NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of Law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Ajay K. Mehrotra is Professor of Law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and an Affiliated Professor of History at Northwestern University. He is also currently the Executive Director and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation (ABF), an independent, non-profit research institute that focuses on the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law, legal institutions, and legal processes. His scholarship and teaching focus mainly on American legal, intellectual, and economic history and tax law . More generally, his research explores law and political economy in historical and comparative perspective, with a particular focus on fiscal policy and state-building.
Before joining the ABF and Northwestern, Mehrotra taught at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was a Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and a Professor of History in the college. Prior to his time at Indiana University he was a Doctoral Fellow at the ABF. After law school and before he embarked on his academic career, Mehrotra was an Associate in the Structured Finance department of the New York offices of J.P. Morgan.
Mehrotra received his B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan, his J.D. from Georgetown, and his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Chicago.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of History, Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences
Akin Ogundiran (Ph.D., Boston, 2000) is broadly interested in the archaeology and history of Africa over the past 2,500 years, with emphasis on the Yoruba world (West Africa). His earlier research efforts sought to understand the impacts of global/regional political economies on community formations and how social actors created knowledge, communities, and identities with objects and the landscape. Ogundiran's current research intersects cultural, political economy, and environmental approaches to study the history of complex social systems at different scales-e.g., household, urbanism, and empire. His ongoing field projects are in three parts: the archaeology and history of an Early Iron Age community formation (400 BC-100 AD); the political economy and social ecology of the Oyo Empire (1570-1830); and the landscape history of the Osun-Osogbo Grove-a UNESCO World Heritage Site (ca. 1590 to the present), all in southwest Nigeria. His methodology is eclectic, ranging from archaeology, orality, and ritual archives to geosciences, landscape studies, language, performance, material life, and documentary sources. He is also interested in the cultural history of the Black Atlantic. Ogundiran directs the Material History Lab in the Department of History.
Dr. Ogundiran has received support for his research from the National Geographic Society, Archaeological Institute of America, National Humanities Center, Carnegie Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Philosophical Society, among others.
Professor Stanley teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Japan before the twentieth century, early modern global history, and women's/gender history. She accepts graduate students working on Edo and Meiji Japan.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- People
Ashish Koul specializes in the history of South Asia from the eighteenth century to the present. Her research investigates the historical processes through which collective identities take shape and transform in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Her current book project, provisionally entitled "Caste Reinvented: Arains, Islam, and Politics in Twentieth Century South Asia," examines the intertwining of caste, religion, and politics in the historical trajectory of a South Asian Muslim community called the Arains. Paying attention to changing ideas about history and genealogy, religious practice, and political representation, her book analyzes articulations of Arain identity during a period when this community, and South Asia as a region, witnessed the transition from British colonial rule to post-colonial nationhood.
Her course offerings include:
History of South Asia, ca. 1750 to the present (lecture)
South Asians in the world, 18 th century to the present (lecture)
Islam and Gender in the modern world (seminar)
Empires, Borderlands, and Nationalisms (seminar)
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of English John Evans Professor of Latin
Barbara Newman (Ph.D. Yale, 1981) has published extensively on medieval religious culture, especially works by, for, and about religious women. Among her books are God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages, which won the Charles Homer Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America, and Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred, winner of an Outstanding Academic Title citation from Choice. Prof. Newman has also translated numerous medieval Latin texts, including Hildegard of Bingen's Symphonia, the collected saints' Lives by Thomas of Cantimpré, the Life of Juliana of Cornillon, Mechthild of Hackeborn's Book of Special Grace, the Letters of Two Lovers (probably by Abelard and Heloise), and the works of Richard Methley (in progress).
Job Titles:
- Associate Chair of Department
- Associate Chair of the History Department
- People
Benjamin Frommer (Ph.D., Harvard, 1999), Associate Professor of History and Associate Chair of the History Department, is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which was also published in Czech translation (Prague: Academia, 2010), and co-editor of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020). His current book project, The Ghetto without Walls: The Holocaust in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, examines the wartime destruction of one of the world's most integrated and intermarried Jewish communities. His research and writing have been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Masaryk Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has received the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award (2007) and held the Wayne V. Jones Research Professorship in History (2010-2012) and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (2013-2016). From 2013 to 2016 Frommer served as the inaugural Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.
Job Titles:
- Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University
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Brett Gadsden is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. He specializes in 20th century American and African American history, with a specific focus on black political and social history, black freedom struggles, and racial discrimination, segregation, and inequality.
His first book is titled Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). The central focus of this project is the three decades long effort to desegregate the state's system of public education. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, school desegregation proponents won a series of victories in suits against Jim Crow schools that, in part, provided the evidentiary basis for the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This campaign continued through the 1970s, as the problem of school segregation emerged most pronouncedly as a function of racially segregated housing patterns. After exposing a record of state-sponsored discrimination in education and housing policy, they secured a ruling demanding the nation's first inter-district, metropolitan desegregation plan. More broadly, Between North and South explores how historical actors understood the significance of geographic sectionalism and the ways in which they practiced their politics either contributed or undermined sectional frameworks. This work also demonstrated the extent to which activists artfully manipulated-alternately embracing and rejecting-the discursive frameworks like de jure and de facto segregation that so inform historians' characterizations of American political culture and race relations across time and space.
He is currently working on his second book, titled "From Protest to Politics: The Making of a ‘Second Black Cabinet,'" which explores the set of historical circumstances that brought African Americans into close consultative relationships with presidential candidates and later into key cabinet, sub-cabinet, and other important administrative positions in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations and opened to them unprecedented access to centers of power in the federal government. The rise of these figures to prominence, this project contends, marked the beginnings of modern African American executive authority in modern U.S. history.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Member of the Administrative Faculty and Staff
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
- People
Caitlin Fitz (Ph.D., Yale, 2010) is a historian of early America, in a broad and hemispheric sense. Her work explores early U.S. engagement with foreign communities and cultures, as well as the relationship between ordinary people and formal politics. Her award-winning first book, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (Norton/Liveright, 2016), shows how Latin America's independence wars shaped popular understandings of race, revolution, and republicanism in the United States. Her current research illuminates Latin Americans' influence on U.S. abolitionism and equal rights activism. Fitz has also written about the hemispheric dimensions of the War of 1812 (Journal of American History, 2015), U.S. citizens in insurgent Brazil (The Americas, 2008), Indigenous neutrality during the U.S. revolution (Journal of the Early Republic, 2008), and antislavery activists in Tennessee (Civil War History, 2006). A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she has served on the Editorial Board of Early American Studies, and she has co-chaired the Nominating Committee and the Program Committee of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
Fitz has written essays, reviews, and opinion pieces for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The Los Angeles Times. She works regularly with K-12 students and educators, and she has collaborated on public history events and exhibitions with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Newberry Library, and others. Recipient of a Weinberg Distinguished Teaching Award at Northwestern, she offers courses on American history through 1865.
Job Titles:
- Harold L. Stuart Professor of Finance
- People
Carola Frydman is the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Finance and the Faculty Director of the John L. Ward Center for Family Enterprises at the Kellogg School of Management, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Frydman's research focuses on American business and financial history. Her research has focused on the role of financial intermediaries for firm growth, both during normal times and during financial crises. She has also made important contributions to our understanding of the long-run evolution of executive compensation, the skills of managers, and corporate governance. Recent projects focus, among other topics, on assessing the rise of women in business, the long-run evolution of family enterprises in America, the disparate impact that inflation has had on households across the income distribution in the twentieth century, and on the role that less regulated financial intermediaries have played on the development of the American economy. Her work has been published at journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Economic History, and is frequently featured in main media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and NPR. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Finance, and has previously served as Co-Editor of Explorations in Economic History and on the board of various other journals, including the Journal of Economic History. Prior to joining Kellogg, Professor Frydman was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management (2006-2011) and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University (2011-2016). She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, and B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Universidad de San Andres, Argentina.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Teaching Excellence
Daniel Immerwahr (Ph.D., Berkeley, 2011) is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. He is the author of Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015) and How to Hide an Empire (FSG, 2019), both of which have won scholarly awards. Immerwahr is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and his essays have also appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Harper's, The New Republic, and the New York Review of Books, among other places. He is writing a fire history of the United States.
More information and many of Immerwahr's writings are available at his website.
Job Titles:
- Arts and Sciences and Professor of History and Italian
- Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of History and Italian
Edward Muir (Ph.D., Rutgers, 1975) is the Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences and holds a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence. He works in Italian social and cultural history, especially during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with a special interest in the history of ritual and violence. He is the past president of the two principal academic societies in his specialty: The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference and The Renaissance Society of America. Beginning in 2023, he will serve as the President of the American Historical Association. In 2023, he served as president of the American Historical Association.
Besides receiving Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, he has been a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the National Humanities Center, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Newberry Library. He is a co-editor of the book series "Early Modern History: Culture and Society" (Palgrave-Macmillan) and was the founding editor for the "I Tatti Italian Renaissance History" series (Harvard University Press). He has served on the Board of Editors of The American Historical Review, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Microhistories, Renaissance, Annales: Annals for Istran and Mediterranean Studies, and California Italian Studies.
Job Titles:
- Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities
- People
Immerwahr regularly offers undergraduate courses on global history and U.S. foreign relations. He is not accepting graduate students as advisees but teaches graduate seminars and serves on doctoral committees. His syllabi are online here. He is on sabbatical until fall 2025.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- People
Job Titles:
- Vice President of Research
- People
- Vice President of Research and Education at the Newberry Library
Interests
Geographic Field(s): American History, Before 1900; American History, Since 1900
Dr. Rose Miron is the Vice President of Research and Education at the Newberry Library. She has been at the Newbery since 2019, serving as the Director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies for 5.5 years before stepping into her current role. A non-Native historian, her research explores Indigenous history across the Great Lakes, especially related to public history and memory. In addition to academic publishing, Dr. Miron has also worked on and written about several public history projects. She is co-director of a multifaceted public history project called Indigenous Chicago, which is an extended collaboration between the Newberry Library, Native community members, and tribal nations with historic ties to the Chicago region. Prior to joining the Newberry, she served as the Program Manager for the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, where she primarily worked on the development of their digital archive project. Her work on repatriation, digital projects, and representations of Indigenous history in the public has been published in both scholarly and public-facing mediums.
Job Titles:
- Director, Office of Fellowships
- People
Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe (Ph.D., Princeton, 2000) serves as Director of the Office of Fellowships and as an affiliate of the Program in American Studies. Her academic work scrutinizes responses to religious and ethnic conflict in Reformation Europe and colonial North America.
Job Titles:
- Professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Emily Kadens, the Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is a legal historian with a particular focus on the medieval and early modern history of commercial law and practice. She has a JD from the University of Chicago and a PhD in medieval history from Princeton. An expert on early modern English equity court archives, she is currently using previously unexamined equity court files to study the history of commercial practice and commercial fraud in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. She has also written extensively on how custom does-or does not-function as law, the concept of the medieval law merchant, and the early history of English bankruptcy. Another current project involves working with a neural net platform developed in Europe to build an AI model that can automatically transcribe 16th- and early 17th-century English secretary hand with a high degree of accuracy. The goal is to make transcriptions of equity court material available in a searchable online repository.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of History, Wender - Lewis Teaching and Research Professor
Geraldo Cadava (Ph.D., Yale University, 2008) is a historian of the United States. He focuses on Latinos in the United States, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and Latin American immigration. Originally from Tucson, Arizona, he came to Northwestern after finishing degrees at Yale University (Ph.D., 2008) and Dartmouth College (B.A., 2000).
Cadava is the author of two books. Most recently, he wrote The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of An American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump, published by Ecco in 2020. His first book was Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland, published by Harvard University Press in 2013. He is working on a third book, an overview of Latino History since the Spanish conquest called A Thousand Bridges, to be published by Crown.
He is a Contributing Writer for The New Yorker, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Public Books, and author of the Substack newsletter Latinos in Depth. Other writing has appeared in The Journal of American History, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.
Cadava teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Latino History, the American West, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, migration to and from Latin America, and other topics in U.S. History, including Watergate, the musical Hamilton, the 2016 and 2020 elections, and the History of College Sports. He is also the Director of the American Studies Program.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- People
Haley Bowen (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2023) is a historian of the early modern French empire, with particular research interests in state-building, gender, and religious culture. Her current book project, provisionally entitled Breaching the Cloister: Laywomen, Convents, and the State in the Early Modern French Empire, explores how laywomen in Paris, New France, and Martinique engaged with monastic institutions as ambiguous sites of both incarceration and retreat. Bowen's work has been supported by grants from the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, the Rackham Graduate School and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, the Meeter Center at Calvin College, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. She graduated from Harvard College in 2014 with an A.B. degree in History and Literature, and from 2019-2021 was affiliated as a visiting researcher at the Centre des recherches historiques (CRH) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- People
Haydon Cherry (Ph.D., Yale University, 2011) is a historian of modern Southeast Asia, particularly modern Vietnam. His first book, Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City, 1900-1940, has been published by Yale University Press. The book traces the changing social and economic history of the poor in colonial Saigon (now Hồ Chí Minh City) by following the lives of six individuals (a prostitute, a Chinese coolie, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an invalid, and a destitute Frenchman) in the first decades of the twentieth century. His second book project is an intellectual history of twentieth-century Vietnam told through the biography of Đào Duy Anh, arguably the most important Vietnamese scholar of the modern period.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- People
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- People
Henri Lauzière (Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2008) joined the history department after a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the study of the Middle East since the First World War at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Islamic intellectual history and the political history of Arab societies in both the modern Middle East and North Africa. His first book, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), traces the history of Salafism as a concept and argues against the long-standing but largely mythical narratives of salafiyya embedded in the secondary literature. The book also uses the intellectual journey of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894-1987), a Moroccan religious scholar and globetrotter, to illuminate the changing conceptions of Islamic reform within transnational Salafi networks over the course of the last century. The Making of Salafism thus identifies important factors and historical conjunctures that help to explain why self-proclaimed Salafis gradually abandoned the principles of Islamic modernism, or moderate reform (al-iṣlāḥ al-mu ʿtadil), and why they became increasingly and almost exclusively associated with a type of Islamic "purism" that appears to be arch-conservative. Prior to his doctoral studies in Washington D.C., Lauzière received a Bachelor's degree in history from Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada, and a Master's from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Job Titles:
- Ian Sanders Chair in History and Assistant Professor of Instruction
Job Titles:
- Crown Professor of Middle East Studies
- People
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- Associate Professor of Religious Studies
- People
J. Michelle Molina (PhD, University of Chicago, 2004) studies the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. She has explored Jesuit spirituality in an effort to understand how individuals - both elite and commoner -- approached and experienced religious transformation. In particular, she has been interested in examining the impact of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises - a meditative retreat geared toward self-reform - on early modern global expansion. Molina's book, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion is published with University of California Press. The book examines the impact that this Jesuit program of radical self-reflexivity had on the formation of early modern selves in Europe and New Spain. She offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of a "modern self" by demonstrating how the struggle to forge and overcome selves was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary expansion.
Momentarily emerging from the early modern period to bear witness to events in her own era, Molina has explained what it might mean that the current pope is a Jesuit. She has observed that it is best to situate this Jesuit pope in relation to the modes of self-formation found in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and, importantly, that this Catholic imperative to "know thyself" indicates that Pope Francis is well versed in what has been termed "philosophy as a way of life."
Having studied Jesuit global expansion, Molina has turned her attention to a period of "contraction" for Catholic missionary evangelicalism. She is now writing a book about the expulsion of the Jesuits from Mexico in 1767. The book tells the story of the arrest, expulsion, and aftermath through the study of three kinds of inventories. The first are the lists of books and objects that the Jesuits were compelled to leave behind after their arrest. The second inventory is the accounting of self that shapes the conversion narrative of a young Swedish Lutheran who, inspired by Voltaire, took up life as a merchant to learn more about the world and to find "true religion" based upon reason. When he boarded a ship to Corsica in 1769, his travelling companions were 200 Mexican Jesuits recently expelled from the Americas. In close confines with these members of the Society of Jesus for the duration of his five-week journey, Thj ülen chose to convert to Catholicism and, shortly after arriving in Italy, he became a Jesuit. The third inventory is the collection of "memorias" or obituaries of dead Jesuits from the Mexican Province, composed by José Felix de Sebastián from the moment of the arrest in 1767 until 1796.
In her teaching, she offers a graduate seminar on embodiment, materiality and affect. For undergraduates her courses include an undergraduate research seminar on refugees, migration, and exile; an introduction to religious studies theories and methods; the study of the problems of race and religion in Latin America; as well as a course on religion and existentialism in mid-20 th century film.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- People
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder
- Associate Professor of Instruction in Legal Studies
- People
Joanna Grisinger (J.D. University of Chicago Law School 1998; Ph.D., History, University of Chicago, 2005) is Associate Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies at Northwestern University, where she teaches a variety of undergraduate courses including Legal and Constitutional History of the United States, Constitutional Law, Gender and the Law, Law and Society, and Law & the Civil Rights Movement. She received her J.D. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago; her research focuses on the modern administrative state in twentieth-century U.S. legal and political history. Her first book, The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2012), offers a political history of administrative law reform. Her current research explores public interest participation in administrative decision making; she is currently working on a book manuscript that examines airline regulation as a site for mobilization around issues of race and apartheid, disability, consumer rights, and the environment.
Prof. Grisinger is a co-founder and co-organizer (with Kimberly Welch, Kathryn Schumaker, and Logan Sawyer) of the Law & History Collaborative Research Network (established 2013) within the Law and Society Association, co-edits (with Deborah Dinner) the Legal History section of Jotwell.com, and is the advisory editor on Law and Criminology for the American National Biography Online. She is a member of the American Society for Legal History's board of directors and is chair of the ASLH Standing Committee on the Annual Meeting.
Job Titles:
- People
- Senior Editor of the Journal of Economic
Joel Mokyr has served as the senior editor of the Journal of Economic History from 1994 to 1998, and was editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (published in July 2003), and serves as editor in chief of a book series, the Princeton University Press Economic History of the Western World (35 monographs to date). He served as President of the Economic History Association 2003-04, President of the Midwest Economics Association in 2007/08, and President of the Atlantic Economic Association (2015).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Historian
- People
Jonathan Brack is a historian of medieval and early modern Iran and the Mongol Empire. His research focuses on religious exchanges, conversion, and comparative empires. His first book is An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press, 2023). He coedited the volume Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals (University of California Press, 2020).
Before coming to Northwestern, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He is currently working on his second book, which explores the relationship between science and religion in Mongol dominated Eurasia. Another project examines the place of Judaism and narratives about the Israelites in Islamic Persianate empires, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and from Iran to Central Asia and India.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of Economics
Joseph Ferrie is an economic historian who uses micro-level longitudinal data to study economic mobility. Using data from census manuscripts, passenger ship records, tax lists, and city directories, he has compared mobility in Britain, the United States and France from the 1850s to the present. He is also interested in determining the link between early-life circumstances and later life outcomes, and the migrant from rural areas to cities and towns. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Job Titles:
- Graduate Program Coordinator
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- Appointed Journal Editor
- People
- Professor of History, Board of Visitors Professor
Masur served as the History Department's Director of Graduate Studies for four years (2011-14, 2016-17). She helped apply for and implement a Teagle Foundation grant to promote excellence in graduate student teaching and served a three-year term on TGS's Advisory Council for Academic Affairs. Her graduate teaching and advising fields include the Civil War and Reconstruction, African American history, legal history, political history, and the history of women and gender. Her current Ph.D. students are working in all those areas.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Historian
- People
Kathleen Belew is a historian, author, and teacher. She specializes in the history of the present. She spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2018, paperback 2019). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. By uniting Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, the movement mobilized and carried out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. This movement was never adequately confronted, and remains a threat to American democracy. Her next book, Home at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed rents in America's social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House).
Belew has spoken about Bring the War Home in a wide variety of places, including The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered. Her work has featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline). Belew is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University. She earned tenure at the University of Chicago in 2021, where she spent seven years. Her research has received the support of the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation. Belew earned her BA in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named Dean's Medalist in the Humanities. She earned a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University.
Belew has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2019-20), Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. Her award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of history of the present, conservatism, race, gender, violence, identity, and the meaning of war. Belew is co-editor of and contributor to A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and has contributed essays to Myth America and The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- People
Keith Woodhouse (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 2010) teaches courses for the History Department and the Environmental Policy and Culture program. His research interests are environmental history, intellectual history, political history, and the twentieth-century United States. He is the author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, which focuses on the ideas and political and philosophical commitments that radical environmentalists held and what those commitments tell us about the relationship between the environmental movement and American political thought. He has taught at several campuses in the University of Wisconsin system and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Job Titles:
- Professor of History, Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities
Job Titles:
- Chairman of Department
- William Smith Mason Professor of American History / Department Chair
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Senior Lecturer
- People
Lane Fenrich (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1992) is a cultural historian of the twentieth-century United States, specializing in the period since the Second World War. In recent years, he has taught primarily U.S. Gay and Lesbian History and related courses.
Job Titles:
- Geographic Field ( S ) : Asian
Masur recently coordinated a team that produced Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice. Part of the Colored Conventions Project, this online exhibit highlights early Black communities and Black activism in Illinois and includes biographical profiles of 25 individual people.
Masur's other published scholarship includes An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press, 2010), and, with Gregory Downs, The World the Civil War Made (UNC Press, 2015). She has consulted extensively with museums and arts organizations, including the National Constitution Center and the Newberry Library. She was part of the editorial team that created Reconstruction: The Official National Park Service Handbook, and she co-authored, with Downs, The Era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900, a National Historic Landmark Theme Study published in 2017. She was also a key consultant for the 2019 documentary, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War and appeared in the recent CNN film, Lincoln: Divided We Stand.
Masur was the 2023 faculty recipient of Northwestern's Ver Steeg Award, which recognizes excellence in work with graduate students. She regularly consults with K-12 teachers and speaks with the media on topics including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Lincoln, the Constitution, and monuments and public memory. She has written historical commentary for the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post's Made By History, and other outlets. She also teaches US women's history and recently wrote on op-ed on abortion rights and federalism in US history. She and Downs are co-editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era, a scholarly journal that maintains a blog called Muster.
With illustrator Liz Clarke, Masur recently completed Freedom Was In Sight! A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region, which will be published in fall 2024 by UNC Press.
Kate Masur's personal website is katemasur.com.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Program Assistant
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- Graduate Student Spotlight
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- People
- Professor of African American Studies
Martha Biondi (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1997) is a member of the Department of African American Studies with a courtesy joint appointment in the History Department. She specializes in twentieth century African American History and is the author of To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City published by Harvard University Press, which awarded it the Thomas J. Wilson Prize as best first book of the year. In 2012, the University of California Press published her book, The Black Revolution on Campus, an account of the nationwide Black student movement of the late 1960s and early Black Studies movement of the 1970s. She is currently researching a book on neoliberalism, violence and Black life, focusing on Chicago since the 1980s.
Job Titles:
- Wayne Jones II Research Professor in
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor With Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
- People
Michał J. Wilczewski, Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures is a historian of modern East-Central Europe who specializes in Poland and Polish culture. At Northwestern, he regularly teaches Polish language, literature, culture, and history courses. He also serves as the faculty advisor of the Polish American Student Alliance (PASA) and is a Faculty Associate for Willard Residential College.
A historian of everyday life, he is interested in telling the stories of ordinary people and marginalized populations in their quest to gain recognition and access to state power. His current book project entitled Broken Land: Everyday Life and the Reconstruction of the Polish Countryside, 1914-1939, traces the daily activities of rural people in interwar Poland as they rebuilt the countryside and helped build the fledgling state. Focusing on farmers' everyday experiences-in their homes, fields, schoolhouses, and community centers-Broken Land explains how interwar Poland's rural dwellers experienced the transition from being imperial subjects to becoming citizens of a nation-state following the Great War.
More recently, he has begun researching a new project called Sex in the Time of Sanacja: Debates about Morality in Interwar Poland that examines the changing discourses concerning pornography, marriage and the family, homosexuality, nudism, and prostitution in the interwar Polish state. He traces the liberalization of attitudes toward sexuality in the country at the same time that Poland's political arena was turning increasingly right-wing and asks how a relaxation of laws and ideas toward such issues could happen at all.
In addition to his research, he is at work on three pedagogy-related projects. The first is in partnership with linguists at the University of Białystok to create Polish-language teaching materials. The second is a Polish Native Speaker recording project to enhance Polish language students' listening comprehension. And the last is the Poland in Chicago Digital Mapping Project that maps Polish and Polish-American spaces in the Chicagoland area.
Wilczewski holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MA in history from Michigan State University, and a BA in sociology from La Salle University. He is the recipient of a 2013-2014 Fulbright IIE Student Research Grant. Prior to arriving at Northwestern, he worked as a program assistant for Polish Studies and taught Polish history, language, and literature courses at UIC. In addition to teaching and researching, he has also done some academic translation work and is the current book review editor for history, the social sciences, and diaspora studies for The Polish Review.
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
- Professor of History, Director of Graduate Studies
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of Religious Studies
Robert A. Orsi (Ph.D., Yale, 1983) is the first holder of the Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies in the Religion Department; he holds a joint appointment in History. Before coming to Northwestern, he taught at at Fordham University at Lincoln Center from 1981 to 1988, at Indiana University from 1988 to 2001, and at Harvard Divinity School from 2001 to 2007. He was president of the American Academy of Religion in 2002-03. He studies American Catholicism in both historical and ethnographic perspective, and he is widely recognized also for his work on theory and method for the study of religion.
His first book, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (Yale, 1985, 2nd ed. 2002), received the John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association and the Jesuit National Book Award. This was followed by Thank You, Saint Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (Yale, 1996), which won the Merle Curti Award in American Social History from the Organization of American Historians, and has been the subject of symposia at Yale, Princeton, the American Academy of Religions, and the Association for the Sociology of Religion.Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them(Princeton, 2004) received an Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion and has been the focus of symposia at Fordham, Princeton, and the American Academy of Religion. Orsi has also edited Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Indiana, 1999).
He is currently at work on The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies and on a social and cultural history of 20th-century Catholic childhoods in the United States, to be published by Harvard University Press.
Job Titles:
- Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and
- Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and
Joel Mokyr (Ph.D., Yale, 1974) is an economic historian and has a joint appointment in economics and history with full voting rights and participation in both.
Job Titles:
- Ian Sanders Chair in History and Assistant Professor of Instruction
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer
- Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation
- People
Cushman has been director of HEFNU since Fall 2016. Before coming to Northwestern, Cushman served as Head of Educational Programming at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark (2013-1016). Prior to that, she served as Director of Youth Education at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County (Long Island, NY; 2007-2013). While there, she completed her doctoral dissertation, The Women of Birkenau (Clark University, 2010), a social history of the women's camp in Auschwitz. Her current book project, Women in Auschwitz, is under contract with Indiana University Press and is based on her dissertation. She is co-editing, with Joanne Pettitte and Dominic Williams, The Routledge Handbook of Auschwitz-Birkenau (2025). She is co-editor in chief of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. Her research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, Steven Spielberg, and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. Her research and teaching interests center on Holocaust history, the concentration camp system, and gender and sexuality.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Associate Professor of Legal Studies
- People
Shana Bernstein (Ph.D., Stanford, 2003) is an historian of the twentieth-century United States, with a particular interest in social reform movements, including civil rights and environmental health and justice. Originally from Northern California, where she completed degrees at UC Berkeley and Stanford, she initially joined Northwestern as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Latino Studies before accepting a tenure-track position in History at Southwestern University in 2004. She rejoined the Northwestern faculty in 2014 as a Clinical Associate Professor of Legal Studies.
Her first book, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford, 2011), reinterprets U.S. civil rights activism by revealing its roots in the interracial efforts of Mexican, Jewish, African, and Japanese Americans in mid-century Los Angeles. It also argues that the early Cold War facilitated, rather than derailed, some forms of activism. Bernstein has also written academic articles on the history of environmental health and civil rights, and has written essays for CNN, The Forward, Talking Points Memo, The Hill, Pacific Standard, American Prospect, and the Austin American Statesman. She has received fellowships including from the Huntington Library and the Mellon Foundation, and is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Bernstein is currently working on a project that uses the history of strawberries as a lens for exploring the intersection of worker health, consumer health, and environmental health. She teaches undergraduate courses on comparative race and ethnicity, immigration, and health and inequality.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics
Taco Terpstra (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2011) is a member of the Department of Classics with a courtesy joint appointment in the History Department. He specializes in Roman socioeconomic history and is the author of Trading Communities in the Roman World (Leiden: Brill 2013) and Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019). In 2017-18, he was involved in a combined research and exhibition project at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, which resulted in the edited volume Portrait of a Child: Historical and Scientific Studies of a Roman Egyptian Mummy (Block Museum, 2019, coeditors: E. Rönkkö and M. Walton). His teaching includes courses on Roman sociopolitical and economic history, methodologies of historical research and the archaeology of Roman Campania.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in the Economics Department
- Associate Professor of Economics
- People
Walker Hanlon is an Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Northwestern University with a courtesy appointment in the Department of History and co-director of Northwestern's Center for Economic History. His research focuses on understanding how economies evolve over the long-run using novel historical data, with a specific focus on Britain and the broader North Atlantic economy from the late 18 th century to the First World War. He is particularly interested in questions related to technological progress, urbanization, demography, international trade, and the environment. He is currently working on a book, The Laissez-Faire Experiment, on British government during the long nineteenth century (under contract with Princeton University Press). In other recent research he explores the emergence of the engineering profession during the Industrial Revolution, the impact of the Bradlaugh-Besant trial of 1877 on the British demographic transition, and the health costs of air pollution in British cities during the nineteenth century. Prof. Hanlon received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2012.
Job Titles:
- Research Professor in
- Research Professorship in History ( 2010 - 2012 )
- Wayne Jones II Research Professor in
Amy Stanley (Ph.D., Harvard, 2007) is a social historian of early modern and modern Japan, with special interests in global history, women's and gender history, and narrative. Her most recent book, Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020), won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Biography and PEN/America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award in Biography and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. She is also the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (UC Press 2012), as well as articles in the American Historical Review, The Journal of Japanese Studies, and The Journal of Asian Studies. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2007, and she has held fellowships from the Japan Foundation, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Job Titles:
- William Smith Mason Professor of American History / Department Chair
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Expert
- People
Doug Kiel (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012) is a citizen of the Oneida Nation and studies Native American history, with particular interests in the Great Lakes region and twentieth century Indigenous nation rebuilding. He is working on a book manuscript entitled Unsettling Territory: Oneida Indian Resurgence and Anti-Sovereignty Backlash. The Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, a community that had been dispossessed of their New York homelands in the early nineteenth century, yet again suffered devastating land losses as a result of the Dawes Act of 1887-a policy that President Theodore Roosevelt once called "a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass." Kiel's book examines how the Oneida Nation's leaders strengthened the community's capacity to shape their own future by envisioning, deliberating, and enacting a dramatic reversal of fortune during the twentieth century. His book also examines the origins of recent litigation between the Oneida Nation and the Village of Hobart, a mostly non-Native municipality that is located within the boundaries of the Oneida Reservation and seeks to block the tribe from recovering land that was lost a century ago.
Prior to joining the Northwestern faculty, he taught at Williams College, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlebury College. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Newberry Library, and the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, NM, among others.
Beyond the university, Kiel has worked in several museums, testified as an expert witness in regards to Indigenous land rights, and in 2008 was as an Indigenous Fellow at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, Switzerland. He currently serves on the advisory committee for the renovation of the Field Museum's exhibition on Native North America.
His publications are available to download.
Job Titles:
- Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor