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Our faculty publish in a wide range of fields. Browse the most recent publications below and find even more in the publications archive.
Ikuko Asaka
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Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation
(2017 Duke University Press)
In Tropical Freedom Ikuko Asaka engages in a hemispheric examination of the intersection of emancipation and settler colonialism in North America. Asaka shows how from the late eighteenth century through Reconstruction, emancipation efforts in the United States and present-day Canada were accompanied by attempts to relocate freed blacks to tropical regions, as black bodies were deemed to be more physiologically compatible with tropical climates. By tracing these negotiations of the transnational racialization of freedom, Asaka demonstrates the importance of considering settler colonialism and black freedom together while complicating the prevailing frames through which the intertwined histories of British and U.S. emancipation and colonialism have been understood.
Eugene M. Avrutin
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Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin
(2022 Bloomsbury)
Analyzing a wide range of printed and visual sources, Racism in Modern Russia marks the first serious attempt to understand the history of racism in Russia over a span of 150 years. A brilliant examination of the complexities of racism, Eugene M. Avrutin's panoramic book asks powerful questions about inequality and privilege, denigration and belonging, power and policy, and the complex historical links between race, whiteness, and geography.
Teresa Barnes
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Uprooting University Apartheid in South Africa: From Liberalism to Decolonization
(2019 Routledge)
South Africa continues to be an object of fascination for people everywhere interested in social justice issues, postcolonial studies and critical race theory as manifested by the enormous worldwide attention given to the #RhodesMustFall movement. In this book, Teresa Barnes examines universities’ complex positioning in the apartheid era and argues that tracing the institutional legacies left by pro-apartheid intellectuals are crucial to understanding the fight to transform South African higher education.
Marsha E. Barrett
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Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism
(2024 Cornell University Press)
Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma reveals the fascinating and influential political career of the four-time New York State governor and US vice president. Marsha E. Barrett's portrayal of this multi-faceted political player focuses on the eclipse of moderate Republicanism and the betrayal of deeply held principles for political power. Although never able to win his party's presidential nomination, Rockefeller's tenure as governor was notable for typically liberal policies: infrastructure projects, expanding the state's university system, and investing in local services and the social safety net.
David R.M. Beck
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Bribed with Our Own Money: Federal Abuse of American Indian Funds in the Termination Era
(2024 University of Nebraska Press)
In Bribed with Our Own Money David R. M. Beck analyzes the successes and failures of Indigenous nations’ opposition to federal policy in the 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on case studies from six Native nations, Beck recounts how the U.S. government coerced American Indian nations to accept termination of their political relationship with the United States by threatening to withhold money that belonged to the tribes. Bribed with Our Own Money analyzes both successful and unsuccessful efforts of Native nations to oppose this policy within the larger context of long-standing federal abuse of tribal funds. It is the first book to view federal termination efforts grounded in bribery for what they were: a form of coercion.
James R. Brennan
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Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania
(2012 Ohio University Press)
Winner of the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize
Taifa is a story of African intellectual agency, but it is also an account of how nation and race emerged out of the legal, social, and economic histories in one major city, Dar es Salaam. Using deeply researched archival and oral evidence, Taifa transforms our understanding of urban history and shows how concerns about access to credit and housing became intertwined with changing conceptions of nation and nationhood. Taifa gives equal attention to both Indians and Africans; in doing so, it demonstrates the significance of political and economic connections between coastal East Africa and India during the era of British colonialism, and illustrates how the project of racial nationalism largely severed these connections by the 1970s.
Claudia Brosseder
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Inka Bird Idiom: Amazonian Feathers in the Andes
(2023 University of Pittsburgh Press)
From majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos, birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire. Claudia Brosseder uncovers the many meanings that Inkas attached to the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands. She shows how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace and shares new insights into Inka visions of interspecies relationships, an Inka ontology, and Inka views of the place of the human in their ecology. Inka Bird Idiom invites reconsideration of the deep intellectual ties that connected the Amazon and the mountain forests with the Andean highlands and the Pacific coast.
Adrian Burgos, Jr.
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¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues
(2020 Smithsonian)
by Margaret Salazar-Porzio and Adrian Burgos Jr. with Robin Morey
The dual-language (English and Spanish) ¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues / En los barrios y las grandes ligas takes readers on a journey into the heart and history of U.S. Latina/o baseball. The extraordinary stories of Latinas/os alongside the artifacts of their remarkable lives demonstrate the historic role baseball has played as a social and cultural force within Latino communities across the nation for over a century and how Latinos in particular have influenced and changed the game. The variety of stories and objects included in this volume brings our seemingly disparate pasts and present together to reveal how baseball is more than simply a game. The history of Latinos and baseball is this quintessential American story.
Antoinette Burton
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Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds
edited by Antoinette Burton, Renisa Mawani & Samantha Frost
(2024 Bloomsbury)
Human species supremacy is one of the most persistent fictions at work in the field of modern British imperial history today. This open access collection challenges that assumption, and investigates what histories of empire look like if reimagined as the effect of biocultural, chemical and cultural processes, rather than the result of effects by humans that have been visited upon cultural landscapes, fauna and biomes.
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Gender History: A Very Short Introduction
(2024 Oxford University Press)
This volume introduces the field of gender history--its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the 1970s.
Sundiata Cha-Jua
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Reparations and Reparatory Justice: Past, Present, and Future
(2024 University of Illinois Press)
Edited by Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Mary Frances Berry, and V. P. Franklin
Sharing a focus on reparations as an issue of justice, the contributors provide a historical primer of the movement; introduce the philosophical, political, economic, legal and ethical issues surrounding reparations; explain why government, corporations, universities, and other institutions must take steps to rehabilitate, compensate, and commemorate African Americans; call for the restoration of Black people’s human and civil rights and material and psychological well-being; lay out specific ideas about how reparations can and should be paid; and advance cutting-edge interpretations of the complex long-lasting effects that enslavement, police and vigilante actions, economic discrimination, and other behaviors have had on people of African descent. Groundbreaking and innovative, Reparations and Reparatory Justice offers a multifaceted resource to anyone wishing to explore a defining moral issue of our time.
Tamara Chaplin
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Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France
(2024 University of Chicago Press)
In Becoming Lesbian, historian Tamara Chaplin argues that the history of female same-sex intimacy in France is central to understanding the struggle to control the public sphere in the twentieth century. This monumental study draws on a wide range of undiscovered sources from cabaret culture, sexology, police files, radio and TV broadcasts, photography, the Minitel (an early form of internet), and private letters, as well as over one hundred interviews that Chaplin conducted with women from France and its colonies. Becoming Lesbian demonstrates how women of diverse classes and races came to define themselves as lesbian and used public spaces and public media to exert claims on the world around them in ways that made possible new forms of gendered and sexual citizenship.
Teri Chettiar
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The Intimate State: How Emotional Life Became Political in Welfare-State Britain
(2022 Oxford University Press)
The Intimate State explores how state-supported mental health initiatives made emotional intimacy both politically valued and personally desired during a crucial period of modern British psychiatric and cultural history. Focusing on the transformative decades following World War II, Teri Chettiar narrates the surprising story of how individual emotional wellbeing became conflated with inclusive democracy and subsequently prioritized in the eyes of scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens. Through new archival research, The Intimate State traces the rise of a modern psychiatric view of the importance of intimate relationships and the resultant political culture that continues to inform identity politics--and the politics of social equality--to this day.
Angela Diaz
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A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War-Era Gulf South
(2024 University of Georgia Press)
Winner of the 2024 Michael V. R. Thomason Best Book of the Year, Gulf South Historical Association
The story of several communities in the Gulf of Mexico that uncovers how wars within the upper rim of the Gulf facilitated American and southern imperialism in Latin America. Maria Angela Diaz covers several conflicts leading up to the Civil War with Mexicans, Cubans, and Native Americans. She places the Civil War within this framework and follows the trajectory of relations with Latin America through the end of the Civil War and ex-Confederates’ attempts to emigrate abroad.
Augusto F. Espiritu
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Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora
(2016 NYU Press)
Edited by Martin F. Manalansan and Augusto Espiritu
Written by a prestigious lineup of international scholars grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperial power, the essays examine both the genealogy of the Philippines’ hyphenated identity as well as the future trajectory of the field. Hailing from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors revisit and contest traditional renditions of Philippine colonial histories, from racial formations and the Japanese occupation to the Cold War and “independence” from the United States. Filipino Studies makes bold declarations about the productive frameworks that open up new archives and innovative landscapes of knowledge for Filipino and Filipino American Studies.
Peter Fritzsche
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Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
(2020 Basic Books)
This unsettling and illuminating history reveals how Germany’s fractured republic gave way to the Third Reich, from the formation of the Nazi party to the rise of Hitler. Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler’s First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich. Hitler’s First Hundred Days is the chilling story of the beginning of the end, when one hundred days inaugurated a new thousand-year Reich. This book was also published in French in 2024.
Laura Frances Goffman
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Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia
(2024 Stanford University Press)
Disorder and Diagnosis offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents—hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often excluded from histories of this region—Laura Frances Goffman demonstrates how the Gulf and its Arabian hinterland served as a buffer zone between "diseased" India and white Europe, as a space of scientific translation, and, ultimately, as an object of development.
Marc A. Hertzman
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After Palmares: Diaspora, Inheritance, and the Afterlives of Zumbi
(2024 Duke University Press)
Honorable Mention, 2025 Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section Book Prize
In After Palmares, Marc A. Hertzman tells the rise, fall, and afterlives of Palmares, one of history’s largest and longest-lasting maroon societies. Forged during the seventeenth century by formerly enslaved Africans in what would become northeast Brazil, Palmares stood for a century, withstanding sustained attacks from two European powers. In 1695, colonial forces assassinated its most famous leader, Zumbi. Hertzman examines the remarkable ways that Palmares and its inhabitants lived on after Zumbi’s death, creating vivid portraits of those whose lives and voices scholars have often assumed are inaccessible.
Kristin L. Hoganson
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The Heartland: An American History
(2019 Penguin Books)
One of NPR's Best Books of 2019
A history of a quintessentially American place--the rural and small town heartland--that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world. In The Heartland, Kristin L. Hoganson drills deep into the center of the country, only to find a global story in the resulting core sample. Deftly navigating the disconnect between history and myth, she tracks both the backstory of this region and the evolution of the idea of an unalloyed heart at the center of the land. A provocative and highly original work of historical scholarship, The Heartland speaks volumes about pressing preoccupations, among them identity and community, immigration and trade, and security and global power. And food. To read it is to be inoculated against using the word "heartland" unironically ever again.
Craig Koslofsky
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Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World
(2023 Penn State University Press)
Edited by Katherine Dauge-Roth and Craig Koslofsky
The early modern period opened a new era in the history of dermal marking. Intensifying global travel and trade, especially the slave trade, bought diverse skin-marking practices into contact as never before. Stigma examines the distinctive skin cultures and marking methods of Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas as they began to circulate and reshape one another in the early modern world. Stigma investigates how early modern people used permanent marks on skin to affirm traditional roles and beliefs, and how they hybridized and transformed skin marking to meet new economic and political demands.
Rosalyn R. LaPier
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Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet
(2017 University of Nebraska Press)
Winner of the 2018 John C. Ewers Book Award
Winner of the 2018 Donald Fixico Book Award
Rosalyn R. LaPier demonstrates that Blackfeet history is incomplete without an understanding of the Blackfeet people’s relationship and mode of interaction with the “invisible reality” of the supernatural world. In Invisible Reality LaPier presents an unconventional, creative, and innovative history that blends extensive archival research, vignettes of family stories, and traditional knowledge learned from elders along with personal reflections on her own journey learning Blackfeet stories. The result is a nuanced look at the history of the Blackfeet and their relationship with the natural world.
Ralph W. Mathisen
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Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations: From Prehistory to 640 CE, 3rd Edition
(2020 Oxford University Press)
Challenging the stereotypes and myths that typically characterize students' understanding of antiquity, Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations: From Prehistory to 640 CE, Third Edition, focuses on continuity and connections, along with cultural diffusion and cultural diversity, to show how history is a cumulative process and that numerous similar themes recur in different times and places. The text also explores sensitive issues and debates including attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and tolerance; gender issues and roles; slavery; social mobility; religion; political evolution; the nature of government; and imperialism.
Erik S. McDuffie
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The Second Battle for Africa: Garveyism, the US Heartland, and Global Black Freedom
(2024 Duke University Press)
Winner of the 2024 John Gjerde Prize, Midwestern History Association
In The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its offshoots. Throughout, McDuffie evaluates the possibilities, limitations, and gendered contours of Black nationalism, radicalism, and internationalism in the UNIA and Garvey-inspired movements. In so doing, he unveils new histories of Black liberation and Global Africa.
Robert Michael Morrissey
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People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America
(2022 University of Washington Press)
Winner of the 2023 Hal K. Rothman Book Prize for best book in western environmental history, Western History Association
In People of the Ecotone, Robert Morrissey weaves together a history of Native peoples with a history of an ecotone to tell a new story about the roots of the Fox Wars, among the most transformative and misunderstood events of early American history. To do this, he also offers the first comprehensive environmental history of some of North America’s most radically transformed landscapes—the former tallgrass prairies—in the period before they became the monocultural “corn belt” we know today. Tracing dynamic chains of causation from microscopic viruses to massive forces of climate, from the deep time of evolution to the specific events of human lifetimes, from local Illinois village economies to market forces an ocean away, People of the Ecotone offers new insight on Indigenous power and Indigenous logics.
Mauro Nobili
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Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa
(2020 Cambridge University Press)
The Tārīkh al-fattāsh is one of the most important and celebrated sources for the history of pre-colonial West Africa, yet it has confounded scholars for decades with its inconsistences and questions surrounding its authorship. In this study, Mauro Nobili examines and challenges existing theories on the chronicle, arguing that much of what we have presumed about the work is deeply flawed. Contextualizing its production within the broader development of the religious and political landscape of West Africa, this study represents a significant moment in the study of West African history and of the evolution of Arabic historical literature in Timbuktu and its surrounding regions.
Kevin Mumford
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Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis
(2016 University of North Carolina Press)
Bonnie and Vern Bullough Book Award Winner, Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality
A Stonewall Honor Book in Nonfiction, American Library Association Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Round Table
Finalist, Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, The Publishing Triangle
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award, LGBTQ Studies, Lambda Literary
This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times—from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism—helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality. In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists—from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald—Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men.
John Randolph
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Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility since 1850
(2012 University of Illinois Press)
Edited by John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin
Since its rapid imperial expansion in the seventeenth century, Russia's politics, society, and culture have exerted a profound influence on movement throughout Eurasia. The circulation of people, information, and things across Russian space transformed populations, restructured collective and individual identities, and created enduring legacies. This volume represents the latest discoveries of scholars attempting to rediscover this experience, and to understand its lasting meaning for today. A strong contribution to our understanding of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, this volume offers new models of research for historians, sociologists, political scientists, and others who are seeking to integrate the study of human mobility into their work.
David Sepkoski
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Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene
(2020 University of Chicago Press)
A history of scientific ideas about extinction that explains why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to “think catastrophically” about extinction. How we interpret the causes and consequences of extinction and their ensuing moral imperatives is deeply embedded in the cultural values of any given historical moment. And, as David Sepkoski reveals, the history of scientific ideas about extinction over the past two hundred years—as both a past and a current process—is implicated in major changes in the way Western society has approached biological and cultural diversity. In Catastrophic Thinking, Sepkoski uncovers how and why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to think catastrophically about extinction.
Carol Symes
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The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo): A Dramaturgical Analysis, Historical Commentary, and Latin Edition with a New English Verse Translation
(Medieval Institute Publications, 2023)
In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play’s dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose fully-staged production tested the theatricality of this translation, provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play’s rich interpretive and performative possibilities.