People

U.S. Historian Mary Renda continually pushes the boundaries of her discipline through her focus on the role of women and gender, the multicultural nature of U.S. history, and the international contexts in which that history has taken shape. In addition to her course offerings in U.S. women's history, U.S. imperialism, and other areas of United States history, Renda teaches interdisciplinary women's studies courses. It's not a vacation from her area of specialty, however. "When I teach women's studies," says Renda, "it brings into sharper relief the importance of history."

Deeply engaged in bringing history to wider audiences beyond the academy, Daniel Czitrom served as the historical advisor for Copper, an original dramatic series set in Civil War-era New York City (BBC America, 2011-13). He has also appeared as on-camera commentator for several documentaries, including The Rise and Fall of Penn Station (PBS, 2014) and New York: A Documentary Film (PBS,1999). Czitrom is the author most recently New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that launched the Progressive Era (2016), as well as Media and the American Mind (1982), and Rediscovering Jacob Riis (2008).

Kavita Datla’s research focuses on colonial Hyderabad and explores what the histories of South Asia might tell us about larger shared experiences, be they colonialism, secularization, or democracy. In her writing and teaching, Datla examines the emergence of new political forms in the modern British Empire and hopes to animate the discussions and debates that have characterized South Asian publics. She is the author of The Language of Secular Islam: Urdu Nationalism and Colonial India (2013).

Christine DeLucia specializes in the indigenous and colonial histories of North America, particularly in the Northeast/New England. Researching in an interdisciplinary manner, she works extensively with local, regional, and transatlantic archives and museums, as well as with material and visual culture, archaeological sources, oral history, and the land itself. She has published on topics of memorialization, environmental history, and indigenous literary networks. In all her work she examines enduring connections between past and present, and how the places we inhabit can convey alternative narratives about diverse peoples.

Desmond Fitz-Gibbon is a cultural historian of modern Britain and western Europe, with thematic interests in cultural economy and comparative urban history. His own research concerns the integration of land and house property into the market culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Curious about the history of many things, however, his teaching covers a range of topics, from ancient money and histories of energy to Victorian murder and, of course, real estate agents.

Adi Gordon’s teaching interests include modern Intellectual and modern Jewish History. He researches modern Jewish and European intellectual histories with emphases on Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, on the one hand, and on Zionism and the Yishuv (the Jewish society in Pre-48 Palestine) on the other. His research focuses on the intersection of Central European and Jewish history and ideas with other historical arenas and global transformations

Lowell Gudmundson focuses on coffee, Central America, and Afro-Latin America.  His students have earned graduate and professional degrees in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe.  They have turned their own research interests, as diverse as history, immigration, ethnomusicology, health care, and food studies, into career paths in politics, publishing, medicine, public health, urban planning or ecotourism.  Gudmundson maintains close ties and joint research projects with Costa Rica’s public universities where he began his career.

Holly Hanson is a social historian of Africa whose research and publications focus on Uganda. Her interests include the history of democracy and political accountability in East Africa over the last five hundred years, land tenure, the role of farming in building prosperous communities, and economic history. Many of her classes incorporate community-based learning opportunities with recently resettled African immigrant in the area and "Education and Capacity in African History includes a collaboration with the Springfield Renaissance School.

Jeremy King studied Soviet history in college, but then fell prisoner to the tragedies and charms of Central Europe. Trained at Columbia University as a historian of Austria-Hungary and its successor states, he lived for several years in Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and a few other cities in the region. King teaches courses on Central Europe since about 1800. Themes and nodal points include nationalism, the state (liberal, democratic, fascist, and communist), "race," law, the Holocaust, public policy, and post-communism.

Lynda Morgan's research interests center around 19th century African-American history, including slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction. As a social historian, she places the experiences of groups of people at center stage, linked to political and economic history. Recently Morgan became interested in the reparations movement and its history, which has taken her into the 20th and 21st centuries. She is also interested in the free African-American population in the antebellum North, the history of segregation, the role of violence against African-Americans, and the abolition movement.

Carolin Roeder is a historian of Modern Europe. Her work pursues a transnational approach to the histories of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. She is particularly interested in environmental history, the history of exploration, and new approaches to Cold War history. Her research has taken her from the slopes of the Slovenian Alps to the peaks of the Pamirs, following Soviet scientists in the search of the yeti.

Lan  Wu is a historian of early modern China with a focus on borderlands. She received her PhD in the History-East Asia Program from Columbia University in February 2016. Lan’s research focuses on the role of religion in imperial formation in China. Her current book project examines how marginal communities in inner Asia grew stronger, as China expanded its territory in the eighteenth century. 

A writer, photographer, pilot, and Earth historian, Lauret Savoy is also a woman of mixed African American, Native American, and Euro-American heritage. Her work explores the complex intertwinings of natural and cultural histories. She writes about the stories we tell of the American landscape's origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Each of her courses challenges students to examine their assumptions about the world.

Robert Schwartz is a European historian keenly interested in the history of environmental change and public health. In his course,`Research Methods in History, Environmental Change and Public Health`, students explore how industrialization and the growth of cities in Victorian Britain affected infant mortality and the spread of infectious diseases; how the state, local governments, and medical professionals responded to these problems in public health; and how the history of environmental change and public health inform policy and practice today.