work, she plays video games and is mother to Louise, her rambunctious yet loving tabby cat.
Fiscal Associate
Brian is currently employed as one of the Fiscal Associates for the department, and he handles hiring outside vendors for the faculty via ICA’s, grad student travel, helping faculty and staff procure computer equipment with ASC, as well as removing older equipment, and handling P-Cards for the various needs of the faculty and department. After being employed with the Superior Court in New Jersey for 15 years as a mediator and probation officer he recently moved to the Columbus area so his children, Zoe age 10 and Michael age 7, could be closer to their cousins and other family members.
Academic Advisor
Kari has recently joined the department as the new Academic Advisor. She graduated from The Ohio State University with a bachelor's in psychology before completing her master's in clinical psychology at Loyola University Maryland. After earning her degree and discovering her love for higher education, she worked for several years in student services at Ohio State Lima and Wright State University. When Kari isn’t meeting with students, she is spending quality time with her five-pound Chihuahua, Mia, re-exploring Columbus after ten years away, or dreaming up new adventures to add to that ever-growing travel bucket list.
New Faculty
Associate Professor
Carter V. Findley Professor
of Ottoman and Turkish History
Yiğit Akın grew up in Izmir, Turkey, and studied mechanical engineering at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. After seeing the light early on, he happily converted to the humanities. As a master’s student at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, he explored sports and physical education in early republican Turkey. Akın’s first book, Gürbüz ve Yavuz Evlatlar: Erken Cumhuriyet’te Beden Terbiyesi ve Spor (Robust and Vigorous Children: Physical Education and Sports in Early Republican Turkey) (İletişim Yayınları, 2004), offers a new framework for thinking about the relationship between sports and physical education, governmentality, public health, and nationalism in early republican Turkey.
In his second book, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford, 2018), Akın focuses on the Ottoman society’s catastrophic experience of the First World War and how this massive global conflict impacted the lives of millions of ordinary Ottomans.
Akın is currently working on two projects, the first one on the final years of the Ottoman Empire in an international context, tentatively titled, The End of the Ottomans: A Global History, and the second one on the social and cultural history of “death” in the late Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey.
Before joining the faculty at Ohio State, Akın taught at the College of Charleston and Tulane University, where he received the university’s highest teaching award.
Apart from history, Akın likes to spend time with his family, travel, read novels, and listen to classical music. He continues to suffer from watching his miserable fourth division soccer team, Karşıyaka- KSK.
Assistant Professor
Contemporary African American History and Black Leadership
DeAnza Avonna Cook is a provost postdoctoral fellow and incoming Assistant Professor of Contemporary African American History and Black Leadership at The Ohio State University. Her research specializes in race, social reform, and American law enforcement during and after Civil Rights Movement struggles in the 1960s. She loves studying histories of social justice and social struggle and enjoys teaching true stories about power and politics; policing and punishment; and freedom and liberation. Cook’s writing on criminalization and law enforcement in America’s past and present is featured in the Metropole, Black Perspectives, and Annual Review of Criminology.
Cook was born in Jacksonville, Florida, but she spent most of her childhood in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountain region of small-town Virginia. She graduated with a BA in history in 2017 from the University of Virginia where she studied the intellectual history of broken windows policing in America. Thereafter, she earned a MA and PhD in history from Harvard University in 2019 and 2023 respectively. Cook’s dissertation, "Soul Patrols: Race, Representation, and the Limits of Police Reform in America, 1962-2022," examined the evolution of police reform, police-community partnerships, and experimental crime control in Boston and beyond at the dawn of the 21st century. Her current project builds upon her doctoral research to explore how evolving ideas and newfound identities in the American law enforcement profession ultimately revolutionized urban police business at the neighborhood and national level throughout the post-Civil Rights era.
Before joining the faculty at The Ohio State University, Cook taught a Race, Civil Rights, and Constitutional Policing seminar for law enforcement officers in Virginia, as well as an African American history course for incarcerated juvenile and adult students in Massachusetts. She currently volunteers with Boston-based organizers at the Democracy Behind Bars Coalition to advance Jail-Based Voting Rights and Felon Re-enfranchisement and to advocate for CORI reforms and Reentry resources for people most directly affected by policing and incarceration. Above all, Cook is passionate about learning Black history in addition to educating and empowering people inside and outside of prison walls. She adores cross-country road trips and returning to Boston and down South to visit family and friends, and she is a beloved cat mommy to Nala and Lillie.
Assistant Professor
Caribbean History
Ryan Fontanilla is a historian of water politics, environmental crisis, and subaltern warfare in the Anglo-Atlantic world, with a particular focus on colonial Jamaica. He joined The Ohio State University in 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Caribbean History. Fontanilla teaches courses on Caribbean history, the history of African diasporic and African American politics, culture, and environmental-intellectual thought in the African Atlantic world, and racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition.
His first book, based on his dissertation manuscript, “Waters of Liberation: An Environmental History of Nineteenth-Century Jamaica,” explores the inter-generational freedom struggles of Afro-Jamaicans for freshwater and food sovereignty. It describes how white elites in Jamaica eagerly exploited the Emancipation of 1838 to implement novel forms of water enclosure and debt bondage among the Black population. It also shows how free Afro-Jamaican men and women drew upon African traditions of environmental sustainability, mutual aid, and armed insurrection to claim and defend their customary rights and rites to free water. Reckoning with the watery coordinates of environmental racism in former slave societies like Jamaica reveals clues about how the poor, vulnerable Black masses of the Caribbean today have adapted, and may yet adapt, to global climate change. Fontanilla’s work has appeared in the Boston Review and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.
In a past life, Fontanilla sailed the Caribbean as a member of the U.S. Coast Guard. His next book will interrogate the historical origins of this military service as the premier slavehunting wing of antebellum U.S. military power on the high seas.
Fontanilla received his bachelor’s from George Mason University, his master’s from George Washington University, and his doctorate from Harvard University.
Assistant Professor
African American History
María Esther Hammack is a Mexican scholar born and raised in the City of Los Mochis, in the State of Sinaloa, in northern Mexico. She attended East Carolina University and become an #ECUPirate in 2008 completing both a BA in history in 2012 and a MA in Atlantic world history in 2015. In May 2021 she obtained a doctorate in American history at the University of Texas at Austin where she worked under the guidance of Dr. Daina Ramey Berry. Hammack also received two certified teaching portfolios in African & African Diaspora Studies and in Women and Gender Studies from UT Austin. Hammack comes to The Ohio State University after finishing a two-year Barra Postdoctoral Fellowship in the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her work, broadly conceived, aims to bridge the histories of Black liberation that shaped the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. The goal is to help visibilize the actors who propelled the processes of freedom in North America and to situate them in tandem with those who spearheaded similar processes that delivered abolition beyond the continent. Her first book, Channels of Liberation: Freedom Fighters in the Age of Abolition, soon to be under contract with Penn Press, reexamines the Underground Railroad to reconsider and widen the actors, timelines, and geographies of Black Liberation in North America through the experiences of Black women, men and children who left the United States to claim freedom in Mexican spaces.
To The Ohio State University, Hammack brings a transnational research, teaching, and mentoring agenda engendered through her own lived experiences as a woman of color, as a border crosser, and as an immigrant in the United States. This background buttresses her intentionality to help create spaces that are diverse, inclusive, and that challenge anti-Blackness; commitments she finds essential not only for the work she undertakes, inside and outside of the classroom, but largely for the future of higher education. She is excited to forge initiatives to help strengthen the pipeline of first-generation students and to support many future historians through our Department of History. She furthermore looks forward to guiding scholars-in-the-making across departments where she hopes to serve as an affiliate faculty including the Department of Latinx Studies and the Department of African American and African Studies, among others.
Assistant Professor
Dr. Carl F. Asseff Asst. Prof. in Anthropology and the History of Medicine
Erin V. Moore joined Ohio State as the Dr. Carl F. Asseff Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology and the History of Medicine in July 2020, at the height of the pandemic. Moore’s research has focused on HIV/AIDS and women’s health in central Uganda, where she has been conducting fieldwork and studying Luganda, one of Uganda’s 43 recognized languages, since 2009. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Moore studied the historical emergence of ‘adolescence,’ a life-stage category new to the twentieth century that we now take for granted. Her dissertation, also undertaken at the University of Chicago, explored how western ideas about intervening in the lives of adolescent girls became a billion-dollar movement supported by celebrities, development economists, journalists, UN agencies, and multinational NGOs, and how that movement was implemented in East Africa. Moore is currently working on a book manuscript based on this research, titled Investing in Girls: Sex, Money, and the Deceit of Development in Uganda. She has also written about the role of translation in transnational feminism, Ugandan legislation banning miniskirts, traditional healers’ approach to sexual health, changing marriage practices among middle class Ugandan youth, and how World Bank policies shaped Ugandans’ vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. Inspired by African HIV-treatment activism, Moore’s future work will follow patient advocates in the global fight for insulin affordability. Moore lives in Columbus with her family, where she is learning to garden.
Assistant Professor
Health Services Management and Policy
Marian Moser Jones is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University in the College of Public Health, Division of Health Services Management and Policy, and the History Department. She has previously taught at the University of Maryland School of Public Health (2011-21) and at Virginia Commonwealth University (2008-10). Jones teaches courses on the history of public health, nursing, and medicine; health systems and policy; and maternal and child health. She is the author of The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Johns Hopkins, 2012), as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles on the history and sociopolitical context of nursing, maternal and child health, homelessness, and other topics. Currently, Jones is working as the principal investigator of a collaborative project, At The Crossroads of Pandemic Inequity and the Backlash against Public Health: Lessons from the Front Lines, which involves conducting in-depth oral histories with current and former health officials about the pandemic response and their experiences of public hostility and support, as well as how these experiences intersected with health equity efforts. She has also conducted a study with nurses who served in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. When these projects are complete, she will return to complete a book, Finding New Fronts, on American nurses who served in World War I and the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, and who advanced modern public health nursing in the United States. Jones was a 2010-2011 De Witt Stetten postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, received her PhD and MPH degrees in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University, and received her AB from Harvard College. Jones was born in St. Louis, Missouri, lived in New York City, Virginia, and Maryland, and then “returned” to Ohio, where four previous generations of her family lived.
Professor, Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair
in National Security Studies
Christopher McKnight Nichols joined the department in summer 2022 as Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow (“Woody”) Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Nichols is an award-winning teacher as well as scholar. He was Oregon State University’s Honors College Professor of the Year in 2014, where he taught for the previous ten years and was Director of the Center for the Humanities for over five years. He is the author or editor of six books and is a frequent public commentator on the historical dimensions of U.S. foreign policy and politics. He completed his MA and PhD (May 2008) at the University of Virginia and held postdoctoral positions at UVA and at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nichols’s first major publication as an Ohio State faculty member appeared in late 2022, a co-edited and co-authored volume, with University of East Anglia Professor David Milne, entitled Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, published by Columbia University Press. The book was recently awarded the 2023 International Studies Association’s Joseph Fletcher Prize for Best Edited Book in Historical International Relations. Nichols is best-known for his book Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (Harvard University Press, 2011, 2015) and his work on isolationism, internationalism, and globalization in U.S. history. He is at work on a book on the early Cold War using the election of 1952 as a lens through which to view the transformation of U.S. foreign policy, national security, and related domestic politics.
Nichols is a founding editorial board member of The Washington Post‘s “Made by History” section, serves on a number of boards and in many roles for an array of professional organizations, and is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Since Fall 2022, Nichols has put his skills in public history and public program development to work in leading the charge in ramping up early planning for Ohio State’s campus, community, and statewide programming for the United States’ semiquincentennial (250th anniversary). Stay tuned for the announcements about the exciting and high-impact programs, events, K-12 initiatives, community outreach and engagement activities to come. As he likes to say, “history matters!” The series of programming for the 250th national anniversary provides a great opportunity to showcase Ohio State’s excellence, demonstrating how compelling history can also be relevant history--helping to reveal how the past has shaped the present, providing new ways of understanding our world today and, hopefully, helping Ohioans and those around the U.S. to shape a better future.
Assistant Professor
Seth Andre Myers Chair in Global Military History
Lydia Walker is a historian of twentieth-century global decolonization. She has broad interests in the international history of South Asia, Southern Africa, military intervention, and insurgent resistance. Her research focuses on nationalist insurgent movements that did not achieve statehood during decolonization and how they sought out alternative sources of international recognition. Her monograph, States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) focuses on the limits placed upon national liberation movements within a state-centric international system.
Walker has received fellowships and support from communities at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Institute for History at Leiden University in The Netherlands, New York University’s Center for the U.S. and the Cold War, the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, and the Social Science Research Council, among others.
In the Ohio State University History Department, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses focused on imperial conquest, decolonization, and nationalist movements in global and military history. She also currently serves as Department Placement Officer. Outside the department, Walker is a Faculty Fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security and a member of the Provost’s Early Career Scholars Program, an Office of Academic Affairs initiative that aims to attract and retain early-career faculty who have demonstrated exceptional promise.
Before becoming a professional historian, Walker danced with Pennsylvania Ballet II in Philadelphia and toured as a member of the corps de ballet with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, then housed at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. She is a founder of Delhi Dance Theater, a contemporary dance company in New Delhi and trained at the School of American Ballet. She holds a BA in history from Columbia University’s School of General Studies. She received an MA and PhD in history from Harvard.
As a historian with a strong interest in contemporary international dynamics, Walker is thrilled to join Ohio State’s History Department, with its historic strengths in military and diplomatic history, growing energies in global and international history, and ongoing commitment to public engagement.
