Ken Alder (Professor)

Ken Alder’s prediction in last year’s newsletter proved correct. He did in fact teach his “History of the Future” for a second time in fall 2024, and it was again excellent fun. Some of his other predictions for that fall did not turn out so well. But then historians famously make poor prognosticators. The first page of his syllabus contains this disclaimer: “None of the predictions made in this course should be construed as legal or medical counsel, nor advice on financial investments or career choice. The future is what you make of it.”  On another note, Ken took up the reins of the Science in Human Culture program again for a one-year term in 2024-25.  It remains a wonderful intellectual home. 

Michael Allen (Associate Professor)

This fall Michael designed and taught a new seminar for incoming first-years titled "First Generations of Higher Ed: A Social and Emotional History" that introduced first-generation and low-income students to successive waves of pioneers into elite universities over the past century or so. He found it a deeply rewarding way to integrate his personal and professional life, his research and teaching. And he signed a book contract, giving him hope that he will finish my manuscript by the Dec 2025 deadline! Aside from that, he moved and saw his son graduate college!

Lydia Barnett (Associate Professor)

Lydia Barnett is spending her leave year in 2024-25 reading and researching about the vanished swamps of Italy's Po River Valley for a book project about environmental change in the Little Ice Age. Sadly this project involves eating a lot of pasta in Italy and spotting the occasional wild flamingo (not pink!). She also co-authored an article with one of History's current grad students, Lauren Cole, about their experience teaching an undergrad lecture course on the history of science and medicine.

Robin Bates (Assistant Professor of Instruction and Ian Sanders Chair in History)   

Robin Bates added lecture classes on "The History of Capitalism" and "The History of Socialism" to the undergraduate catalogue. He also led the second annual Sanders Seminar on the Historian's Craft, watching with amazement and appreciation as our exceptional Sanders Scholars completed original research essays on topics ranging from the political culture of dietary supplements in the postwar United States, to the military culture of German flying aces in World War One, to the Japanese expatriate experience of the wife of Northwestern's first law school dean during the 1890s. This summer, he's looking forward to presenting his research on France's colonies during the Revolution of 1848 at the Global Consortium for French Historical Studies in Paris.

Kathleen Belew (Associate Professor)

Kathleen spent the year hard at work on a new manuscript, parts of which became a new lecture course on the history of the 1990s (highlight: a sweet little apocalypse, Y2K). She has particularly enjoyed graduate advising this year, and she recently won a CCHS course development grant to co-design and co-teach a class on the Transformation of Childhood with her first Northwestern doctoral student, Jan Michael.

Haley Bowen (Assistant Professor)

Haley Bowen taught two new lecture classes over the past year, including a course on the history of witchcraft -- something she has been subconsciously training for ever since her elementary school field trips to Salem, Massachusetts. Her search for a spell that will bewitch her book manuscript into writing itself continues. In its absence, she has kept busy at her desk, submitting both a book chapter and an article and presenting papers at a smattering of conferences around the US. The highlight of her year was undoubtedly her summer research trip to the French colonial archives in sunny Aix-en-Provence, the memory of which sustained her all through the cold midwestern winter.

Kevin Boyle (William Smith Mason Professor of American History)

Kevin Boyle softened his second year as department chair with a bit of writing, some very enjoyable presentations, and way too many donuts. His favorite piece of writing was a summertime essay in The New York Times, comparing Joe Biden and LBJ. His favorite talk was at a Saturday evening event in the community center of Dungloe, a tiny town on Ireland’s northwest coast, as cool a place as he’d ever gone to give a lecture. As for his favorite donut, Kevin still can’t decide, so he really has no choice but to keep eating through his third year too.

Jonathan Brack (Assistant Professor)

Yoni and co-editors Michal Biran and Or Amir published Mamluks and Mongols: Studies in Honor of Reuven Amitai, a special issue of the Chicago-based journal Mamluk Studies Review. In his contribution to this Festschrift, Yoni explored Muslim-Jewish polemics and manuscript exchanges at the Mongol rulers’ court in early 14th-century Iran. The article is part of Yoni’s new book project, tentatively titled Ever Closer Encounters: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Mongols’ Middle East. Yoni also taught this year a new undergraduate research seminar on “Jews and Muslims: Intertwined Worlds.”

Lina Britto (Associate Professor)

Last year was a whirlwind. After March 2024, when Routledge published two edited volumes on Colombia that Lina worked on for the last four years, she promised herself that this time (for sure) she was going to slow down. She kept her promise until the Colombian governmental agency that manages the peace agreement between the state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), known as the Unit for the Implementation of the Peace Accords, invited her to participate in the second report of the Historical Commission of the Armed Conflict and Its Victims (CHCV in Spanish). The assignment took her back to Colombia's marijuana producing regions, battlegrounds of the internal armed conflict, to investigate how the histories of the plant reveal factors that help explain the persistence of war. The report was finalized in December 2024 and officially launched in March 2025. Her essay opens the report under the title, "The Trips of War: Marijuana and State Violence."

Geraldo Cadava (Professor)

Gerry is finishing up his term as Director of the American Studies Program, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2024. He helped organize a series of anniversary gatherings, culminating in a dinner attended by more than one hundred alumni, professors, current students, staff, and administrators. In the months before the presidential election, he attended and wrote about the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, as well as Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, for the New Yorker. Meanwhile, he’s hard at work on his third book, about Latino history over the past five hundred years. He expects to finish a draft this year. As if all this weren’t enough, he and Kathleen Belew are having a blast coaching their son’s house and travel baseball teams.

 Peter Carroll (Associate Professor)

Peter Carroll looks forward to being back in Suzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, among other places, this summer. Well, given the events of today, April 7 -- will the Trump administration lay an additional tariff of 50% on China for having the temerity to match the USA in setting an original levy of 34%? -- it might be more accurate to state that he hopes to see colleagues and friends in China soon. The notion that the phrase, “May you live in interesting times,” is a venerable Chinese curse is apocryphal, Orientalist nonsense, but these are “interesting times,” indeed.

Deborah Cohen (Richard W. Leopold Professor of History and Director, Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs)

Deborah continues to direct the Buffett Institute. Having pillaged all the History Department's excellent ideas for undergraduate education, she and her enterprising Buffett team are now inventing new programs from scratch. Most exciting is the new international post-baccalaureate fellowship. Deborah and her colleagues eagerly welcome alumni participation in Buffett events and initiatives. The institute’s recent symposium featured an all-star cast of diplomats and negotiators talking about peacemaking since the 1990s.

Jeff Eden (Associate Professor)

Jeff’s last book, God Save the USSR, has been released in paperback at a decent price, so he can finally renegotiate the loan he took out to buy the hardback edition. He has an article coming out and two things under review, and even though his New Year’s resolution last year was to write something accessible, all three projects double down on his commitment to boutique obscurantism.

Caitlin Fitz (Associate Professor)        

Caitlin Fitz spent the last several months turning a lifelong hobby – sports -- into the subject of academic inquiry. With support from a CCHS Course Development Fellowship, a WCAS Course Enhancement Grant, and above all the superstar graduate instructor Hannah Reynolds, she developed a new course on the global history of women's sports from the ancient world to the present. Our Evanston location enabled hands-on exploration of these global histories, from Frances Willard to NU undergraduate backstroker Sybil Bauer (who, in 1922, became the first woman to break a men's world record). We also tried our hands at early twentieth-century calisthenics, mid-twentieth-century “girls' rules” basketball, and, of course, Jazzercise (invented just blocks from Harris Hall by Judi Sheppard Missett '66). Active learning has never felt so good.

Benjamin Frommer (Associate Professor and Associate Chair)

After a year as interim Director of the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, in fall 2024 Benjamin Frommer took on the position of Associate Chair of the History Department (alongside his continued leadership of the Graduate Cluster in Jewish Studies). In addition to lectures and seminars on the Holocaust, in winter quarter 2025 Frommer taught his "Global History of Prisons and Camps" course to both undergraduates on the Evanston campus and students in Northwestern's Prison Education Program at Sheridan Correctional Center. Beyond presenting at conferences, organizing workshops and talks, and making progress on his scholarship, Frommer managed to cross three items off his bucket list: visiting Devil's Tower, trekking around Tikal, and finishing the New York Marathon.

 Daniel Greene (Adjunct Professor)    

Daniel Greene continued to enjoy teaching a graduate seminar in Public History. It was a busy year beyond Northwestern, too. In addition to working for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he joined the Academic Advisory Council for the Tree of Life Museum and Education Center in Pittsburgh. Daniel also co-chaired the Local Resources Committee for the Organization of American Historians Conference in Chicago in April 2025.

Laura Hein (Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History)

Laura Hein was the Distinguished Visitor of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University during the 2024-25 academic year, "an honor bestowed to individuals who have attained the highest level of achievement in our program’s research areas."  She also served on the Feis award committee of the American Historical Association, which recognizes exciting new forms of public history.

Daniel Immerwahr (Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities)

Daniel Immerwahr has spent the year on sabbatical at Harvard, where he has been working on his book, This Too Shall Burn: America in the Age of Wood. He has also written occasional articles for the New Yorker, on subjects from attention spans, the Golden Girls, and the LA Fires.

 Ashish Koul (Assistant Professor)

Ashish is busy revising her first book manuscript. Since fall of 2024, she has enjoyed teaching undergraduate courses on the history of migration from modern South Asia, and the history of imperial and international borderlands.

 Henri Lauzière (Associate Professor)

Henri came back from Abu Dhabi in time for the beginning of the new academic year. He decided to beat the iron while it was hot and to immediately teach his course on the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Among those who enrolled were many students from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. So, in a way, it is like he had never left the Persian Gulf. This fall, Lauzière will be on leave again to write his book on the history of reason in modern Islamic thought. He will be at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with his family.

Melissa Macauley (Professor of History)

Melissa Macauley is making steady progress on her new book, A People’s History of the South China Sea. As part of this project, she was forced -- almost against her will -- to conduct a summer’s research on Saigon in the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence. Her workweeks exploring a new archive were broken by grueling weekend visits to notable landmarks across the south of France. She also participated in a workshop held in Singapore on Chinese migration and settlement in Southeast Asia and completed both an article that is forthcoming in the American Historical Review and a book chapter for an edited volume on Sinophone Cultures. Most of her year, however, was devoted to chairing the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, where she has been practicing her memo-writing skills.

Kate Masur (John D. MacArthur Professor)

Kate Masur published Freedom Was in Sight! A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region, co-authored with illustrator Liz Clarke. She was delighted to see the book highlighted in an AHR feature, "Graphic Narratives and History in the Americas." She collaborated with two teachers at Homewood Flossmoor High School (in Chicago's south suburbs) to develop curricular materials for the book, and she's enjoyed discussing it with a variety of audiences. She also published two legal-historical articles that were incited by present-day politics: “Freedom and Families: Reconstruction Republicans and the Question of Women’s Reproductive Autonomy," in the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, and, with Gregory Downs, “Designed to Ameliorate the Condition of People of Color: The Reconstruction Republicans and the Question of Affirmative Action,” in the Journal of American Constitutional History.

Joel Mokyr (Robert H. Strotz Professor)

Joel Mokyr finished at long last his book Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000-2000 with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini, and it’s currently in production at Princeton University Press. He is now hard at work on Why Britain: A New Economic history of the British Industrial Revolution with Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, which is under contract at Princeton University Press.

Despite his well-known aversion to public speaking and his proverbial reticence, he gave a slew of lectures overseas and at home including the Hicks Lecture at Oxford University, an invited plenary lecturer at the American Philosophical Society, the annual Bogen Lecture at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the keynote address at the FRESH meeting and Louvain-la-Neuve, the Griffin Lecture at Melbourne University in Australia, and the keynote address at the Asian Historical Economics Conference in Hong Kong. Partly as a result of all that travel, he achieved his greatest distinction yet: the status of Global Services at United Airlines.

In addition he published four full-size solo-authored essays and continues to serve as editor-in-chief of the book series, Princeton University Press Economic history of the Western World (which long ago became globalized and publishes books about Asia and the Middle East). He continues as co-director of Northwestern’s Center for Economic history and supervises about ten dissertations and postdocs.

Edward Muir (Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences)     

Just before the new regime grasped hold of our democracy, Ed managed to end his term as president of the American Historical Association, which was on the front lines of defending honest history education for his entire term. He reports that it was an often-frustrating but fascinating exposure to the history wars. Ever the optimist, he kept his sanity by reminding himself that this too will end. Despite the drama, he managed to shepherd one of his books into a Russian translation and wrote an article about a rebel nun in 17th-century Venice.

 Akin Ogundiran (Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences)

Akin Ogundiran is completing his second year in Harris Hall, shuttling most days between his third-floor office and the lower level (L40) where the Material History Lab is located. Five undergraduate students (including two Leopold Fellows) are working with him in the lab this year on various topics, including the material history of nighttime and domesticity in the Oyo Empire and the recent contributions of chemistry to the history of trade, taste, migration, and knowledge networks in West Africa. He enjoys working with these brilliant students who are curious about different methods of understanding the past. Another highlight is that the Material History Lab is now online. Check us out here! Thanks to NU’s department of Media & Technology Innovation and graduate student Craig Stevens for making it happen.

Outside Harris Hall, Akin is a Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America during the 2024-2025 academic year. The endowed distinguished lectureship allowed him to present different versions of his data-driven musings on “The Oyo Empire: Domesticity of Governance and Politics of Dependency” to diverse audiences across the United States. The same topic was the subject of his 2024 Roberts Lecture at the University of Pittsburgh . He was also a guest of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin in September, where he delivered the 2024 Jan Vansina Lecture titled, “The Little Ice Age and the Oyo Empire: An Unfinished Process of Recovery in West Africa, ca. 1380-1840.” Last December, he gave a keynote address on “Hoof Beats and the Humans in the Saddle: History, Culture, and Epistemology in a Distant Land” at a conference on Horses and the Human Story: A Global Perspective at the University of Colorado Boulder. That address continued his exploration of equine biopolitics in Yoruba history.

Akin published four articles during the academic year, including "Yorùbá Indigenous Religion," in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History and an autobiography, “From Dictionary to Archaeology: My Intellectual Journey,” in Working as Indigenous Archaeologists: Reckoning New Patterns Between Past and Present Lives (Taylor and Francis). Other articles appear in the West African Journal of Archaeology (Nigeria) and Revista de Arqueologia (Brazil).

Susan Pearson (Professor)

Susan Pearson hosted a conference in May entitled "Paper People: Documentation, Identity, and Citizenship in United States History." The event convened scholars working on naturalization papers, passports, driver's licenses, free papers, and more. It aimed to examine how a variety of documents have been used to establish identity categories and, as a result, access to citizenship. Susan is grateful to the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies for providing funds for the conference!

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies) 

In 2024, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (YPS) published Besmirching the Denominational Enemy Within and Outside: Counter-history or Its Parody, co-authored with Ephraim Nissan from UCL. He also published an introduction to and a chapter in After Soviet State Antisemitism: Emigration, Transformation, and the Re-Building of Jewish Life Since 1991, co-edited with Zeev Khanin from Bar-Ilan University. The Old Lion Publishing House in Ukraine issued second editions of books that YPS edited and for which he wrote prefaces and annotations (in Ukrainian and English), on Jewish architectural legacy in Lviv and on Jewish photographers and photo studios in Lviv.  

He received an Israel Institute Grant to develop a course, "Jerusalem: History, Memory, Fantasy,” which covers three thousand years of the history of the city, and which he taught in fall 2024. He also spent a year studying Arabic. YPS also been producing artwork that serves an extension of his scholarship. He presented his newest art at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago and discussed art in times of war on Chicago’s Ukrainian radio station.  

Scott Sowerby (Associate Professor)

In between teaching about pirates and courtesans, Scott has continued to chip away at the mammoth and perhaps foolhardy undertaking of writing a book on religious toleration in early modern Europe. He presented papers related to the project at Oxford and at Northwestern’s Economic History Seminar. He also wrote an article entitled “The Archbishop and the Green Boys: Irish Catholic Recruitment in the British Army during the American Revolutionary War.” It’s a piece that relies in part on discoveries made by a series of Leopold Fellows he has worked with over the past few years, including the amazing Alix Hamilton, Michael Palaskas, and Carolina Stutz. Hopefully, it will appear in print next year.

Amy Stanley (Orrington Lunt Professor and Director of the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies)

Amy Stanley is having a great time directing the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. She enjoys the lunch lectures, but her favorite parts are the Leopold Fellows presentations and the faculty work-in-progress seminars, where she gets to hear what her colleagues and their students are doing. Last year, she was on leave, which is why she didn't contribute to the newsletter, but happily she did get some work done. She studied literary Burmese, and while she absolutely can't say anything comprehensible, she did learn to read well enough to use some Burmese material in her new research. Two essays from that project -- "Gendering the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" and "Re-visiting the 'Comfort Girls' of Report #49: Sex, Race, and Information in Asia's War for Empire" are forthcoming in the American Historical Review later this year. She has also been consulting for Season Two of the Netflix series "Blue Eye Samurai," though she can't tell you any spoilers because she signed an NDA!

Lauren Stokes (Associate Professor)

Professor Stokes spent 2024-2025 in Chicago's most Hanseatic sister city, Hamburg, as a fellow at the Hamburg Institute of Advanced Study. Her new project, "The Jet Age in Eight Passengers," tells the story of civil aviation since 1945 through collective biographies of eight prototypical travelers -- including the business traveler, the asylum seeker, and the deportee. She enjoyed the opportunity to observe the German election from up close, but she can report that "ship spotting" is a more relaxing way to spend a day.

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