FROM THE CHAIR
Each year, our newsletter provides us an opportunity to review and reflect on our achievements and to think about the future. Championing our students and faculty is one of the best parts of being chair. Equally rewarding have been my interactions with our wonderful alumni. Please share your news and accomplishments with us, or tell us about the way a professor or class continues to affect you. We are always delighted to hear from you, and our present students value knowing what NIU history alumni are doing now. Please send your news to history@niu.edu
There are many ways to remain connected to our department. Some alumni choose to volunteer. For example, our students are often eager to hear from alumni about their career paths. Please let us know if you would be willing to talk with students about your job either at an in-person event or online. If you live close enough to DeKalb and are interested in volunteering at a departmental event, we have a few occasions where we could use help. Just let us know that you are interested in volunteering by emailing history@niu.edu
You can also stay in touch simply by attending our public events such as our annual Lincoln Lecture. This coming year, we are especially excited to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this lecture series. Clint Smith, award-winning poet and columnist for The Atlantic, will deliver the 20th Lincoln Lecture. He is the author of the book How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, his work focuses on teaching about race and racism in the classroom. The lecture will take place a bit earlier in the year than usual, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 12, and will be followed by a book signing event. We hope some of you will be able to join us. We had many reasons to be proud Huskies this year. To name just a few, we welcomed a new faculty member to our department. Professor Aurore Candier, the new director of the Center for Burma Studies, joined us this
past spring. Professor Natalie Joy was awarded the Bonn-Yale-Anton-Wilhelm-Amo Fellowship for academic year 2024-25 and has spent the past year in Germany working on a book. Under the leadership of Professor Christina Abreu, the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant that will allow Professor Abreu, colleagues and students to work with the NIU Libraries to digitize nearly 300 oral history interviews gathered as part of the NIU Latinx Oral History Project. In April, Professor Aaron Fogleman was named a Board of Trustees Professor, the highest honor accorded to faculty at NIU. It recognizes excellence in research, teaching, service, engagement and leadership. We also had the opportunity to celebrate the publication of books by two history faculty, Sean Farrell and Damián Fernández. Finally, our office administrator Julie Yarmolovych was recognized with a Rising Huskie Award, an honor for the most outstanding new staff on campus. Read about these achievements and more in the pages that follow.
We remain deeply grateful for the donations that allow us to continue to support our students as well as our research, teaching and engagement missions, even as state and university resources have declined. In gratitude for the generosity of our donors who give $20 or more, we will happily mail you one of our departmental T-shirts if you send your address and T-shirt size to history@niu.edu
I want to close this letter with a special word of thanks to two of our faculty. Professor Andy Bruno is moving on to a new position at another university. We will miss him a lot, and we remain grateful for his friendship and many contributions to our department, not least his tireless service as director of graduate studies over the past six years. Professor Eric Mogren, a specialist in American environmental history, has taught his last class and is looking forward to new adventures in retirement. We could always count on Professor Mogren for the perfect question at the right time, and colleagues across the university are especially grateful for his years of service on many important personnel committees. We miss him already and wish him a long and happy retirement.
Valerie L. Garver
NEW BOOKS IN HISTORY
Our history department bookshelf expanded again with the publication of three new books. Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast by Sean Farrell was published in October 2023 by Syracuse University Press. In this remarkable study, Farrell presents a detailed examination of Thomas Drew’s public career and the intricate linkages among anti-Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism and populist politics in early Victorian Belfast. Described by critics as an important and original work on the social, religious and political history of Belfast, Farrell demonstrates how Drew’s success stemmed from an adaptive combination of his fierce anti-Catholicism and populist Protestant politics; the creation of social and spiritual outreach programs that placed Christ Church at the center of west Belfast life; and the rapid growth of the northern capital. On Oct. 20, our department was delighted to celebrate Professor Farrell’s book with faculty, students and his family members in attendance.
Likewise, at the start of the spring semester, our department finally seized the opportunity to celebrate Professor Damián Fernández for his monograph, Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 C.E. (University of Pennsylvania Press), which was published in 2017. Fellowship opportunities and the pandemic meant the department could not schedule this overdue celebration earlier. Congratulations, Professor Fernández.
The second new book to appear this past year was Ismael Montana’s Blacks of Tunis in al-Timbuktāwī’s Hatk al-Sitr: A West African Jihadist’s Perspectives on Bori, Religious Deviance, and Race and Enslavement in Ottoman Tunisia (With Translation and Critical Annotation), published in January with Brill. This critical edition and a first complete translation of Hatk al-Sitr places the story of al-Timbuktāwī’s encounter with the Bori practitioners not just in the Maghribi and Sudanic African contexts, but also in the environment of the late 18th and 19th centuries' Jihad and Islamic revivalism. The result is an insight into a discourse on Bori, Jihad, and race and enslavement in the context of the African diaspora to the Islamic world.
In addition to his just-celebrated 2017 monograph, Damián Fernández’s book (coedited with Molly Lester and Jamie Wood) Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom: Beyond imitatio imperii, by Amsterdam University Press 2023. This volume interrogates the assumption that Visigothic practices and institutions were mere imitations of the Byzantine Empire. Contributors rethink these practices not as uncritical and derivative adoptions of Byzantine customs, but as dynamic processes in dialogue not only with the Byzantine Empire, but also with the contemporary Iberian context and the Roman past.
More faculty books are coming onto shelves in the year ahead. In the short term, keep your eyes open for Professor Beatrix Hoffman’s Borders of Care: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Fight for Health Care in the United States, which will be out January 2025 with the University of Chicago Press.
Professor Farrell and Professor Fernández speaking to attentive and captivated audiences at the Thurgood Marshall Gallery, where both receptions were held.
16TH ANNUAL HISTORY GRADUATE STUDENT ASSOCIATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE
This year, the History Graduate Student Association held its annual History Graduate Student Conference (HGSA) Friday, April 12, in Swen Parson Hall. In addition to participants from NIU, the conference attracted graduate students from other universities across the U.S. who presented their original historical research. After welcoming the attendees and offering some exciting opening remarks, Thom Brown, a Ph.D. student who chaired the conference, introduced the lineup of events associated with the conference program. The keynote speaker, Professor Chie Ikeya from Rutgers University, delivered a riveting lecture titled "Thinking Miscegenation Transnationally," which sparked an engaging discussion following her presentation. One of the highlights of this year's HGSA conference was the inclusion of history alumni, professors and current graduate students in hosting a session for undergraduate students interested in careers in history.
LATINX ORAL HISTORY PROJECT RECEIVES NEH GRANT DURING ITS 10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY
The Northern Illinois University Latinx Oral History Project is having a milestone year. Our project team celebrates 10 years of documenting the Latinx experience in the Midwest through interviews, and received a $348,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve and digitize the project.
“There is no oral history depository that centers on Latinos in the Midwest,” said Christina Abreu, director of the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies. “Much of Latino history remains confined to the coasts, where there have historically been larger communities. Stories of Latinos in the Midwest are just now being told, even though populations have existed for centuries in the region.”
From its humble beginnings in 2014 under the guidance of Professor Kristin Huffine and undergraduate students in the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies, the Latinx Oral History Project has grown to include the work of 40 students, including students enrolled in Professor Abreu’s classes. Interviews continue to be collected and processed by graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in oral history courses or participating in university-funded independent research projects.
“In collaboration with NIU Libraries, the NEH grant will allow us to digitize the entirety of our collection,” Abreu said. “It will provide access to full interviews as well as transcripts in both English and Spanish through an openaccess online database.”
The collection currently contains close to 300 audio and video interviews with Latinx community members: community activists and organizers; K-12 teachers and higher education faculty and staff; health care workers, factory workers and farmworkers; local and state government officials; and undocumented migrants and individuals from mixed-status families. Many of the interviews have focused on themes of family, identity formation, Latinx social and political organizing, and the difficulties faced by the undocumented in the United States. A subset of the collection, Voces of the Pandemic, provides 50 firsthand accounts of Latinx experiences during COVID-19.
For Abreu, who came to NIU in 2017, there’s still much more to be done.
In addition to digitization, Abreu hopes the collection will expand to include mapping, images and historical analysis.
Those materials will be of benefit to K-12 educators, researchers, scholars and students, according to Abreu. But it will also fuel outreach by the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies, through sharing research at conferences and organizing and hosting a national, one-day symposium.
While the NEH grant will help grow this project, its benefits go beyond northern Illinois.
“It puts us on the map in terms of historical resources for Latinos in the Midwest,” Abreu said.
The project’s success is truly a result of strong partnership, Abreu said, adding there have been others who have contributed to the project by doing outreach and networking with communities. Among them is the DeKalb County History Center, who collaborated with the center to host a “pop-up” oral history event, inviting the local Latinx community to participate in oral history interviews centered on the development of the downtown Pleasant Street neighborhood.
One of the strongest partners in the project’s development has been NIU’s Founders Memorial Library, which helped develop a pilot website providing digital access to the collection in 2018 and continues to handle the technical aspects of the online presence such as uploading content with descriptive metadata and indexing.
Up to this point, the project has been sustained by NIU internal grants. Seed funding from a Research and Artistry Opportunity grant got the project off the ground in 2018. Since then, it has been sustained by funding from the Friends of the NIU Library and two research, engagement and academic diversity grants.
Students Vivian Meade and Maria Aristeo collaborate with Christina Abreu on the Latinx Oral History Project as part of a summer research opportunity grant.
But for students who have worked on the Latinx Oral History Project, the impacts go beyond just earning academic credit.
Alexandra Alcantar, a Newman Civic Fellow who graduated in May, worked on the Latinx Oral History Project while completing her Honors capstone project on Latinx civic engagement.
“My role with this project was to record eight oral history interviews with college-aged Latinx students (and graduates) from NIU,” Alcantar explains. “The participants were all Latinx and from mixed-status families, and we discussed their experiences with civic engagement.”
Her capstone research was showcased at NIU’s annual Conference on Undergraduate Research and Engagement (CURE), earning her two first-place awards.
“The oral history project was very meaningful for me since I interviewed college-aged individuals to discuss their experiences about civic engagement. Their stories were very emotional and impactful to hear since I had some similar experiences with my own civic engagement on campus. I feel very blessed to have had this experience,” Alcantar added.
Matt Maletz has worked with the project from its beginning, first as a graduate assistant and currently as a doctoral student in history. As a master’s student, he played an important role in getting the Latinx Oral History Project off the ground.
Maletz worked with students who conducted the first oral history interviews as part of a summer research opportunities program; created bibliographies on Latinxs in the region and researched what other materials were available; and sorted through the nuts and bolts of setting up an institutional oral history project.
“I taught several sections of oral history and Latino oral history, and the interviews collected as assignments for these courses were added to the collection,” he said. “I also processed several sample interviews for this project, which involved creating metadata for the audio and video files for the project’s first website.”
His experiences are still influencing him as a doctoral student.
“When I began working on the oral history project, I did not believe that it would have much to do with my research. I realized the potential for using oral history to supplement my archival research for my dissertation.”
The impact of NIU’s Latinx Oral History Project is apparent to the student who has been involved for nearly a decade.
“It’s clear that the project has documented an important era in the relationship of Latinxs to the larger American body politic,” Maletz said. “The project has borne witness to the rise of xenophobia and nativism, authoritarianism and pandemic. Future historians will be able to look to the collection to help understand this eventful period. I am proud to have made some small contribution to it.”
Access the collection here
By the Numbers: NIU Latinx Oral History Project
271 interviews, averaging about 54 minutes in length for a total of 228 hours of recordings.
238 English transcripts have already been created.
37 Spanish-only transcripts.
Alexandra Alcantar, a Newman Civic Fellow who graduated in May, worked on the Latinx Oral History Project while completing her Honors capstone project on Latinx civic engagement. She presented her research at the 2024 annual CURES Conference.
HISTORY PROFESSOR AARON FOGLEMAN NAMED 2024 BOARD OF TRUSTEES PROFESSOR
History is still being written — and discovered. And perhaps among its most successful explorers is NIU history Professor Aaron Fogleman
His work on revolution, slavery, gender, religion, and forced and free transatlantic migrations has helped develop the fields of early America and the Atlantic World — an area of study focusing on interactions among the people of Europe, Africa and the Americas from the 15th to the mid-19th centuries.
“There is no doubt that Dr. Fogleman is a leading voice among Atlantic World historians,” says NIU Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences Bob Brinkmann. “He has had a long and rich career at NIU that put him in the midst of the international scholarship that emerged in the last 30 years. He is widely recognized as a key contributor to the literature on this topic and his ideas have sparked important scholarship.”
For his internationally recognized research, service within the NIU community and passion for helping students to succeed — many have gone on to become historians themselves — the university has awarded Fogleman with its 2024 Board of Trustees Professorship. The professorship is the top university honor reserved for faculty members who demonstrate excellence in all facets of teaching, service, leadership, and research or artistry.
The author of numerous academic articles and four books, Fogleman sheds light on important but long overlooked aspects of history — both the colonizers and the colonized, and the free and the unfree migrants.
The NIU professor’s impressive body of work includes his 2013 book, Two Troubled Souls, which traces the lives of a married couple who, as missionaries and religious seekers, traveled Europe, the Caribbean and North America during the 18th century. Through their personal history, Fogleman illuminates the challenges of the era and the roles of religion, gender and marriage at that time. The book received the American Historical Association’s 2014 James Rawley Prize, honoring the best book exploring the integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century.
Last year, Fogleman and his former doctoral student, Robert Hanserd, published their book, Five Hundred African Voices, bringing together an unprecedented number of life stories of African slave-ship survivors. Recognized as an indispensable resource for scholars, the book catalogs nearly 500 discrete accounts and more
than 2,500 printings of those accounts published over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages.
Susan Branson, professor and chair of the history department at Syracuse University, says Fogleman’s strengths can be found in “his ability to view events and individuals from a new perspective.”
“Often these insights come from his talent for archival investigation; he is a scholar who questions boundaries of accepted wisdom, and in the process uncovers neglected or disregarded documents that reveal new information,” Branson says. “Uncovering hundreds of slave narratives, that historians claimed did not exist, is the most recent example of this ability.”
A 22-year veteran of NIU, Fogleman has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the NIU Presidential Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professorship. He serves on institutional boards at NIU; on national and international grant-awarding committees; and as a referee for scholarly research in national and international journals.
What’s more, Fogleman’s classroom credentials are impeccable. He has taught 5,000 students at all levels; sat on 13 dissertation committees (directing six); employed eight research assistants; and directed hundreds of research projects, field essays, seminar papers and senior theses. His former Ph.D. students hold professorships at the likes of the University of Iowa and the College of William & Mary.
“I challenge students to excel while supporting those needing extra care,” Fogleman says. “I support students who are diverse in age, heritage, gender and sexual orientation. We emphasize current relevance and history that matters, so students recognize themselves when studying history.”
Not surprisingly, Fogleman’s former students sing his praises and often cite their professor’s encouragement to “think big.”
Under Fogleman’s guidance, for example, Jeremy Knoll accomplished an incredible feat as an undergraduate. He conceptualized and carried out an analysis of Illinois Civil War monuments for Research Rookies, presented his findings to Illinois historians, and published the research in the highly respected Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.
“Even now, we continue to correspond regularly, and his advice has continued to help me in my graduate studies,” says Knoll, who’s now a Ph.D. student in history at The Ohio State University. “Dr. Fogleman’s impact on my life as both mentor and professor has enabled me to reach heights in my academic career that I had never anticipated.”
FACULTY AWARDS
Professor Anne Hanley received a short-term grant from the Luso-American Development Foundation to spend a month in Portugal's National Archive Torre de Tombo in the fall. Hanley will be researching the 18thcentury rice trade between colonial South Carolina and Lisbon for a comparative project that examines North American and Brazilian competition for the Lisbon commodities market in the age of mercantilism.
Professor Natalie Joy was awarded the Bonn-YaleAnton-Wilhelm-Amo Fellowship at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn (Universität Bonn) in Bonn, Germany, from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024.
Professor Ismael Montana was awarded a summer 2024 research and artistry grant for his project “The Tax (Majba) Fiscal Registers and Enslaved West African Population in NineteenthCentury Tunisia: Toward a Historical and Demographic Database.” Montana also received funding from OSEEL to involve an undergraduate student in this research.
STAFF AWARD
Julie Yarmolovych, the office administrator for NIU's Department of History, is a recipient of the 2024 Rising Huskie Staff Award for her outstanding work, dedication and support of our department. This award recognizes staff members who, despite being new to NIU, have demonstrated excellence, innovation and performance that has made a significant impact in a short period of time.
Christine Worobec, Professor Emerita, Board of Trustees Professor and Presidential Research Professor (pictured in the back row on the right and being introduced by Professor Valerie Garver, chair of the history department), was among the 11 alumni, faculty and staff honored during the college’s 2023 CLAS Distinguished Awards. The CLAS Distinguished Awards program recognizes individuals who have achieved prominence in their professional fields or who have made significant contributions to the college, its mission and its reputation for excellence.
LINCOLN LECTURE AND OTHER EVENTS
Yale historian Professor Greg Grandin delivered a riveting Lincoln Lecture Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023, in Altgeld Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. His lecture, which drew on his 2020 Pulitzer Prizewinning book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, explored the changing meanings of the frontier in American identity and U.S. history from the American Revolution to the 2016 electoral politics of the border wall.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians, Grandin has published widely in The Nation, where he is a member of the editorial board; the London Review of Books; The New Republic; NACLA’s Report on the Americas; and the New York Times, among other venues. He is also a regular guest on Democracy Now!
Named for the distinguished historian of imperial Russia, W. Bruce Lincoln, who taught at NIU from 1967 to 1999, the endowed Lincoln Lecture series brings to campus distinguished scholars who address topics of interest to both the academic community and the general public. We are grateful to his widow, Mary Lincoln, for creating and funding the lecture series. Contributions to the W. Bruce Lincoln Endowed Lecture Series should be sent to the Northern Illinois University Department of History, Zulauf Hall 715, DeKalb, Illinois 60115-2893; checks payable to the Northern Illinois University Foundation, with a notation in support of the W. Bruce Lincoln Endowment.
We are thrilled to announce that the 2024 Lincoln Lecture will be delivered by Clint Smith, Ph.D. An award-winning poet and columnist for The Atlantic, Smith is the author of the book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. This book explores sites of memorialization of slavery, investigating how their storytelling has shaped our historical understanding of the past. As a staff writer for The Atlantic, his work focuses on teaching about race and racism in the classroom.
PROFESSOR NATALIE JOY REFLECTS ON RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP IN GERMANY
I spent the 2023-24 academic year in Germany as a postdoctoral fellow at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn (Universität Bonn). Bonn is a beautiful, mid-sized city in northwestern Germany located along the Rhine River, not far from Belgium and the Netherlands.
The Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies is one of six interdisciplinary research clusters, known as “Clusters of Excellence,” at the University of Bonn. These clusters are funded by the German federal government and the government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Bonn is located. As its name suggests, the BCDSS focuses on slavery and other forms of “asymmetrical dependency,” a category that encompasses a wide range of unequal, hierarchical relationships. Each year, the BCDSS organizes its activities around a specific thematic research area; for 2023-24, the theme was “Gender and Intersectionality,” guiding both the year's events and the research of visiting fellows.
The postdoctoral fellowship I held this past year, the Bonn-Yale-Anton-Wilhelm-Amo Fellowship, is named after Anton Wilhelm Amo, who was brought from Africa (present-day Ghana) to Germany in 1707 at about seven years old. After becoming a free person, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy and taught at several German universities before returning to Africa.
The Bonn-Yale-Anton-Wilhelm-Amo Fellowship supports scholars like me who study the history of the United States. My research focuses on how Native Americans influenced the rhetoric and strategy of the American antislavery movement in the three decades leading up to the U.S. Civil War. The Amo Fellowship is a joint initiative between the BCDSS and Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC). I had previously held a monthlong fellowship at the GLC in May 2014 for the same project. Although none of my research archives are in Germany, my year at the BCDSS has been highly productive, allowing me to revise my book manuscript, The Indian’s Cause: Native Americans and the American Antislavery Movement, for publication. The BCDSS’s extensive schedule of lectures, workshops and seminars has made this year particularly engaging.
The opportunity for informal conversations with other scholars has been invaluable and highlights the benefits of a residential fellowship.
The BCDSS is a highly interdisciplinary environment, which has made my experience here especially enjoyable. Researchers at the BCDSS, including professors and Ph.D. and M.A. students, come from a variety of fields such as history, anthropology, art history, literary and cultural studies, and archaeology, among others. Throughout the year, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and visiting scholars present on diverse topics such as contemporary Brazilian food delivery workers, enslaved lead miners in ancient Greece and the visual culture of slavery. Engaging with these varied fields has been enlightening, and I look forward to incorporating some of what I have learned into my NIU classes.
Spending the year in Germany has expanded my scholarly network. I have had the opportunity to meet scholars from around the world, including Germany, the U.S., Brazil and Romania. I have particularly enjoyed discussions with German scholars in American Studies and am eager to build on these connections after returning to the United States. Additionally, receiving feedback from scholars at the BCDSS and elsewhere has been beneficial. I have given talks at the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln), and will present new research at a conference on African American citizenship at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in the Netherlands in December 2024.
I am grateful for the opportunity to work at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies this year. I am confident that this experience will continue to positively influence my research and teaching long after my return to NIU.
NIU HISTORIANS REACH NEW AUDIENCES
Our history department has consistently emphasized public history and community engagement as vital aspects of the historians’ craft. As in the previous academic year, 202324 was no different. Many faculty members engaged in a number of exciting public history projects, contributing to NIU’s history department mission of making history come alive for people in northern Illinois and beyond.
Among the exciting public history projects was one undertaken by Professor Christina Abreu, who organized and participated in a roundtable on “Latinx Oral History Projects in the Midwest” at the Latina/o/x Studies Annual Conference in Tempe, Arizona, April 17, 2024.
Professor Christina Abreu and Spencer Mosner following their participation in this roundtable on their research at the 2024 annual CURES Conference.
During the spring 2024 semester, Professor Rosemary Feurer, who has made significant contributions to public history, took her History 373 class, “Strikes, Riots, and Uprisings in U.S. History,” on a tour of sites in Chicago.
This tour was made possible thanks to the generosity of an anonymous history department donor who believes in the value of public history. Among the sites Feurer and her class visited were the Haymarket Monument in Chicago, the new Ida B. Wells monument and the Pullman National Historical Park. During the class tour, senior history major Paul Benson commented that he had driven by the famous Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument in Forest Home Cemetery in Oak Park many times while visiting his grandparents but had never realized the site’s rich historical significance.
“This furthered my understanding and was an amazing experience.” NIU junior Jessica DeGenova also remarked that the Pullman site was her favorite, noting that it “was very surreal to stand in the very places where some of these significant strikes, uprisings and rebellions that we have been reading about occurred.”
Other exciting examples of faculty engagement with the community come from the new “History, Culture and Politics Discussion Group.” This group, started by Aaron Fogleman in the fall 2022 along with NIU library archivist Bradley Wiles, consists of history faculty, library faculty, and graduate and undergraduate students. The group met semimonthly in the Rare Books and Special Collections department of the library with pizza and drinks to discuss readings on the controversial political uses of history throughout the world. The group plans to continue their semimonthly meetings next academic year.
Meanwhile, Professor Amanda Littauer, who has created a space in her scholarship to address mental health among LGBTQ+ young people today, concluded a three-year term of service on the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBTQ Status in the Profession.
In April 2024, Professor Aurore Candier, our recently appointed director of the Center for Burma Studies, launched an exhibit on Burmese Marionettes, showcasing student work and aiming to enhance the center's visibility. Candier also facilitated a faculty meeting to brainstorm strategies involving various departments, marking a step toward comprehensive planning for the center's development.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS AND AWARDS
NIU Lincoln Laureate Finalist
Violet Thorp
Scholarships
Jeannie A. Hainds Scholarship
Kalin Schaeffer
Nicole Perkins
Marvin Rosen Scholarship
Olivia Zapf
Oscar Matasar Scholarship
Angie Gutierrez
Bruce W. Zabel Scholarship
Jon Dunlap
James P. and Mary Clare Sczepaniak Scholarship
Kalin Schaeffer
Alisha Loerhl
Brian Bustos
Danielle Germain
Blake Axelson
William P. Wirth Memorial Scholarship
Blake Axelson
Angelo and Linda Capua History Studies Scholarship
Brenda Schurrer
Alia Moran
Juli Anderson
Daniell Germain
Donald L. Hatch Jr. and Elizabeth Klaus
Hatch Scholarship
Samantha Hopkins
David L. Wagner Medieval Studies Scholarship
Desirée Griffin
Awards and Prizes
LAS Dean’s Award
Zachary Mena
Outstanding History Student
Samantha Hopkins
HIST 495 Research Paper Prize
Nicholas Merrell
Scott Freund
David L. Wagner Prize in Medieval Studies
Desirée Griffin
James Shirley Undergraduate Essay Prize
Veronica Morales
Edward Hoffman
Tyler Rambuski-Salzman
Patrick J. White History Education Awards
Winners: Anna Sheehey (fall 2023) and Ethan Davis (spring 2024)
Runners Up: Colin Strader (fall 2023) and Jacob Doyle (spring 2024)
Honorable Mention: Austin Van Vleek (fall 2023) and Ashley Tutt (spring 2024)
UNDERGRADUATE NEWS AND AWARDS (continued)
Two undergraduate students from the History and Social Science Secondary Educator Licensure Program, Colin Strader (placed at South Elgin High School with Walt Gola and Michael Thornton) and Ashley Tutt (placed at East Aurora High School with Ken Gerk and Patrick Milz), were awarded the Exemplary Student Teacher Award. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Committee on Teacher Preparation and Development recognizes the best of the best within each program with this distinction. Candidates are nominated by either their university supervisor or cooperating teacher, and they submit teaching materials for review. Ultimately, one or two individuals from each program are identified as the recipients of this award.
Olivia Zapt won one of the highest-rated posters in the humanities category at NIU’s 2023 Conference on Undergraduate Research and Engagement for her project, “American Rice in the Portuguese Market during the Eighteenth Century,” mentored by Professor Anne Hanley Zapt was also selected for the SEF to fund her primary source research on Carolina-Portugal trade in fall 2024.
HISTORY UNDERGRADUATE MINI-CONFERENCE
This academic year, our history department organized a three-part, mini-undergraduate conference with the theme “Historical Methods in Action.” These mini conferences were generously funded by an anonymous donor to whom we remain grateful. One of the pedagogical goals of these mini-conferences was to promote undergraduate research skills, artistry and engagement. Led by Professors Trude
Jacobsen Gidaszewski (fall '23), Sean Farrell (fall '23) and Aaron Fogleman (spring '24), these conferences not only exceeded expectations in creating a professionallike environment for students to present their original research topics in poster sessions, but also prepared them for further engagement in the NIU Conference for Undergraduate Research and Engagement (CURE).
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT SPOTLIGHT:
OLIVIA ZAPF
Hometown: Green Bay, Wisconsin
Year: Expected graduation: 2026
Majors: History, political science
What did you want to be when you were growing up? Are you pursuing that as a major, or have you taken another path?
As a little kid, I wanted to be a veterinarian because I wanted to help animals. Later, I wanted to become an author and write books and scripts. I have chosen to pursue neither career; however, I do still enjoy being around animals and writing. Instead, I have chosen to become a history major and political science minor to later pursue a degree in law. I hope to be a lawyer to better the lives of individuals in my future community.
What is your major (and/or minor) and why did you decide on this course of study?
I am a history major and political science minor. I chose history because I had really, really inspirational teachers for my AP European History and AP United States History classes in high school. Additionally, I was really good at it
and enjoyed learning about the past and how it can affect the present and future. For my political science minor, I really like studying politics and how they work, so I can be an informed voter and understand the system while helping others learn about it, too.
Tell us about the research you are doing and why it interests you.
Currently, I'm in the Research Rookies program and working with Dr. Hanley in the history department about the South Carolina rice trade in the 18th century. This research is interesting to me because it has to do with all parts of life: economics, politics and society. In education generally, these three have been pretty separated, and it's interesting to see them all come together through the South Carolina rice trade.
How has conducting research strengthened your education and experience at NIU?
I'm learning how to do research, annotate articles, write academic papers and work with a research team. Educationally, a lot of the skills I'm learning will help me
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: OLIVIA ZAPF (continued)
in future classes and in doing my own synthesizing and questioning rather than taking sources completely at face value, which I think is really important. Regarding my NIU experience, I'm getting connected and learning how to use resources that I would have learned way later; luckily, I have access to these resources now and can learn to use them.
How will your research experience help you in the future?
In the future, both in undergraduate and law school, I will need to be able to read, synthesize and write effectively. Outside of that, I will need to be able to bring sources together to create and defend an argument as a lawyer. By doing this research now and learning how to bring logical arguments together, I can focus on making those skills better rather than creating them. This experience is showing me, in a guided way, how to work through research and places of inquiry in an efficient and effective way.
Who at NIU has been important to your success doing research and why?
The professor I'm working with, Dr. Anne Hanley from the history department, is my faculty mentor and has been really beneficial to my success in research because she is both giving me guidance and letting me have autonomy in how I do different aspects of the research. She is also really understanding when circumstances come up, which I really appreciate. Life happens to all of us and being able to work through and around that is really important to me. Additionally, I wouldn't have been able to work on this project without her.
Are you involved in any student organizations, mentoring programs or extracurricular activities? If so, which ones? How have they added to your experience as a Huskie?
Yes, I'm the assistant opinion editor at the Northern Star (NIU's student newspaper), am part of the Honors Program and am in the Research Rookies program. Overall, these three extracurriculars are reinforcing and teaching me new skills about management, involvement
and research. I'm grateful for these experiences, and I encourage anyone who's interested to take part in any of these organizations/extracurriculars. Or any organization; there are so many on campus that you can definitely find a club or group to call your own!
What do you enjoy the most about the Honors Program?
Personally, I really like the Honors classes. Last semester, I was in the Honors section of COMS 100, and this semester I'm in the Honors seminar HIST 399 (Montaigne and the Wars of Religion) with Dr. Sandberg. These classes are fun because they're usually smaller and can foster more of a community than most normal classes can. They're a nice change of pace from the bigger classes where it can feel a little bit more overwhelming.
Who has been one of your favorite instructors/professors and why? What course did they teach?
He doesn't work at NIU anymore, but Dr. Jim Hill was my favorite professor. He taught POLS 210: Law and the Courts and had such an interesting teaching style and way of telling stories to help his students remember and understand the content. His teaching style was very student-centered, and class debates were focused on what we were discussing while bringing in real legal principles and arguments, which helped me get a better feel for the legal profession.
Where is your favorite spot on campus or in the community? Why are you drawn to it?
The courtyard by Davis Hall (meteorology building) that looks over the lagoon is probably my favorite campus spot. I'm drawn to it because when it's nice outside, the fountains and lagoon look pretty, and it's a nice spot to sit and eat breakfast. Additionally, walking around the lagoon is really nice. Geese are usually there, and as long as you're mindful of them, they leave you alone.
GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
2023-2024 M.A. Graduates
Adiza Mohammed
April Sanchez
Peter Alexander
Chela Aufderheide
Sean Carter
Alexander Engelhardt
Yakubu Naporo
Berkeley Neuman
2023-2024 Ph.D. Graduates
Journey Steward
Alexander Sosenko
Fellowships and Awards
Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Alexander Lundberg
Hugh Jameson Graduate Student Essay Prize
Chela Aufderheide
Honorable Mentions: Helen Kallao and Jonathan Adsit
James Shirley Graduate Student Article Prize
Anna Henderson
Outstanding M.A. Student
Chela Aufderheide
Outstanding Ph.D. Student
J. Hollis Harris
Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation
Kevin Luginbill (Aug. 2022-May 2023)
Norris Graduate Fellowship
J. Hollis Harris
Earl W. Hayter and Alfred F. Young Research
Grant (Hayter-Young)
Pale Almissouri
Alfred F. Young Dissertation Research Grant
J. Hollis Harris
Daniel McCoy
Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching
Jonathan Adsit
Angelo and Linda Capua Graduate Fellowship
J. Hollis Harris
GRADUATE STUDENT SPOTLIGHTJ. HOLLIS HARRIS
Hometown: Nashville, North Carolina
Year: Expected graduation: 2025 Doctoral Program: History
What did you want to be when you were growing up? Are you pursuing that as a major, or have you taken another path?
I have always been interested in some form of history, but distinctly remember wishing I could be a train conductor as a child. Something about them fascinated me. Now, I am pursuing a Ph.D. in history, a much different goal than what young Hollis envisioned.
What is your major (and/or minor) and why did you decide on this course of study?
I am in the history Ph.D. program, and I decided to pursue this course of study because once I found it, I did not think my life would be complete without it in some form. I was fortunate enough to begin a career in the field through NIU and hope to continue it for a lifetime.
Tell us about the research you are doing and why it interests you.
I am researching and writing a dissertation about a secret society of Irish Americans known as Clan-na-Gael. They were based in "districts" and "camps" around the U.S. in the early 20th century but were mainly headquartered in cities like New York and Philadelphia. Members of the clan were oathbound to secrecy and believed that the only way to free Ireland from the British Empire was to do so through armed force. It interests me because they were eventually successful despite themselves, which makes Clan-na-Gael's history useful for understanding how some nations come to be.
How has conducting research strengthened your education and experience at NIU?
Research has been at the very core of my experience at NIU since beginning the M.A. program. Without the ability to do this work through research seminars, independent studies and research trips to New York and Boston, my experience at NIU would be much emptier. I count myself fortunate that research has instead made it much fuller, more enjoyable and undoubtedly worthwhile.
How will your research experience help you in the future?
Good research is at the core of what historians do, and my personal hope is that in the future it will lead to equally good publications that teach people useful things about the past. I also think it will sharpen my ability to educate others about the past through classes in ways that encourage them to take something useful from learning about history into their daily lives.
Who at NIU has been important to your success doing research and why?
Sean Farrell, Ph.D., my advisor, has constantly shed light on every bit of darkness that has ever clouded the path ahead. His patience with me has been astounding, and he has exerted such a positive impact on my intellectual development that I do not much care to imagine a life without having met him.
How have you connected with other students to study for classes, meet new people or form new friendships?
Yes, I’ve been working with several other graduate students to connect with people across campus for the past few semesters. We are working to build the NIU Graduate Student Association, a campuswide organization open to all graduate students. We envision a GSA built by graduate students, run by graduate students and that works on behalf of all graduate students. We plan social events, foster community and advocate on behalf of all NIU graduate students. Please reach out to us at northern. illinois.gsa@gmail.com if you are interested in joining!
Are you involved in any student organizations, mentoring programs or extracurricular activities? If so, which ones? How have they added to your experience as a Huskie?
I am involved with the History Graduate Student Association as its current president and with the Graduate Student Association as a founding member and organizer. The HGSA
serves history graduate students specifically, while the Graduate Student Association is a campuswide effort that is still developing. Both have helped stave off the isolation that can come with specialized research, particularly as they have enabled me to make real, lasting friendships within my department and around campus in general.
What NIU offices, departments or resources have helped you succeed? And how?
First and foremost, the NIU Department of History has fostered a truly exceptional graduate experience. The faculty and staff give quite a lot of their time to mentoring students outside the classroom, the courses taught are high quality across the board and the department does everything possible to facilitate graduate work outside NIU.
Who has been one of your favorite instructors/professors and why? What course did they teach?
As an M.A. student, I took Andy Bruno's Disasters in History reading seminar, and it was absolutely one of my favorite courses in my time here at NIU. We discussed a range of different historical themes through "disaster history," or that which focuses specifically on the relationship between disasters in human society. This meant developing a historical perspective on hurricanes, for example, which I never thought I would do before becoming a graduate student. Still, my experience has been all the better for it!
GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
Berkeley Neuman (M.A. May 2024), was accepted into the doctoral program in history at the University of Nevada in Reno with a multiyear fellowship and began study there in the fall 2024 semester.
Sheila Bombaar (M.A. May 2023), was accepted into the doctoral program in History at the University of Texas in Austin with a multiyear fellowship and will begin study there in the fall 2024 semester.
Doctoral student Anna Henderson published an article entitled “‘Lively and Resolute at Anything He Undertakes’: Mobility, Agency, and Self-Liberation among Elderly Enslaved People in Colonial and Antebellum
North Carolina” in the North Carolina Historical Review, scheduled to appear in the April 2024 issue.
Doctoral student Reginal Rice won the Best Feature Documentary Award for his film Tracing Our Path Through Bronzeville at the Tampa Bay Black Art and Film Festival 2024. This documentary was recognized for its artwork, archives and interviews highlighting the cultural achievements of the Bronzeville neighborhood. Watch for an announcement of a screening of this film in the 20242025 school year.
Doctoral student LeNie Adolphson won the 2024 Timuel D. Black Fellowship for her dissertation project, “Health Care in the Black Metropolis: A History of Provident Hospital.”
FACULTY NEWS
Distinguished Teaching Professor E. Taylor Atkins returned to our department in 2023 and was delighted to be in the classroom full time again. In 2022, Bloomsbury Academic published the second edition of A History of Popular Culture in Japan, From the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Atkins contributed a chapter, “Playing Changes: Music as Mediator Between Japanese and Black Americans,” to Black Transnationalism and Japan (eds. Natalia Doan and Sho Konishi, Leiden University Press, 2024), and finished a manuscript on the 1974 album Kogun by the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 Japan series. As an Honors Faculty Fellow in 2023-24, Professor Atkins taught an
Honors seminar on Rebel Music, concluding with a public conference at which students presented their research projects as papers, video documentaries, and live music and dance performances. Musician/composer/activist Jen Shyu delivered the keynote address. As Japan Business Society of Detroit Foundation Specialty Scholar, he will teach Japanese Culture and Society for study abroad students in the May Career/Culture Hybrid Program at Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone, Shiga, prefecture, with whom he has a longstanding relationship.
Over the past year, Professor Andy Bruno has continued giving talks and publishing popular pieces related to his 2022 book Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy, which received its second award recognition in December 2023, an honorable mention for the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize for an outstanding monograph on Russian, East European or Eurasian history from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He has also been busy working on a new book about the environmental history of economic
growth in the Soviet Union. In connection to this project, he has helped put together a conference roundtable and journal forum on degrowth and environmental history. Other ongoing collaborative projects have including coediting a journal cluster on Eurasian climate history and an anthology of Russian ecological texts. After a six-year stint as the director of Graduate Studies for the department, in the summer 2024, Professor Bruno accepted a new position as the Stephen F. Cohen Chair in Russian History at Indiana University Bloomington. We wish him all the best in this new role.
Professor Aurore Candier, recently appointed director of the Center for Burma Studies, began her tenure with extensive administrative duties and active engagement both on and off campus. She attended the Association of Asian Studies conference in Seattle to present her paper on the conceptual history of Burma. Back at NIU, she organized a student-led workshop aimed at shaping future strategies for the center, drawing participation from a diverse group of students.
Professor Sean Farrell had another busy year. The highlight was definitely the publication of his new book, Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2023), in October 2023. The publication of this book led to a number of great events, including a departmental celebration in October and book launches at Washington University in St. Louis and Queen's University, Belfast. Farrell gave an invited keynote lecture at the Midwest regional meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Much of the rest of his time was spent in committee meetings. One of Farrell’s doctoral students, Journey Steward, received her Ph.D. in December. Farrell also had the opportunity to teach some great students in Historical Methods (395), Senior Thesis (495), British Empire and Modern Ireland.
Professor Damián Fernández returned to teaching in person after a research leave in Germany. This year, Fernández has continued working on his various research projects. In addition to academic articles, his book Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom: Beyond imitatio imperii, (coedited with Molly Lester and Jamie Wood) was published by Amsterdam University Press in late 2023. Fernández also made his first incursions in the realm of podcasts and hosted two episodes on ancient history (in Spanish) for the Argentine Association of Research Historians.
This year, Professor Aaron Fogleman continued to work on his “African Voices” project. This included working with postdoctoral and doctoral students to find another 270 such published accounts by African slave-ship survivors in the Atlantic World, which will be included in the planned website. Fogleman has also written several articles based on this material, with more pending, and he presented some of this work at the Early American Workshop at Providence College (Rhode Island). In November, Fogleman presented material from his monograph project titled “Immigrant Voices” at the Early Modern Atlantic Workshop at the University of Minnesota via Zoom. In the fall, he also chaired a Zoom session at a conference organized by the McNeil Center of Early American Studies in Philadelphia that celebrated the career of Alan Kulikoff, former professor of history at NIU.
During the 2023-24 academic year, Fogleman also organized two new book receptions. In the first (Oct. 20), we celebrated the publication of Sean Farrell’s book: Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast (Syracuse University Press). On Jan. 19, we did the same for Damián Fernández — after a very long delay — for his book titled Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 C.E., Empire and After (University of Pennsylvania Press).
This year, Fogleman taught the U.S. survey course (to 1865), History 495 Senior Thesis in the fall, and History 395 Historical Methods. He also taught a new course, Transatlantic Slavery, 1492-1867, with Ismael Montana in the spring.
Professor Valerie Garver spent a lot of time writing this year. Aside from continuing work on books and articles in progress, she completed the department’s onceevery-eight-years program review. She had an especially delightful time this past spring teaching a revamped MDST 225 Introduction to Medieval Society and Culture (the old IDSP 225).
In her capacity as assistant director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Professor Trude Jacobsen Gidaszewski attended the Luce Southeast Asia Initiative Grantee Convening Conference, titled Southeast Asian Studies Now: Transdisciplinary, Collaborative, and Engaged, at UCLA Sept. 29-30, 2023. During the conference, she presented NIU's project, "Expressions of Global Asia: Southeast Asians in Illinois." Additionally, she organized a panel titled "Unlikely Bedfellows? Cambodia, the Cold War, and Transnational Solidarities" at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in Seattle March 14-17. This panel featured her own research on public health, as well as contributions from current Ph.D. candidates Thom Brown and Court Hansen and NIU alumnus Ron Leonhardt.
After serving as acting director and then assistant director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at NIU for a year and a half, Gidaszewski is returning to the department full time to complete her third monograph and supervision of graduate students studying Southeast Asia during the Cold War.
Professor Anne Hanley began the 2023-24 academic year teaching one of her favorite classes: Latin America Through Film. It was a real pleasure exploring big themes affecting ordinary people through an array of marvelous films. She continued work on her book on standardization, using the results from her June 2023 research trip to São Paulo, Brazil, to bring all the book’s threads together. Hanley presented her most recent work at the Brazilian Studies Association conference in March.
That trip also resulted in a new research project — a comparative study of the Portuguese market for rice imported from colonial Carolina and colonial Brazil in the 18th century — with her longtime collaborator, Professor Renato Leite Marcondes of the Universidade de São PauloRibeirão Preto. Research Rookie Olivia Zapf worked with her all year on a study of the colonial Carolina side of this story. During the NIU’s Conference on Undergraduate Research held in April, Zapf presented a poster on the results of her research.
The year also brought some real highs from Hanley’s work with graduate students. Her advisee Alex Lundberg presented his research at the American Historical Association conference in January and the Brazilian Studies Association conference in March. Lundberg was awarded the highly competitive Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2024-2025. The two geography grad students with whom she was working also successfully defended their dissertations, Felipe Valdez in February and Flávia Xavier in March.
FACULTY NEWS (continued)
In September 2023, Professor Beatrix Hoffman participated in a roundtable on applied medical history at the annual meeting of the European Association for the History of Science and Medicine in Oslo, Norway. The photo shows Hoffman in front of the beautiful Oslo Opera House. Her book, Borders of Care: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Fight for Health Care in the United States , is coming out in early 2025 with the University of Chicago Press.
Professor Eric Jones stepped down from his position as the college’s director of global initiatives at the end of the summer to focus on finishing a book project. During his tenure in this role, Jones was responsible for managing a variety of international initiatives, including joint degree programs with partner institutions and collaborating with International Affairs on programming and matters such as visas.
Professor Brian Sandberg thoroughly enjoyed developing and teaching an Honors seminar, HIST 399 Montaigne and the Wars of Religion, while serving as an Honors Faculty Fellow with the University Honors Program at NIU in 2023-2024. Sandberg also offered a graduate seminar, HIST 610 Graduate Reading Seminar on Religious Violence from 1500 to Today, and taught undergraduate courses on HIST 110 History of the Western World I and HIST 420 The Renaissance. Sandberg was honored to collaborate with Chela Aufderheide, who acted as Great Journeys Graduate Research Assistant during 2023-2024. With Aufderheide's support, he continued to work on his book manuscript, A Virile Courage: Gender and Violence in the French Wars of Religion, 1559-1629 (in progress) as well as a new book project (in research).
He published a chapter on “Troubles Concerning Religion: Causes, Parties, and Armed Conflict in the French Wars of Religion,” in Beyond the Battlefield: Reconsidering Warfare in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tryntje Helfferich and Howard Louthan (London: Routledge, 2023), 167-193.
He also published “Early Modern France and the Military Revolution,” in Global Military Transformations: Change and Continuity, 1450-1800, ed. Jeremy Black (Rome: Società Italiana di Storia Militare and Nadir Media, 2023), 113-160. He presented on “Sources of Islamophobia in Early Modern France and the Mediterranean World,” at Paradigms of Racialization: Alternative Sources, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in April 2024, and on “Race, Conflict, and Informal Empire: Francophone Perspectives on Racialization in the Early Modern Mediterranean World,” at Racialization: A Plurality of Paradigms, held in Pavia (Italy) in June 2023. Sandberg served on the local organizing committee for the Renaissance Society of America Conference, which was held in Chicago in March 2024. He also organized a panel on “Communities in Motion in the Early Modern World” for the conference and presented a research paper on “‘Trafficking in Barbary’: Communities, Commerce, and Informal Empire in the Francophone Mediterranean.” Sandberg participated in workshops on The Digital Afterlife of Ephemeral Print: Research and Pedagogy with French Pamphlets at the Newberry, and Le Gratie d’Amore: A Workshop in Western European Dances of the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, at the Newberry Library.
Sandberg served as an external examiner for two successful dissertation defenses at Georgetown University: Leigh Stevens, “Violating the Body Politic: Pillaging, Royal Authority, and Community Grievances during the French Wars of Religion,” Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University (James Collins, advisor); and Natalie Donnell defended “Princesses Étrangères: Women and Politics between France and the Spanish Low Countries,” Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University (James Collins, advisor). He continues to serve on the Renaissance Quarterly advisory board and as an affiliate of the European Union Center at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign. He writes essays and blog posts on early modern history in research, teaching and the media at his professional website
ALUMNI NEWS
Our department encourages alumni of our undergraduate and graduate programs to share their stories. We constantly need to demonstrate to current students (and their families) the applicability, flexibility and potential lucrativeness of a history degree in the private and public sectors. Nothing makes this case better than alumni testimonials. Please share your stories by emailing us at history@niu.edu or by sending a letter to NIU Department of History, DeKalb, IL 60115.
Gregory Bereiter (Ph.D. 2016), who previously held a position as a federal historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C., has started a new role as historian at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.
David Carlson (M.A. 2017), is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, Notre Dame University. In April 2024, he successfully defended his dissertation titled “Antislavery Feelings and Proslavery Steps: From the Atlantic to the Continental Slave Trade in Virginia, 16191820” and will be award his Ph.D. degree soon.
Nicole Dressler (Ph.D. 2018), associate teaching professor in the Department of History, College of William & Mary. In May 2023, Dressler presented a paper at the William & Mary - St. Andrews Biennial Symposium in Scotland. She was awarded the Keith and Sandy Dauer Research Award and, in summer 2023, used it to traveled to Philadelphia and Maryland for research. She was selected for a faculty exchange visit to the University of St. Andrews, and in March 2024 presented a paper there. In fall 2023, Dressler received the history department’s Society of the Cincinnati Research Fellowship and will travel to New York this summer to do research.
Wayne Duerkes (M.A. 2015) has been appointed as the managing director at Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Area. Duerkes, formerly the executive director of the McHenry County Historical Society, has a strong background in history and heritage conservation, with his M.A. from Northern Illinois University and his Ph.D. from Iowa State University.
Justin Iverson (Ph.D. 2020), is an historian with the federal government at Langley AFB in Hampton, Virginia. Recently, he was recognized as the best wing historian in the U.S. Air Force, meaning he ran the “best individual history office for superior historical and heritage services that contributed to their unit’s ability to accomplish its mission,” making him very likely the first NIU alum ever to receive such an award. Since last summer, Iverson has had
two articles accepted for publication in the Journal of the Early Republic, and Early American Studies. He also has an advance contract for a book chapter in an anthology on which he is working with Vernon Press. He attended the annual conference of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic last summer in Philadelphia, where he chaired a panel on the Gulf South, and he presented a paper at the Washington Early American Seminar at the University of Maryland.
Susan Kwosek (Ph.D. 2019), assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at South Carolina State University. Kwosek was recently named “Professor of the Year” in the College of Education, History, and Social Sciences.
Tom Arne Midtrød (Ph.D. 2008) is associate professor in the Department of History, Iowa University. Arne published an article in Early American Studies and is now director of Graduate Studies in his department.
Steven Peach (B.A. 2008; M.A. 2010) is associate professor in the Department of History, Geography, and GIS at Tarleton State University, Stephenville, Texas. He published a new book titled Rivers of Power: Creek Political Culture in the Native South, 1750–1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).
Stephanie Polito (M.A. 2009) is currently studying for her Master in Nonprofit Administration at Notre Dame University with a goal to continue her work as an activist fighting human trafficking. She wanted to credit Professor Eric Mogren and the late Professor David Kyvig with helping her succeed at NIU. She writes: “Graduating from NIU gave me a confidence boost that I never had before. I am so proud of my Huskie pedigree!”
HELP US CONTINUE OUR TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE
By giving to our Department of History, you are playing an important role in supporting students and faculty. Through annual giving or planned giving and endowments, there’s a method to fit just about any budget. For more information, please contact Kyleigh Exner, associate director of advancement, at 815-753-7533.
There are several ways to make your gift.
Online: Make a credit card gift online (designate your gift to the Department of History).
Phone: 1-877-GIV-2-NIU.
Mail: One-time credit card or check gifts may be made using the Gift Form. Contact Kyleigh directly: 815-753-7533 or kwallace4@niu.edu
In gratitude for the generosity of our donors who give $20 or more, we will happily mail you one of our departmental T-shirts if you send your address and T-shirt size to history@niu.edu