History @ Illinois 2026
Letter From the Chair
In times where the preservation and remembrance of history are under threat, it is vital to connect our work with communities outside of the walls of the university. Public and digital history are excellent means of breaking down those walls and facilitate conversations with communities to create new meanings and foster better understandings of why history matters. This issue highlights the inventive, community-centered work our faculty, staff, and students are doing to connect their research with the wider public. It is a tradition of public engagement for which our faculty have been honored in the past, and most recently with professor Antoinette Burton receiving the campus Distinguished Award for Excellence in Public Engagement.
Inside this issue you’ll find stories marking the 10th anniversary of professor John Randolph’s pioneering digital publishing initiative SourceLab, introductions to our new colleagues Kalani Craig, Tayzhaun Glover, Chelsey Smith, and Shannan Mason and how they use digital tools to connect their work with the public, profiles of graduate students using inventive methods and bringing local history to k-12 classrooms, the culmination of professor Robert Morrissey’s project to reconnect citizens of the Miami and Peoria Nations with their hide painting traditions, and more.
We also honor the legacy of late professor Kathy Oberdeck with a new undergraduate public history award made possible by her family’s generosity. That legacy also lives in professor Daniel Gilbert’s exhibit on the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign-Urbana, which grew from a History Harvest course and collaborations with Spurlock Museum Oberdeck helped initiate. And graduate student Daniel Rodriguez also picks up the baton on Oberdeck’s archival work with the Greater AIDS Alliance of East Central Illinois to preserve local LGBTQ history.
Despite shifting federal priorities, our faculty, students, and staff continue to display resilience and excellence. This year we celebrated seven promotions and honored professor Leslie Regan as she retires. We also applauded professor Antoinette Burton for her appointment to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and professor Yuridia Ramírez for receiving the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award, distinctions that showcase our faculty’s national leadership. Additionally, we completed an external review, convened a faculty retreat, and continued to implement new practices in our department to facilitate fuller participation from faculty and staff. I am grateful for the feedback, collaboration, and dedication of my colleagues who make all of this work possible.
And I remain grateful for the continued support of our alumni and donors. Write to us at history@illinois.edu or fill out our alumni updates form to share your news and how your degree in history impacted your journey.
All the best,
Adrian Burgos, Jr.
Kalani Craig, associate professor
Craig is a medievalist and digital historian who describes herself as working at the intersection between software development and historiography. Building digital tools that can be used for academic research, in the classroom, and by communities is a key focus of Craig’s work.
Tayzhaun Glover, assistant professor
Glover’s research examines movement, slavery, and freedom in the Caribbean. He's also an ACE Mellon Fellow which has allowed him the opportunity to explore how the public engages with history and how he can tailor his research to appeal to different audiences.
Chelsey Smith, assistant professor
Smith is a historian of nineteenth-century Jamaican history and her research interests include education, race, and labor in the Caribbean and Latin America. Previously, she was a public humanities postdoctoral fellow in the department, and plans to create a course that teaches students how to create public history projects.
Shannan Mason, lecturer
Mason is a historian of early American history whose research explores relationships between science, nature, and economics. Mason hopes to teach students how to use digital tools for historical research in the classroom, how to apply different methods of analysis in their assignments, and how to use artificial intelligence.
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History Harvest revives Farm Aid memories for Spurlock exhibit
When you think of major concerts in the history of rock and country music, Champaign probably doesn’t spring to mind. But in September 1985, Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois was the site of the first Farm Aid relief concert for American farm families, featuring a lineup of legends like Willie Nelson, Neil Young, B. B. King, Loretta Lynn, and Bob Dylan.
Spurlock Museum, professor Dan Gilbert and students in his History Harvest class, and the Champaign County History Museum partnered to create a new exhibit commemorating the concert.
In Memoriam
David Prochaska, emeritus professor
Emeritus professor David Prochaska (b. 1945) passed away on January 6, 2025. Prochaska was a historian of colonialism and visual culture with a specialty in colonial Algeria. He was also interested in France and the Mediterranean, the anthropology of tourism, museum studies, urban history, and colonial urbanism.
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Professor Leslie Reagan's next chapter
After 33 years at the University of Illinois, Reagan—a path-breaking and internationally recognized scholar of reproduction, medicine, public health, law, social activism, media, women, gender, sexuality, and disability—has decided to retire.
Faculty Achievements
- Deepasri Baul, Summer Faculty Fellowship, Humanities Research Institute
- Adrian Burgos, Jr., College of LAS Norman P. Jones Professorial Scholar Award
- Antoinette Burton, Distinguished Award for Excellence in Public Engagement
- Marc A. Hertzman, James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History by the American Historical Association, honorable mention for best book in the 2024 Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section Prizes, honorable mention for the Warren Dean Memorial Prize by the Conference on Latin American History for the best book on the history of Brazil, honorable mention for the Murdoe J. Macleod Book Prize by the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Conference on Southern History for the best book in Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean for After Palmares: Diaspora, Inheritance, and the Afterlives of Zumbi
- Kristin Hoganson, Guggenheim Fellowship; 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (this award was later rescinded due to National Endowment for the Humanities funding cuts)
- Erik McDuffie, Jon Gjerde Prize for Best Book in Midwestern History for The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom; College of LAS Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar
- Yuridia Ramírez, 2025 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award
- Roderick Wilson, College of LAS Conrad Humanities Scholar
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the oldest honorary societies in the United States. Founded in 1780, the academy recognizes scientists, artists, scholars and leaders who have distinguished themselves in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Professor Antoinette Burton was one of four U of I professors elected in 2025.
Faculty and Lecturer Promotions
- Marsha Barrett, associate professor, recipient of College of LAS Helen Corley Petit Scholar Award
- James Brennan, professor
- Claudia Brosseder, professor
- Augusto Espiritu, professor
- Marco Jaimes, senior lecturer
- Erik McDuffie, professor, recipient of Distinguished Faculty Promotion Award
- Mauro Nobili, professor
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Historic Native American robes to be displayed at Versailles exhibition
It's a monumental achievement for the Reclaiming Stories project, led by professor Robert Morrissey along with citizens of the Miami and Peoria Nations, that has been working for the past five years to reconnect the tribes with their hide painting tradition.
New Books by Faculty
1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe
by Peter Fritzsche
Barbarians, Hoards, and Hacksilver in Late Antiquity: The New Silver Monetary Zone on Rome's Northern Frontier
by Ralph Mathisen
The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tārīkh Ibn Al-Mukhtār of the Songhay Empire and the Tārīkh Al-Fattāsh of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi
by Mauro Nobili, Zachary V. Wright, H. Ali Diakité
Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Modern City
by Mark D. Steinberg
Der Balkan: Mission Possible
by Maria Todorova
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New award for undergraduates honors public history pioneer professor Kathy Oberdeck
The Kathryn Oberdeck Public History Award Fund will honor the dedication to public history, community engagement, and social justice work of history professor Kathy Oberdeck, who passed away in 2022.
The fund will support undergraduates who are undertaking public history and/or community engagement projects like an internship, honors research paper, or independent research project. The award is generously supported by her husband William Munro and daughters Fiona and Cara Munro.
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SourceLab teaches students new ways of publishing the past
How do we preserve and interpret the historical record in a digital age? SourceLab was created in 2015 by professor John Randolph to teach undergraduates how to create digital documentary editions of historical sources. Ten years later there is a graduate seminar, a journal where students can publish the documentary editions they produce, and weekly meetings where students and faculty across the university can convene to explore topics in the digital humanities.
Human-Centered Learning
Now, more than twenty years later, I still vividly remember one of the most challenging moments of graduate school. I had hit a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in my preliminary examinations. It was Friday morning and the exam was due that afternoon. My brain would not produce another word. I also had to teach. My instinct was to cancel class, but feeling incapable of writing, I decided to hold section, figuring that if I was going to fail out of grad school I might as well give my students a decent class on the way out. To my great fortune, the students lifted me up, their energy carrying class and giving me new hope. After section, I rushed to the library, punched out my final essay, and turned it in just in time.
I have thought about this moment a lot lately, amid the drumbeat of news about artificial intelligence threatening to make historians’ jobs irrelevant. There are many arguments to be made in defense of what we do as historians; that fateful day in grad school suggests a different approach. Historians can and should emphasize our indispensability to higher education. We should also hold tight to all that we gain from human-centered learning. I like to think that the energy that my students gave me years ago was, at least in part, a product of the energy that I put into teaching, and that I have played that energy back to subsequent generations of students. That larger ecosystem is something that we all need—as scholars, teachers, students, and humans. As I complete my term as DGS, that ecosystem—not only what I have given to it, but also what it has given me—remains one of the most powerful ways that I continue to find meaning in being a historian.
Marc A. Hertzman, Director of Graduate Studies
Richard Young
Richard Young uses AI to study the history of happiness by analyzing 20th century advertisements, images, films, and radio. He’s trained AI to detect emotional patterns, like the iconic “Coca-Cola Girl” smile, across thousands of materials.
Alex Jacobs
Alex Jacobs studies queer history and the British Empire in the 19th century, but she spent this summer exploring a different avenue of history education, called place-based learning, through the Summer Bridge Program created by the Humanities Without Walls initiative.
Daniel Rodriguez
Daniel Rodriguez spent his summer working with the Greater Community AIDS Project, through the Summer Bridge Program created by the Humanities Without Walls Initiative, to preserve archival material related to local AIDS and queer history. The project was initially started by late professor Kathy Oberdeck.
Dale Mize
During summer 2025, graduate student Dale Mize explored beefy history for his dissertation, which explores how health concerns shaped the beef industry in the United States from 1945 to 1995.
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Memorial bench commemorates 1990s graduate student cohort
A group of alumni from the 1980s and 1990s and a former faculty member came together to raise money for a new memorial bench outside of Gregory Hall to honor graduate students from that era’s cohort who died young.
The bench honors Katherine Aaslestad (’97), Debra Allen (’92), Charles Crouch (’91), Louis Haas (’90), and Daniel Soloff (’93).
Recent PhDs awarded
William Crane (Tariq Ali/Antoinette Burton), “Prison-Discipline and the Making of Racial Capitalism in British India, 1857-1930” (May 2025)
Eric Denby (Daniel Gilbert), “Rebel Youth: The History of LGBT Youth Organizing in Post-Stonewall America” (December 2024)
Heather Duncan (Ralph Mathisen), “The Kingdom of the Gepids During Late Antiquity: Power, Territory, and Identity in a Forgotten Successor Kingdom” (August 2025)
Rhiannon Hein (Peter Fritzsche), “Gottingen's Global Modernity: Cultures of Belonging in a Provincial German Town, 1775-1815” (May 2025)
Jun Huang (Clare Haru Crowston), “Masks and Masking Practices in Old Regime France and the French Revolution” (December 2024)
Hanping Li (Kai-Wing Chow), “Cult of Laughter: Emotional Refuge, Commercial Publishing, and Humor Culture in Late Ming China (1573-1644)” (December 2024)
Adam LoBue (James Brennan), “Preventive, Pre-Emptive, and Educative: Political Literacy, Anticommunism, and Cold War Knowledge Production in East Africa, 1949-1979” (August 2025)
Damir Vucicevic (Maria Todorova), “Global Margins, Central Actors: Yugoslavia, Egypt, and the Non-Aligned Project, 1948-1970” (May 2025)
Recent MS/MAs awarded
Camryn Burkins (Erik McDuffie), December 2024
Lily Denehy (Antoinette Burton), May 2025
Rebecca Stover (John Randolph), May 2025
2025-26 Incoming PhD Students
Recent PhD and MS/MA Employment and Postdocs
Heather Duncan, Research Assistant, Archaeometry Lab, University of Missouri
Rhiannon Hein, Associate Product Manager, Anonymous Health, CA
Jun Huang, Post-doctoral researcher, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
Adam LoBue, Visiting Assistant Professor, History Department, Valparaiso University
23rd Women’s and Gender History Symposium
The 23rd Women’s and Gender History Symposium, “Gender, Law, and Politics,” drew attendees in-person and virtually from around the world in February 2025. The symposium featured keynote speakers Neil J. Young, a public historian, author, and podcaster, and Laura Frances Goffman, assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois. Young and Goffman, alongside Antonio Sotomayor, associate professor and Latin American and Caribbean studies librarian at Illinois, gave a Q&A entitled “Alt-Academic Career Paths.” This discussion gave attendees insight into the varied career paths open to history doctoral students from library and archival positions to public-facing opportunities at museums and news organizations while providing a space to discuss what career development and preparation looks like in a doctoral program. Graduate scholars presented original research a range of topics from several disciplines, including women, gender, and sexuality studies; philosophy; African American studies; sociology; religious studies; and English. The interdisciplinary nature of this conference was also reflected in the broad sponsorship of 18 departments across campus. The WGHS organizing committee was a mixture of first- through fifth-year PhD students and MA/MS students. Visit our website for more information on the 2025 WGHS and the upcoming 2026 conference.
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From campus to the cockpit: Colonel Harms' flight path through history
30 years after trading his graduation cap for a flight helmet, Colonel Bradley Harms (BA, ‘95, history) returned to campus during homecoming for another career accomplishment: receiving the 2025 Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois Alumni Association. He said his degree from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences was essential to his success.
As a history major, he honed the critical-thinking skills that carried him through combat deployments, command of Marine Helicopter Squadron One, and serving as Chief of Staff for the White House Military Office.
Alumni Updates
Matt Alva (BA, ’05, history) joined Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila LLP as a partner of the firm. Alva focuses his practice on product and premise liability matters, class actions, and mass torts. He also defends businesses in other complex commercial litigation and high-stakes disputes.
Jacob Bell (PhD, ’23, history), an assistant professor in the Department of History at Texas Tech University, published The Documentary Politics of Conquered England's Queens: New Translations of the "Encomium of Queen Emma" and the "Life of King Edward" (ARC Humanities Press).
Michael Croissant (BA, ’93, history) is the vice president of corporate intelligence at Straife. He retired from the CIA in 2021 after nearly 22 years of service as an analyst and targeting officer in locations ranging from Washington, DC, to the Middle East and Central and South Asia. He recently published Bombing Hitler's Hometown: The Untold Story of the Last Mass Bomber Raid of WWII in Europe in 2024.
Don Hickey (BA, ’62; MA, ’68; PhD, ’72, history) retired from teaching at Wayne State College in Nebraska in 2022. An award-winning author who has published twelve books, Don is best known for The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, originally published in 1989 and still in print in a revised edition. Called “the dean of 1812 scholarship” by the New Yorker, Hickey was honored for promoting public interest in history with the Samuel Eliot Morison Award by the USS Constitution Museum in 2013. He was also quoted by name in the U.S. Postal Service sheet of stamps released in 2015 to commemorate the Battle of New Orleans. His latest book is Tecumseh’s War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America was published in 2023 by Westholme Publishing. He continues to write and to deliver papers and public lectures in retirement.
Stacy Lynn (PhD, ’07, history), an associate editor for the Jane Addams Papers, published a new book, Loving Lincoln: A Personal History of the Women Who Shaped Lincoln's Life and Legacy (SIU Press).
Jessica Moyer (BA, ’01, history; MS, ’03, library and information science) joined the Department of Informatics at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences as a program coordinator for the informatics minor and game studies program.
Robert Patch (BA, ’71, history), an emeritus professor at the University of California, Riverside, published his fourth book, An Outpost of Colonialism: The Hispanic Community of Mérida, Yucatán, 1690-1730 (Stanford University Press).
Richard Pound (MA, ’73, history) published his first book, I Went Aviatin’ to China in 2024, which is based on the WWII letters of his father, a pilot who flew the route between India and China, to his mother. After a successful career as an operations officer for the CIA, Pound is enjoying working as a historian again in retirement.
Devin Smart (PhD, ’17, history) an assistant professor of history at West Virginia University published Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya’s Port City (Ohio University Press).
Randi Storch (PhD, ’98, history) was appointed Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Western Oregon University.
Augustus Wood, (PhD, ’20, history) an assistant professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published his first book, Class Warfare in Black Atlanta: Grassroots Struggles, Power, and Repression Under Gentrification (University of North Carolina Press).
Share Your News!
In the Department of History we take great pride in our graduates and the impact they make on a wide range of fields.
If you are a former student, we would love to hear from you about what you are doing now and how your degree made an impact on your life and career.
Department of History Awards 2025
These awards celebrate our faculty, staff, lecturers, undergraduate, and graduate students to thank them for their dedicated service to our department. They also provide funding and scholarships for their research and education and honor the excellence of their work. We are grateful to the support of our donors for making these awards possible.
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Invest in the future of the Department of History
Our department relies on the generous support of alumni and friends to provide the best possible learning and teaching environment for our students and faculty members. This past year, the department has benefited from numerous donors. We thank all of you for your generous support.