The Department of History is pleased to announce that three new faculty members (subject to board approval) will join our ranks this fall. Our new colleagues will add to our strengths in South and East Asian history, and nineteenth century United States history.

Deepasri Baul 

Deepasri Baul, currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Asian University for Women in Chattogram, Bangladesh, is a historian of modern South Asia. Baul specializes in urban history and her research analyses how urban space is produced through the intersection of religion and property in late colonial Delhi. She shifts focus away from dominant planning and state-centric approaches to urban history and redirects it on public action and street politics to build bottom-up narratives about the city. She is currently writing her first book and has published her research in academic journals like Studies in History, The Caravan, and public-facing platforms.  

Maria Angela Diaz 

Maria Angela Diaz, currently a faculty member at Utah State University, is a historian of nineteenth century U.S. history. Her main areas of research include the American South, the Civil War era, borderlands studies, transnational nineteenth century history, slavery, race, American imperialism, and territorial expansion. She recently published her first book, “A Continuous State of War: Empire-Building and Race-Making in the Civil War Era Gulf South” (University of Georgia Press), which addresses the process of U.S. territorial expansion into the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. South’s interest in obtaining Latin American territory during the Civil War Era. In addition to her monograph, she has published articles in Florida Historical Quarterly and contributed chapters to edited collections.

Anna Jungeun Lee 

Anna Jungeun Lee, currently the Global Korean Studies Invited Professor at the College of International Studies at Korea University, is a historian of Korea’s transnational consumption. Her primary appointment will be in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, but she will have a 25% appointment in the Department of History. Professor Lee is currently working on her first book project, “Buying into Consumption: Transnational Consumption in Developing Modern Korea,” which examines the irony of foreign and luxury material culture thriving under an authoritarian government. She has published articles in the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, and Acta Koreana.