History Newsletter

Letter from the Chair

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of our departmental newsletter, in which we look back at what was hopefully the most unusual academic year we will ever have to face.  Indeed, as we look forward to returning to campus this fall, it also is important to take a moment and appreciate what we achieved this year. 

As Jim Marten wrote last year, Covid required us to move all classes online after Spring Break, cancel our public events, and reorganize research plans as archives closed and travel far from home was unwise.  Faculty, staff, and students spent much of the summer uncertain of what fall would bring.  That feeling never quite went away, but we persisted. 

Some faculty taught their classes entirely online, while others taught on campus but often had to stream lectures and discussions to support students in quarantine.  Conferences and academic workshops also moved onto Teams and Zoom, allowing us to connect with colleagues and share our scholarship in ways that may be continued beyond this year.  Out signature public events, the Klement and Casper lectures, again had to be postponed, but we engaged with the larger community in new ways through virtual symposia, podcasts, media interviews, and more.   The year culminated with a celebration of our graduating students, our award winners, and our Phi Alpha Theta inductees, featuring the powerful remarks of alumnus Jim Lowder.  He made a case not only for why studying history and other liberal arts matters, but even how that old paper has some practice use in the working world!  

Some of the highlights from the year are described below, but please browse the entire newsletter for more details about the department’s faculty and graduate and undergraduate students, as well as alumni and friends.  As always, if you have comments, questions, or items for next year’s newsletter, do not hesitate to write us at history@marquette.edu. Our Facebook page also remains a great way to keep in touch.  We are especially interested in hearing from our undergraduate alumni.  We always say that you can do anything with a history degree and your experiences prove that.

Thanks to Bryan Rindfleisch for compiling information for this newsletter!

Take care,
Lezlie Knox

  • Newsletter Highlights
  • Faculty News
  • Undergraduate Student News 
  • Graduate and Alumni News

 We celebrated Bryan Rindfleisch and Patrick Mullins who earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor.  Bryan joined the Department in 2014 and has developed an impressive portfolio of classes in both Early America and Native American history.  His most recent research projects are summarized in the faculty section, along with an exciting new collaborative project, the Indigeneity Lab.  Patrick also works in Early American History, with current projects described in the faculty notes section.  He joined the department in 2016 to focus on our growing our Public History program.  This spring he coordinated over 12 students on internships. 

As noted in last year’s newsletter, the fall semester was Carla Hay’s final one teaching at Marquette.  Several colleagues visited the conclusion to her Women in Western Civilization class and joined her students in a salute honoring Carla’s teaching, scholarship, and service to Marquette over the decades.  Unfortunately, Carla is not the only colleague we will be missing next year.  Jenn Finn has accepted an offer from Loyola University to join their Classics Department.  She will be greatly missed by students and colleagues alike. 

It was a banner year for research grants and fellowships in the department.  External awards to individuals include Laura Matthew’s Newberry/NEH fellowship and grants supporting archival work for Steve Avella, Jim Marten, and Patrick Mullins.  Jim also received a Way-Klingler fellowship and Chima Korieh a Regular Research Grant to support their current book projects.  These two internal awards came under the auspices of the Committee on Research.  PhD candidate Ben Nestor was awarded the University’s sole Raynor Fellowship.  

Service can be the invisible part of university life, but Marquette historians play critical roles there in addition to scholarship and teaching.  For example, both Mike Donoghue and Chima Korieh, along with PhD student Tim Houge, served on the University Academic Senate which is a critical part of our shared governance.  Alison Efford chairs the selection committee for the AMUW Chair in Humanistic Studies, which annually brings a distinguished scholar to Marquette to teach a class and present a research lecture.

And we always say that History promotes interdisciplinary teaching and research.  Our service as directors of six interdisciplinary programs confirms that: Africana Studies (Chima Korieh), Asian Studies (Mike Wert), Latin American Studies (Laura Matthew,) LatinX Studies (Laura Matthew), Medieval Studies (Lezlie Knox), and Middle East and North African Studies (Phillip Naylor). Department faculty also direct the Honors in Humanities program (Kristen Foster) as well as the Military History (Jenn Finn and Mike Donoghue) and Public History (Patrick Mullins) programs which are based in the department.

Steven Avella was awarded a Peter R. D'Agostino Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, with which he will travel to the Vatican Archives to continue archival research for his current book project on Catholics in the American West.  An article related to that project, “The Catholic Church in the Twentieth-Century American West: Spatial Realities, Demographic Growth, and Roman Observations,” appeared in US Catholic Historian.  His chapter on “The Immigrant Church,” appears in the just published Cambridge Handbook of American Catholicism.

Alan Ball’s SCOWStats blog continues to draw attention from the legal community as well as journalists interested in understanding the operations of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.  His biggest project of the past year, however, was flipping his classroom to support online teaching.  He created videos for his Cold War and Soviet Union classes, as well as his first-year class on Russian and Soviet images of America.  These videos supported the engaged discussions for which his classes are so well known.

Michael Donoghue hopes to be back in Cuba with students during the next J-term, presuming the pandemic lets us return to traveling abroad.  He is continuing to work on two book projects, Ports of Call, Bases of Revolution: the U.S. Military in Cuba 1941-1964 and The United States and Panama: A Postcolonial Alliance, 1964 to the Present, and will be on sabbatical in spring 2022.

Alison Efford has been finalizing her book, Radical Relationships: The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke (with Viktorija Bilic), which will be published in September 2021. She has begun collaborating with colleagues both within and beyond the university led by Dr. Noelle Bridgen in the Political Science Department. Supported by a President’s Challenge award, the team is exploring feminist and trauma-informed approaches to empower women through physical activity. With PhD students Benjamin Linzy, Melanie Lorenz, and Adam Petersen, Alison will focus on how the history of gender, sport, and the body—especially in the Milwaukee Turners—shapes how and when exercise can be emancipatory. During this unusual teaching year, Alison has continued experimenting with in-class career discernment and community engaged learning.

Jenn Finn’s second monograph, Contested Pasts: A Determinist History of Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire, will be out this fall from the University of Michigan Press.  She has also been working on an edited collection, Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Warfare, while also taking care of Calix Apollo, who arrived in January.  Her big news, though, is that she will be joining the Department of Classics at Loyola University Chicago this fall as their chair and associate professor.  We will miss her dearly but wish her the best! 

Kristen Foster’s recent article on “Cities in the Early Republic,” can be found in Oxford Bibliographies in Urban Studies.  She served on the organizing committee for “Suffrage and Innovation 2020 Conference” sponsored by Marquette’s Institute for Women’s Leadership, for which she and Sarah Wadsworth (English) created a “Timeline to Suffrage, 1776-1920.”  Kristen also continues to serve as director of the disciplinary honors program for the Humanities.  She’s writing the final chapters for Haiti's Mirror: Reflections of Race, Liberation, and Republican Citizenship in America's Early Republic.

Sergio González’s article on “The Sanctuary Movement,” appears in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.  A co-edited volume (with Felipe Hinojosa and Maggie Elmore) Faith and Power: Latina/o Religious Politics Since 1945 is in press from NYU Press and will be published in early 2022. He also published an op-ed on the troubled legacy – past and present – of Hispanic Heritage Month.  He launched Marquette’s first dedicated Latinx Studies class on Midwestern Latinx communities this spring, which received enthusiastic reviews, and is revising his book, Strangers No Longer: Latino Faith and Belonging in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin.

51 years ago, Carla Hay was the first woman hired on a tenure line in the History Department where she would go on to teach 11 distinct classes, many outside her research specialty in eighteenth-century Britain and women’s history.  She has published one monograph, six edited collections, and numerous articles, and continues research on her current project.  She advised 11 dissertations and has sat on a plethora of other theses, MA essays, and numerous graduate exams.  There is no major University or College committee on which she has not served, ranging from the University Academic Senate to Athletics to the university’s Centennial celebration of coeducation. In December we hosted friends, colleagues, and former students to toast her career on Teams.

Franciscan Women: Female Identities and Religious Culture, Medieval and Beyond, coedited by Lezlie Knox and David Couturier appeared this fall.  She also published a chapter “Toward a New Appreciation of Fra Mariano of Florence,” that is part of her current book project.  Along with colleagues across campus, including PhD candidate Ben Linzy, she launched the Covid Conversations podcast to highlight interdisciplinary research at Marquette during the pandemic.  Episode 23, on conspiracy theories—appeared in early June and is available at the link above, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.   

Chima Korieh received the 2021 Thabo Mbeki Award for Excellence in Public Service and Scholarship from the University of Texas at Austin during their annual Africa conference where he also delivered the keynote address focusing on African Nationalisms.  Here in Milwaukee, he was on the community advisory board for the major traveling exhibit on Nelson Mandela, which starts at the Milwaukee Public Museum this summer.  He will be in the archives this summer for his current book project, Hell’s Island: West African Labor, Plantation Agriculture, and Violence on Spanish Fernando Po, 1920-1980, supported by a research grant awarded by Marquette’s Committee on Research.  

Michael Maher presented “Galileo and the Church: Going beyond Prejudice and Presumption” to the Chicago Cigar Society in February. A member of Marquette’s Jesuit community as well as a specialist in Early Modern history, he will contribute to the University’s participation in the Ignatian Year, marking the 500th anniversary of Ignatius of Loyola’s battlefield injury which began his process of conversion.

Jim Marten co-edited an anthology with Dr. Caroline E. Janney called Buying & Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021). He received a Franklin Research Grant and one of Marquette’s distinguished Way Klinger Fellowships to support research for his next book tentatively titled A Social History of the Long Civil War.  He’s been making great progress with digitized newspapers and other records, but looks forward to the reopening of libraries and archives.

Laura Matthew published several articles this past year including “A Tense Convivencia: Placemaking, Pluralism, and Violence in Early Spanish Central America” (with Vanderbilt University archaeologist William Fowler) in The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism and “The Form of the Content: The Digital Archive Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America,” in Digital Humanities Quarterly.  She will be on leave during the coming academic year working on her next book Those Who Survived, about how Indigenous merchants and migrants along the Pacific coast from Oaxaca to El Salvador recreated their world in the wake of eighty years of devastating pandemics, war, and forced globalization at the end of the sixteenth century. Her sabbatical is supported in part by an NEH Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago.  Laura also was elected Secretary (and thus President-Elect) of the Central America Committee of the Conference for Latin American History. 

You can read two new articles from Tim McMahon.  “Separate and Together: State Histories in the Twentieth Century,” appeared in the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies and “‛It Doesn’t Matter What the Authors Meant’: Covenanters in Conflict, 1916-1920”  will be out in October in the volume Ireland and Partition: Contexts and Consequences.  Tim also is Co-PI on the Humanities without Walls-Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Subaward of $1.3 million and continues to serve as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies.

David McDaniel’s classes are central to the Military History program. He offered the World War I class in the fall, adding that conflict to his existing portfolio focused on American Military History and the Vietnam War.  This fall he also will offer a course on war, movies, and their relationship to historical memory.

Dan Meissner has been working his way through consular records (ad nauseam, he reports) for his current book project looking at nineteenth-century diplomat George Seward and Sino-American relations.  He will be in Hong Kong during the fall semester (and teaching on-line), while his wife is a Luce Fellow at the University of Hong Kong.

Patrick Mullins was promoted to associate professor with tenure this year. He received a Keith Armistead Carr fellowship from the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati.  This fellowship supports his current project, Killing Kings in America.  He published a chapter on John Adams in Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders and America’s Future and an article on Charles Wilson Peale in Age of Revolutions. He is serving as exhibit research director on development of new exhibits for the Ray Bradbury Experience Museum in Waukegan and as project manager for the website Ray Bradbury in American Memory, the Black Milwaukee Film Project, and the Hispanic Milwaukee Preservation Project.

The long-term efforts of Phillip Naylor and colleagues from around campus, including our alumna Enaya Othman (now an associate professor of Arabic language and culture in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Culture) have led to the approval of both majors and minors in Middle Eastern and North African Studies which launch this fall.  A revised edition of his France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation has been delayed by the pandemic but will appear soon.  

Bryan Rindfleisch was promoted to associate professor of tenure this year and will publish his second book, Brothers of Coweta: Kinship, Empire, and Revolution in the Eighteenth-Century Muscogee World (USC Press) this summer.  New articles also appeared in The Historian, George Historical Quarterly, XVIII: New Perspectives on the Eighteenth-Century, and The American Historian. He is one of the co-founders of the “Indigeneity Lab” at Marquette where he works with undergraduate students and Indigenous community members around the greater Milwaukee area to develop the “Indigenous Milwaukee Interactive Map,” a multi-year digital humanities project that will chronicle the presence, vibrancy, and history of the Indigenous Peoples of the greater Milwaukee area in the past and present. Most importantly, he and his partner, Bridget, welcomed their second child this past October: Isabelle Grace.

Rob Smith and CURTO have been so active this past year that it is hard to decide what to highlight. Rob was one of the leads on a team of MU faculty to receive a $745,000 Mellon Foundation grant to expand the Educational Preparedness Program – “Bringing Mass Incarceration into the Classroom: Expanding the Blended Course Model.” The EPP will bring traditional Marquette students and current/former incarcerated students into the classroom together. CURTO also partnered with faculty and graduate students from the College of Education to launch the Black and Latino/a Ecosystem and Support Transition (BLEST) Hub, which aggregates educational and workforce resources supporting area youth  In July, you will be able to read (and assign!) The Black Liberation Movement from Reconstruction to Black Lives Matter, which appears in Oxford University Press’ Debating American History series.  Rob also co-authored, "Legacies of Segregation and Disfranchisement: The road from Plessy to Frank..." which historicizes Wisconsin's voter ID law(s). 

Peter Staudenmaier has two book projects in progress: Spiritual Racism in Fascist Italy: Julius Evola and the War against the Jews (which will appear with Routledge) and The Politics of Nature in Nazi Germany: Environmental Ideals and the Myth of Blood and Soil.  This past year he published “Advocates for the Landscape: Alwin Seifert and Nazi Environmentalism” in German Studies Review and “Racial Ideology between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Julius Evola and the Aryan Myth, 1933 – 1943” in the Journal of Contemporary History.  Peter also launched our new gateway course for History majors, “Doing History.”

Michael Wert’s Samurai: A Very Short Introduction is now out in paperback.  He promoted it in various interviews, including one with the BBC. He also appeared in several episodes of the Netflix documentary on the Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan. He tackled the recent controversy over the denial of the experiences of the Comfort Women during WWII by a Harvard Law Professor in the following op-ed.  

News from Undergraduate Students and Alums

CONGRATULATIONS to this year’s recipient of the Boden Award for outstanding senior History major, Marcella Michalek, who will be heading to Yale University Law School this fall.  CONGRATULATIONS as well to Tom Besold who is the winner of the Jablonowski Award for best History paper for a historical fiction set in the Vietnam War, that was part of his Honors in Humanities project.

Newly minted alumna Brooke McArdle will be starting a PhD program in Classics this fall at NYU. 

Oluwaseun (Chris) Ibitoye will be starting law school here at Marquette this fall.

Our undergraduate scholars are actively engaged in research:

Two students received summer research funding under the auspices of the Honors Program for History projects. Nick Howard was funded for a creative research project curating “The History of Milwaukee in 10 Objects,” under the direction of Patrick MullinsQwanzo Rodriguez will be investigating “Electronic Monitoring in the Milwaukee County Youth Justice System” with the guidance of Rob Smith.

Jamal Hanson, Addy Havens, and Laura Wagner are working with Kristen Foster to research the lives of free blacks in the Early Republic as a part of Foster’s current book project.  Their collaboration is supported by the Office of Research and Innovation Summer 2021 Undergraduate Research Program.

Andrew Kasten presented his research on German eugenics on Race and religion at the UWM religious studies conference in April.  Andrew researched this paper for Michael Maher’s History capstone class in fall 2020. 

You can read Arpita Sangani’s overview of research she conducted about the women of Milwaukee Turners on our blog.  Arpita worked with Alison Efford.

News from Graduate Students and Alums

CONGRATULATIONS to the new alumni of our MA program: Heriberto (Eddie) Godina (Diversity Fellowship), Megan Holland, Jenna Hardin, Laurence Matthews, Hannah Uitenbroeck (Trinity Fellow), and Drew Wilson.

CONGRATULATIONS as well to Jenna Hardin and Patrick Bethel who were awarded the Prucha-Theoharis awards for Outstanding MA student and Outstanding PhD student respectively.

MA students Stephanie Berson and Patrick Bethel participated in Digital Humanities and Pre-Modern Studies, a class offered during the spring semester by the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies. 

Stephanie Berson presented “Anna Komnene and Womanhood: The Gender, Grief, and Influence of the Woman of the Alexiad,” at the 20th Annual Vagantes conference for graduate medievalists held in March.  Berson began the project in Phillip Naylor’s Byzantine History course.

PhD candidate Patrick Bethel was awarded a Schmitt Fellowship to support his dissertation research examining the impact of gendered and racial concerns stemming from Ireland’s colonial status on the development of nationalisms in the nineteenth century with a specific focus on the Irish Land War of 1878-1882. An essay drawn from his research is due to appear in the forthcoming volume “Dreams of the Future in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” scheduled to be published by the Liverpool University Press in fall 2021.

Marquette archivist and PhD candidate Bill Fliss is leading a new exhibit on the J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, which you can learn more about here.

MA student Eddie Godina’s master’s essay is entitled Reading Between the Lines: Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and News Coverage in the Great Depression. He co-hosted a talk with Dr. Laura Matthew and other Marquette students in November 2020 titled "Beyond the White Man's Burden: What Does Service Really Mean?" The talk centered on service through the example of the Maryknoll Sisters who collaborated with the indigenous Maya to improve health care during Guatemala's Civil War with special guest Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, who will deliver the Casper Lecture in February 2022. He is currently embarking on the job research process with the hopes of continuing working either in immigration advocacy or nonprofit sector in the Milwaukee area.

MA student Jenna Hardin will be heading to the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA for a PhD program. She presented her paper “Mythologizing Sacrifice: Self-Immolation and Martyrdom in Modern Irish Catholic Nationalism” at the American Conference for Irish Studies’ Midwest Regional and will be presenting her work – “Erin’s Emotions: Homesickness and Transatlantic Communication for Irish Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-Century America” – this summer at the ACIS national meeting.  She coordinated workshops on teaching for the History Graduate Student Organization focused on remote learning and jobs in secondary education with guest speaker MU PhD alumnus Dr. John French.

MA student Megan Holland was initiated into Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha organizations.  Megan was a participant in the ADP program—earning her BA in 2020, while she also began her MA program.

PhD student Tim Hogue has a forthcoming article on New Deal historiography in the Society for Federal History. He serves as assistant editor for H-FedHist and recently completed a scholarly interview with Dr. Jennifer Graber, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin on her book, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (2018). He has also presented his work on the Milwaukee Indian Community School at the James Barnes Graduate Conference in April and published a book review with H-Atlantic. Tim further served as the Graduate Student Organization’s voting representative on the University Academic Senate, a responsibility that has been critical this past academic year.

PhD candidate Lisa Lamson joined the department of History and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay as a lecturer. Despite a rigorous amount of teaching, she is nearing completion on her dissertation on the racial dimensions of female education in nineteenth-century Baltimore and has presented her work at several conferences including the History of Education Society’s Annual Meeting, the Organization of American Historians, and the forthcoming Society for the History of the Early American Republic.  Listen to a conversation about her research on UWGB’s podcast.

PhD candidate Benjamin Linzy wears many hats. While continuing to work on his dissertation, he has accepted a full-time position as the Program Coordinator for Humanities Without Walls here at Marquette, is an avid podcast/video producer for the March On, Milwaukee: A Digital Series, the Institute for Women’s Leadership at Marquette, Spotlight on Research series, Pay Equity Series webinars, Covid Conversations, as well as his own podcasts. He has also published an article and a video essay in the Activist History Review, in addition to several book reviews, and will be presenting his work at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations later this year. On top of that, Linzy is the editor-in-chief of – and contributor to – the Milwaukee Turners’ Newsletter and is the Campus Champion for the Andrew Goodman Foundation here at Marquette.

PhD candidate Ed Longe continues to research on his dissertation in US foreign relations entitled “The Alliance Apart: Anti-Communism and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1948-1960.”  He also is working at the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research through the Charles Koch Associate Program fellowship.

PhD student Melanie Lorenz presented “The German-American Fight for the Professionalization of Midwifery During the Late Nineteenth Century,” at the annual German-American Studies Association meeting. 

PhD candidate Benjamin Nestor – the University’s 2020-2021 Rev. John P. Raynor S.J. Fellow – participated in a workshop through the German Studies Association titled "Emerging Scholars: Dissertation Design," held remotely in October. He was also accepted to present his work this summer at the 2021 Curt E. and Else Silbermann Faculty Seminar through the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He continues to hold a processing position at the Marquette University archives focusing on the digitization of the Dorothy Day collections and will begin processing the recently opened Joseph McCarthy collections this summer. Finally, he remains a participant in the Glass Leadership Institute through the Anti-Defamation League, a yearlong program on the activities of the ADL, antiracism, and countering extremism.   

PhD candidate Maggie Nettesheim Hoffman is the Associate Director of Career Diversity at Humanities Without Walls Consortium. That formal title perhaps masks her instrumental role in bringing a 1.3 million dollar grant from the Mellon Foundation to Marquette, in collaboration with Tim McMahon and Theresa Tobin (Philosophy/Graduate School).  She is looking forward to defending her dissertation this year.   

Congratulations to Steven Vickers (ABD) who has accepted a position teaching Global History at Bayside Academy in his native Alabama!  

MA student Drew Wilson embarked on a graduate internship with Milwaukee’s Historical Preservation Committee (HPC) in March. He is responsible for researching buildings to determine eligibility for historic designation and producing written findings for the HPC (chaired by Alderman Bauman).

ALUMNI NEWS:

Dylan Bain, CPA (College of Arts and Sciences '04 & College of Education '11) is currently employed as an Internal Auditor with Xcel Energy. His primary role focuses on data analytics, RPA (robotic process automation) applications, and continuous improvement solutioning. He credits his background in humanities as the foundational learning required to perform his duties given the myriad of regulations, stakeholders, and vast sources of records he routinely condenses into actionable solutions. Additionally, Dylan hosts two podcasts: Fiscally Savage, focused on personal finance, and Knights and Dragons in which he discusses life, society and personal experiences with his co-host, a therapist who specializes in addiction and trauma.  

Heyley Bowman (MA ’20) leveraged has turned her Public History experience into a position at the Denver Botanic Gardens as a Member and Visitor Service Representative. 

Caitlin Cushing (BA ’12) teaches social science at River Mill Academy in North Carolina.  Her website makes clear that she brings her work as a medievalist (MA from York University in the United Kingdom) and time working as an international art dealer into her classrooms. 

Matthew Costello (PhD ’16), is now the Vice President of The David M. Rubsenstein National Center for White House History.  His recently published book was a finalist for the George Washington Prize 2020. He is currently contributing to and editing a volume of essays entitled Mourning the Presidents with University of Virginia Press, scheduled to be published in late 2022, and a new book project that explores the lives of the Theodore Roosevelt family during their time in the White House, to be published by the White House Historical Association. 

Emily Dattilo (MA ’17) is the newly appointed director of the Mount Prospect Historical Society in Mount Prospect, IL. 

Jodi Eastberg (PhD 2009) took on a new role at Alverno College as Dean of Graduate and Professional programs in January.  Congratulations! 

Patrick Eickman (MA ’20), started a PhD program in medieval history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published several book reviews and continues to research the links between the Crusades and the History of Emotions. 

Luke Frommelt (MA ’16) teaches social studies and coaches cross country at St. Francis Xavier Highschool in Appleton. 

John E. Happ (BA ’79) has a new book coming out this fall called The Navigation Case: Training, Flying, and Fighting the New Guinea War, 1942-1945 (Knox Press), which is part of a personal history of his father who was a combat pilot in WWII. 

Daniel Heimmermann (PhD ’94) was recently appointed the new chancellor of the University of South Carolina at Aiken. 

Andrew Himmelburg (BA ’19) will complete his Oxford University MA degree this summer. 

Aaron David Hyams (PhD, ’16) is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.  You can read his work in an important op-ed in the Missoulian. 

Sean Malone (MA, ’15) works in author relations at Orange Hat Publishing/TEN16 Press in Waukesha, WI. This is also Sean's publisher, with which he has published his first two novels, Spring City Terror 1903 and Ocean's Grave 1907.  He manages book launches and other public interactions, works as an editorial assistant, writes the publisher's quarterly newsletter, as well as articles for partnered magazines "Waukesha Neighbors"  and "Shelf Unbound." 

Andrew Mountin (MA ’15) is director of Music and Liturgy at Fairfield University. 

Jeff Ocwieja (BA 2014) graduated with the University of Wisconsin law school in 2018.  He recently opened Caritas Law, after serving as an Assistant State Public Defender in the Lancaster trial office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender.  

Michael Pulido (PhD ’17) recently earned tenure and promotion to associate professor of History at Bellevue College. 

Charles Reed (MA ’05), is an associate professor of history at Elizabeth City State University.  He was awarded a Franklin Research Grant by the American Philosophical Society to support his research for a second book project tentatively titled An Empire of Justice: Respectability, Britishness, and Citizenship in South Africa, 1880-1920.  

Paul E. Sampson (MA ’15) was recently hired as an assistant professor of History at the University of Scranton after completing his PhD at Rutgers! He teaches courses on the History of Science, History of Medicine, and Global Environmental History. 

Ken Shonk (PhD ’10), who teaches and is the incoming department chair at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, published his new book last month: Ireland’s New Traditionalists: Fianna Fáil Republicanism and Gender, 1926-1938 (Cork University Press). 

Alex Smith (MA ’18) is continuing in the Master of Divinity program at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. During the 2020-2021 academic year he served as vicar at St. Paul Lutheran Church in St. Joseph, MO. He will graduate and become eligible for ordination in spring of 2022. He has also presented papers at several conferences, including the Midwestern Historical Association, the Midwest American Academy of Religion, and the State Historical Society of Missouri. He recently published a shortened version of his MA essay, titled “The Damnesty Oath: Loyalty in Wartime” in Gateway, the magazine of the Missouri Historical Society. He is also an adjunct history professor at Maryville University in St. Louis. 

Anya Toledo (BA, ‘16), recently accepted a position to teach English (and potentially) German in Spain.  After graduation, she earned an MA in medieval history from the University of Edinburgh. 

Isaac Vineburg (History minor, ’13) is currently Digital Media Associate at Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus near Detroit. 

Mindy Williams (MA ’19) is a PhD candidate at Purdue University.  Her dissertation focuses on Mary of Modena, consort to King James II of England.