Moments in History
June 2026 Newsletter
Elizabeth Dorokhina and Holly Mercer, Dean of University Libraries.
Awards & Recognitions
3
6
nEW FACULTY
7
faculty moments - presentations, media features, and news
10
faculty moments - Recent publications
11
current students - undergraduate
15
current students - graduate
20
alumni news
22
Our Centers
25
Follow us on SOCIAL MEDIA
Inside This Issue
Marjorie Antonio (HiLS student, Advisor: Colleen Woods) was awarded the American Studies Association Baxter Travel Grant, the William Randolph Hearst Fellowship, and the James F. Harris Arts and Humanities Visionary Scholarship, for which the College of Arts and Humanities holds an annual competition. The James F. Harris award honors the humanities and arts in action. Past recipients have demonstrated a well-rounded approach to service and community engagement alongside their scholarship. Richard Bell was selected as one of the University of Maryland’s 2025-26 Distinguished Scholar-Teachers. The award honors faculty members who combine outstanding scholarship with teaching excellence. Additionally, Rick's The American Revolution and the Fate of the World was named as a finalist for the 2026 American Battlefield Trust’s Prize for History. The award “recognizes an outstanding published work focused on military history or a biography central to the nation’s formative conflicts.” The American Revolution and the Fate of the World also won the 2025 Journal of the American Revolution’s Book of the Year Award. Danielle Bing (Ph.D. student, Advisor: David Freund) was awarded a Graduate School Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award for AY 2025-26. Zachary Dorner was awarded a visiting fellowship at the Bodleian Libraries. He will be in residence there for a month in the spring of 2027 to work on his second book. Elizabeth Dorokhina (B.A. 2027) was awarded the 2026 UMD Library Award for Undergraduate Research for an essay exploring gender roles during Palestine’s First Intifada. Her essay, titled "Women In The First Intifada: A New Beginning Or An Inevitable End?," was completed in her HIST208 seminar taught by Lauren Cain. Andrea Gutmann Fuentes (Ph.D. student, Advisor: Karin Rosemblatt) has been awarded a Fulbright US Student Program grant to Chile for the 2026-27 academic year for her project, "Chilean Labor and the Global Cold War, 1945-1990." Andrea will examine how relationships between workers in Chile and abroad shaped Cold War geopolitics. She has secured an affiliation with Dr. Mario Garcés at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Hershel Katz (B.A. 2025) was awarded the 2026 UMD Library Award for Undergraduate Research Award for an essay examining how technology, specifically dynamite, impacted the construction of the Panama Canal and what it meant for the labor force. His essay, titled "Building with Explosives: The Role of Dynamite in Constructing the Panama Canal," was completed in his 408 seminar on the Panama Canal taught by Julie Greene. Jayson M. Porter was awarded a 2026-27 Arts for All Faculty Fellowship in support of the CEDAR Gallery. This fellowship supports “faculty members in their publicly-engaged, arts-based research activities throughout the 2026-27 academic year. Fellows will meet as a cohort multiple times throughout the year to learn from each other, deepen their scholarship, and meet with experts on arts integration research, community engaged research, and approaches to funding in the academic sphere.” Marsha Rozenblit delivered the prestigious Leo Baeck Institute Memorial Lecture in March 2026. Her lecture was entitled "Was New York Like Vienna? How Jewish Refugees from Austria, 1938-1941, Made America into a New Version of the Habsburg Monarchy." On that occasion the Leo Baeck Institute, a research institute in New York specializing in the history and culture of German-speaking Jews, awarded Marsha the Moses Mendelssohn Award for her "outstanding scholarly contributions which have advanced our understanding of Jewish history and culture in Habsburg lands." Diya Shah (B.A. 2026) was awarded the 2026 Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Library Award for an essay exploring Playboy magazine as an overlooked site of Vietnam War dialogue and public debate. Her essay is titled “Bridging Battlefield and Homefront: The Playboy Forum and the Vietnam War.” Katelyn Weslowski (B.A. 2026) was awarded a 2026 Winston Family Honors Writing Award for Outstanding Thesis presented by the Honors College for her undergraduate honors thesis, “‘Where the Waters Blend': The Shifting Nature of Indigenous-English Relations in Seventeenth-Century Maryland.” These awards, presently annually, recognize the best essays, research papers, and theses written by honors students at the university. Katelyn also received the Ted and Penny Schwartz Prize for Outstanding Junior Year Honors Paper in the History Department for her paper “The Discriminatory Nature of Anti-Plague Measures in India, 1896-1900.”
Katelyn Weslowski and Erich Schwartz.
Hershel Katz and Holly Mercer, Dean of University Libraries.
Diya Shah and Holly Mercer, Dean of University Libraries.
Katelyn Weslowski at the Honors College Awards Ceremony.
Faculty Moments
Presentations, Media Features, and News
Richard Bell was featured in the media throughout this semester for his 2025 publication, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. He’s been interviewed for multiple podcast episodes, including Episode 438 of Ben Franklin’s World, “Rick Bell: The American Revolution and the Fate of the World” and Episode 95 of the Dallas Morning News podcast, Cross Examining History. Rick has been featured by outlets such as Smithsonian Magazine in an article titled “Native Nations Fought in the American Revolution to Protect Their Ancestral Lands. After the War, Settlers Seized Their Territory Anyway,” and The Christian Science Monitor in an article titled “America at 250: A declaration of ideals reset the world – and still resonates today.” In May 2026, Rick was interviewed by Terp magazine for an article in its spring edition. In his Q&A titled "World Wide Reb: In New Book, Historian Depicts American Revolution as Global War," Bell discusses the book's main takeaways, its characters, and the "ripple effects" of the American Revolution to the present. He was also broadcast on WGN live TV in Chicago in February 2026, and his book was named one of the Top 10 books on the American Revolution by The History Channel. Martina Biondi and Peter Wien organized the international workshop, History of Health in the Maghreb: Colonial Biopolitics, Postcolonial Challenges and International Healthcare (1830–1980) with the Miller Center in May 2026. The workshop brought together established experts and early-career researchers working in the field of the history of health from the Middle East, Europe, and North America. It examined the trajectories of public health in the Maghreb countries at the intersection of colonial and postcolonial history, and with particular reference to the fight against epidemics and reproductive health. The initiative offered an opportunity to discuss the historical transformations of healthcare and their social, political, and cultural implications in the region, as well as to reflect on new methodologies and approaches to the field. The workshop also fostered an interdisciplinary dialogue integrating social history of medicine, political history, and humanitarianism. The workshop was organized in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. It was part of Martina Biondo’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship project, HICAMA – History of Care in the Maghreb: Infectious Diseases, Healthcare Infrastructures and International Aid (1956–1999). In March 2026, Robert Friedel (Professor Emeritus) served as a historical consultant for a Veritasium video about the history and mechanics of zippers. The video, titled "Making a Giant Zipper to Explain How They Work," has garnered more than 8.5 million views on YouTube as of May 2026. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP) has created a partnership with the Journal of the Civil War Era to produce short, public-facing articles. The first of these, "The Unspendable Pension of Henrietta Emory Meads," details the unsuccessful struggle of a Black war widow to obtain the pension, bounty, and back pay to which she was legally entitled. Its most recent installment, "'I was Detected by My Laugh': The Brief Military Career of Margaret Cathrine Murphy," examines the experiences of two women captured in men's clothes and suspected of spying by the Union Army. Ahmet T. Karamustafa gave a talk in late March 2026, jointly with Fatemeh Keshavarz of School of Languages Literatures and Cultures, in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, on the book they co-edited in 2025 titled Mystical Landscapes in Medieval Persian Literature. He also reviewed article submissions in four different journals this semester. When he finds time away from his administrative responsibilities, Ahmet continues to work on his current book project on the Islamization of Turkish speakers in medieval Anatolia provisionally titled Islam in the Mirror of Early Turkish Literature. In March 2026, Leslie Rowland (Professor Emerita) spoke on the public history panel of a day-long symposium at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The symposium focused on the work of the museum's Freedmen's Bureau Project. David Sartorius was featured in "Abandoned Histories," an episode of the American Historical Review podcast, History in Focus, in which several historians discuss their relationships to research projects they left behind. In March 2026, he presented "Paper Work: Passports and Uncitizenship in Cuba" at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, Brazil, as part of a workshop about illegal work and workers in the nineteenth-century Americas. And in May 2026, David participated in a panel at the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York about "The Work of the Humanist." In March 2026, David Sicilia (Professor Emeritus) presented "Securitizing Litigation: The Rise – and Perils – of Third-Party Funding" at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference, which this year convened in London. David also participated on a panel, “Lessons from 250 Years of American Entrepreneurship” for the 20th annual Smith Entrepreneurship Research Conference at the Robert H. Smith School of Business in May 2026. Julie Taddeo launched the first few episodes of her podcast, Period Drama Debrief with co-creator and co-host, Katherine Byrne, from the department of English at Ulster University, UK. Available on Spotify and Apple podcasts, the series examines how British period dramas engage with history, politics, and sex, class, and race, and fan culture. Julie was featured in an episode of Period, The Podcast in which she discussed Bridgerton's treatment of race and class as well as portrayals of aging women and sexuality. Julie has given multiple public history lectures this semester for such venues as Smithsonian Associates, Edward A. Myerberg Center, and OLLI adult learners. She was also interviewed for WBAL Baltimore News regarding King Charles III's visit to the US and his speech before Congress. Thomas Zeller was interviewed by KJZZ, the public radio station in Arizona, about Germany's autobahn and its lack of a speed limit. Some politicians in Arizona are debating a pilot program to do away with speed limits on some rural highways in that state.
Gerson Rosales.
We are delighted to announce the newest addition to our faculty this year. Gerson Rosales will formally join us as an assistant professor in Fall 2026 after completing his postdoctoral fellowship this year. Gerson received his B.A. and M.A. in History from San Francisco State University, and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area of California. His family arrived in the United States as part of the mass migration of Central Americans during the late 1970s and 1980s. His research specializes in migration, racial formation, Latine identity, refugee politics, and transnational social movements in the United States and Central America. He is working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation "Yo canto a mi pueblo: Salvadoran Migration, Activism, and Diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900-1992." The manuscript is a transnational history of the Bay Area's Salvadoran community, beginning with coffee elites' migration during the early twentieth century and ending with the mass movement of Salvadorans and other Central Americans during the 1980s.
New Faculty
Guest speakers and panelists on campus for the international workshop.
Undergraduate
Honors Program seniors at the History Honors Showcase. (Pictured from left to right: Sam Fox, Katelyn Weslowski, Allison Leonard, Tula Locke, Stella Henson, and Clare Lyons (faculty advisor)).
Current students
The 2026 inductees to Phi Alpha Theta. (Pictured from left to right: Rachael Wolfson, Taylor Gillette, Sarah Williams, Jehan Idsassi, Thomas Zeller (faculty guest speaker), Isabella Centeno Solis, Yonah Gross, Nora Schobel, Nicholas Kelly, Michele Taylor, and Mircea Raianu (faculty advisor)).
The History Undergraduate Association (HUA) had a busy semester as always! This spring, HUA hosted events such as Middle East Trivia with the Arabic Club, ice cream, cookie, and pizza socials, a letterpress event with Special Collections, and an event with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center, "Venezuela After US Intervention: The Costs of Oil." In May 2026, students from Robert Chiles’s HIST222: Immigration and Ethnicity in America course put on their annual “Ethnic Foodways Festival.” Students compose original research papers on the transnational history of an immigrant group’s cuisine and culture, and then have the option to prepare a representative recipe for this public-facing history event. More than 30 students participated, representing Bajan, Belarussian, British, Chinese, Dominican, Dutch, Eastern European Jewish, Guatemalan, Hungarian, Indian, Irish, Korean, Lao, Latvian, Norwegian, Peruvian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Ukrainian foodways. An estimated 500 members of the campus community attended, sampling the cuisine and voting on awards. Special awards were presented by Dean Shonekan, Jon Boone, and multiple HIST222 alumni who traveled back to campus for the event. Six honors students in the HIST396: Honors Colloquium II visited Library of Congress with Holly Brewer in May 2026. They spoke with Patrick Hastings, a curator for rare books at LOC, and examined a selection of rare books and pamphlets related to the American Revolution. Mckinley Jovanovic (B.A. 2028) was featured in a Maryland Today article about her experience in wrestling. Mckinley is one of two women on UMD's Club Wrestling team, and won last year’s National Collegiate Wrestling Association (NCWA) Mideast regional tournament in the women’s 131-pound weight class. As Maryland Today writes, Mckinley "gravitates toward U.S. history classes that celebrate unsung women who overcame 20th century adversity." Read more about McKinley's wrestling journey in this Maryland Today article. Katelyn Weslowski (B.A. 2026) shared her undergraduate honors thesis, “‘Where the Waters Blend:’ The Shifting Nature of Indigenous-English Relations in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” at the 17th annual McNeil Center Undergraduate Research Workshop in April 2026. This workshop hosted by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania showcases some of the most promising and creative work being undertaken by undergraduate students in the region (and beyond!). Students gain valuable experience working with a mentor at the center and presenting their research to the MCEAS community as part of the workshop.
Recent Publications
James Gilbert (Distinguished Professor Emeritus), published the fourth novel in the Amanda Pennyworth mystery series in January 2026. The series is set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. In May 2026, History News Network published “Reading Playboy for the History” by Chris Halstead. The piece examines 1960s understandings of witchcraft seen through the lens of a vintage Playboy article. Another of Chris’s articles titled "The Death of Wichmann: Waltharius, Widukind, and the Negotiation of Imperial Loyalties in Tenth-Century Germany" will be published in The Haskins Society Journal 35 in July 2026. Additionally, Chris's "The Lamia queen and the disordered court: Liudprand of Cremona’s Antapodosis in its contexts," was published in Medium Ævum, and "Germany’s Feral Rheas: Colonialism, Rewilding, and Deep History in the Schaalsee Biosphere Reserve" was published in Environment and History ahead of print. In January 2026, the Arabic edition of Shay Hazkani’s Dear Palestine, was published in Egypt under the title azizti filastin. It was translated by Maysara Salah El Din and published by Sefsafa Publishing House. It has since been featured in the Lebanese newspaper, al-Akhbar, and in the Egyptian daily, Youm7. It was also taken up by many bloggers and social media influencers. David Sartorious’s review of The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the World, by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, appeared in The Americas Quarterly in April 2026. Peter Wien contributed a chapter, “Civil Society and Independence Movements,” to the Routledge Handbook on Civil Society in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by James N. Sater (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2026). In April 2026, Peter’s article “Monumental after Life: Placing the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad’s Commemorative Landscape,” was published in Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World.
HUA's 2026-27 officers at the ice cream social. (Pictured from left to right: Alan Rosales-Morales, Naomi Richardson, and Sarah Williams)
One of the pieces Hastings showed to students. A Summary View of the Rights of British America, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1774.
HIST396 students with Patrick Hastings at Library of Congress.
Photos by Jess Daninhirsch (@daninhirschphotography)
The Department's table at Maryland Day 2026, including a presidential trivia game and Mircea Raianu as President Lincoln.
The Department also invited the Washington Nationals Racing Presidents to Maryland Day! Pictured with Darryll and Silvia Pines and Testudo. Photo from Maryland Today.
HUA's letterpress event with UMD Special Collections in Hornbake Library.
"People Power @ 40" at the Filipino Cultural and Bayanihan Center.
As part of their master’s thesis, Douglass Center and Arts for All fellowship project, and reflections from a community co-curatorial project, Marjorie Justine Antonio (HiLS student, Advisor: Colleen Woods) presented at events at both UMD and UCLA. They presented at UMD’s Remembering Historical Violence Symposium (organized by Prof. Erin Mosely and Prof. Siv B. Lie), “People Power @ 40: How the Filipino People Ousted a Dictator.” At UCLA, their presentation “'Keeping Ourselves Safe': Transnational Filipinx Arts Activism and Community Archiving in a Dual Surveillance State” discussed archival and ethical considerations of transnational Filipinx activist community archiving during increasing militarization in the Asia-Pacific. Marjorie was also an invited speaker for Project STAND: Student Activism Now Documented x UCLA Libraries Residency in April 2026 at the University of California, Los Angeles. They have accepted offers to present at the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) Biennial Conference in Washington, D.C. in July 2026, the American Studies Association (ASA) Conference in October 2026 in Chicago, and will serve on a roundtable entitled “In the Meantime: Reflections and Strategies for Liberatory K-12 and Higher Education (2-part roundtable)” at this year’s ASA Conference in Chicago. Their presentation will expand upon their master’s thesis by analyzing how diasporic Filipino youth activists fight back against current US-Philippine counterinsurgency tactics of “red-tagging” through cultural work and productions. Marjorie's "proof of existence” was accepted for forthcoming publication for the upcoming Filipinx Anthology by Flowersong Press, edited by Rachelle Cruz, Michelle Peñaloza, Barbara Jane Reyes, Janice Lobo Sapigao, and Von Torres. This is Marjorie’s first literary work to be published in conversation with other Filipinx diasporic writers, poets, performance artists, and cultural workers (in memory of Filipino author and editor, Nick Carbó). Marjorie will start their Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where they are a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. In February 2026, Lauren Cain (Ph.D. candidate, Advisor: Robyn Muncy) gave an invited talk, "Black Women in Revolutionary New York," for Black History Month at St. John's University in New York. She co-presented with Anna Danziger Halperin, Director of the Jean Margo Reid Center for Women’s History at the New York Historical Society. In January 2026, Lauren presented her paper, "Negotiating Family and Citizenship: First World War Brides and the Limits of Exclusion," at the AHA Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. For that conference, she received an ARHU Graduate Student Travel Award and the American Historical Association awarded her a Dorothy Rosenberg Phi Beta Kappa Annual Meeting Travel Grant. Lauren also received a Russell F. Weigley Graduate Student Travel Grant to support her participation at the 2026 Society for Military History Annual Meeting in Arlington, Virginia. In March 2026, Lauren presented her paper, "'A souvenir from France': How the U.S. Military Mitigated War Bride Marriage, 1918-1923." Finally, Lauren was accepted to the fully funded Society for Military History 2026 Summer Seminar in Military History. It will be held in Lexington, Virginia in June 2026. Chloe Kauffman (Ph.D. candidate, Advisor: Clare Lyons) was awarded the following research fellowships for next year: the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s History, the Helen L. Bing Fellowship, and the American Antiquarian Society Fellowship. The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) is a national research library in Massachusetts that houses the world’s largest and most accessible collection of books and other archival materials. AAS Research Fellowships are awarded based on "scholarly qualifications, the scholarly significance or importance of the project, and the appropriateness of the proposed study to the Society's collections." Dominique Garcia (Ph.D. candidate, Advisor: Karin Rosemblatt) received a dissertation travel award from the History of Science Society to do summer research in Buenos Aires. Angelina Lincoln (Ph.D. candidate, Advisor: Richard Bell), was awarded multiple research fellowships for the coming year. She is another recipient of an American Antiquarian Society Research Fellowship and also received fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Conor MCadden (Ph.D. candidate, Advisor: David Freund) was awarded a Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship for Summer 2026. Nicholas Morrison (Ph.D. student; Advisor: Sarah Cameron) was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) three year fellowship. Dongil Shin (Ph.D. student, Advisor: Colleen Woods) received a runner-up distinction for the 2026 Allan R. Millett Dissertation Research Grant from the Society for Military History for his dissertation project, “Recognition through Violence: Trans-Imperial Counterinsurgency and Militarized Decolonization in Korea, 1937–1987.” He also organized a panel, “Sovereignty and Empire: Violence, Recognition, and Everyday Life in Cold War Korea,” accepted for the 2026 annual Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Conference in Columbus, Ohio. The panel, chaired and commented on by Mitchell Lerner (OSU) is sponsored by the Journal of American-East Asian Relations and features scholars from NYU, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. John Sturc (Ph.D. candidate, Advisor: David Sicilia) presented his paper titled "The Technocratic Project: The 1970s Movement to Preserve Institutions and Restrain the Power of Big Business,” at the Economic and Business History Society Conference in May 2026. Eleanor Vander Laan (HiLS student, Advisor: Robyn Muncy) attended the Loyola University History Graduate Student Conference, The Power of Public History: Resistance, Revolutions, Renaissance. There, Eleanor and former coworker Eleena Ghosh (MLIS '25) presented a paper titled, "'Objectionable Objections to Obscenity': Argus Magazine and the role of University Archivists in Empowering Student Activism." Using their recent mini-exhibit on UMD student publications and freedom of speech challenges as a case study, their presentation explored how university archivists can use histories of student activism as avenues to engage and empower current student activists. At the Spring 2026 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference in Richmond, Virginia, Eleanor presented a poster titled "Reprocessing Legacy Audiovisual Collections in the American Bandmasters Association Research Center." Their poster was based upon work they did as a project archivist in UMD's Special Collections in the Performing Arts. Stephanie Zager (HiLS student, Advisor: Janna Bianchini) attended the Leo Baeck University Spring 2026 conference, Sephardic Studies: Past and Present held at the University of Potsdam in March 2026. The program was organized by the Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg. Her presentation, "Food as Cultural Archive in Sephardic History from Early Modern Iberia to the Contemporary Mediterranean," was included in the Thursday session on “Music and Material Culture.” Her talk was based on her ongoing thesis research, "The Kitchen as Evidence: Food, Domestic Routine, and the Making of Religious Difference in the Tribunal of Llerena," and examined how everyday domestic practices were transformed into evidence of Judaizing within inquisitorial records. This project highlights the kitchen as a critical historical site for analyzing the intersections of food, legal categorization, gendered labor, surveillance, and religious identity. This summer, she will participate in the Institute for Jewish Studies Barcelona’s "Matanel Sefarad Seminar," an intensive program in Sephardic Studies that brings together emerging scholars working on Jewish history across the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean world.
graduate
Marjorie Antonio at the Remembering Historical Violence Symposium.
Chloe Kauffman.
Lauren Cain with alumni at the Society for Military History Annual Meeting. (Pictured from left to right: Amy Rutenberg, Ph.D. 2013, Lauren Cain, current Ph.D. Candidate, Megan Harris, M.A. 2006, and Allison Finkelstein, Ph.D. 2015.)
Stephanie Zager at Sephardic Studies: Past and Present.
Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies
Eleanor Vander Laan at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference.
Gabrielle McCoy.
Alumni News
Evan Ash (Ph.D. 2025, Advisor: Saverio Giovacchini) was hired as an upper school history teacher at Indian Creek School in Crownsville, MD. Next year he'll be teaching AP US, AP World, and 10th grade history. Mikol Bailey (Ph.D. 2025, Advisor: Marsha Rozenblit) was awarded a post-doc at the Anielewicz Center for Research and Teaching on the History and Culture of Jews in Poland at the University of Warsaw. They are contributing to a project called "Jewish Self-government in the Polish Lands: Evolution, Structures, Mechanisms." Maytal Mark (M.A. 2021, Advisor: Shay Hazkani) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Smith College, to begin this fall. Gabrielle McCoy (B.A. 2021) went on to pursue a PhD in history at the University of South Carolina, and has successfully defended her dissertation, "In the Saddle: Gender and the Rise of a Female Equestrian Culture." Samuel Miner (Ph.D. 2021, Advisor: Jeffrey Herf) has accepted an offer for a tenure-track assistant professor position at Louisiana State University with a start date of August 2027. Oliver Otto (B.A. 2025) published an essay titled "Driving Change: The Complex Struggle for American Auto Safety Reform in the 1960s" in the Michigan Journal of History. He completed the research in his HIST408 seminar with Katarina Keane. Jordan Sly (Ph.D. 2025, Advisor: Stefano Villani) was awarded a Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award, for his dissertation "Protector of the Reformed: Oliver Cromwell's Religio-Political Motives and the Development of Protectorate Ideology." Joseph Slaughter (Ph.D. 2017, Advisors: Whitman Ridgway and David Sicilia) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Wesleyan University. Joseph’s first book, Faith In Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic, was published by Columbia University Press in 2023, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Enterprise & Society and Journal of the Early Republic. Kader Smail (Ph.D. 2025, Advisor: Antoine Borrut) co-edited a special issue of Annales islamologiques that has just been published online. The dossier is entitled “Symbolisms and Representations of the Kaʿba,” and about half of the articles are in English. Lane Windham (Ph.D. 2015, Advisor: Julie Greene) was appointed Co-Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.
CenteR foR Global Migration Studies
The CEDAR GALLERY
On May 1, 2026, Dean Stephanie Shonekan, 17 for Peace and Justice, and the History Undergraduate Association joined together in officially opening the CEDAR Gallery in Taliaferro Hall, Room 2155. The CEDAR Gallery is a faculty and student-led environmental gallery that centers ecologies, diasporas, and ancestral roots. Jayson M. Porter is the gallery’s principal curator and faculty lead. The gallery’s intertwined goals are threefold: provide students with the space, tools, and experiences to combat climate anxiety; showcase and celebrate environmental works and teaching at UMD, Maryland, and around the globe; reinforce students’ educational experience at UMD by introducing them to interdisciplinary and environmental-related art, activism, and scholarship. The CEDAR Gallery is supported by the Department of History, the Indigenous Futures Lab in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Arts for All. The gallery is also partnered with two student groups: History Undergraduate Association and 17 for Peace and Justice. Learn more about the CEDAR Gallery here.
CEDAR Gallery's exhibit space, TLF 2155
This semester, the Center for Global Migration Studies (CGMS) was pleased to host events involving UMD faculty, off-campus scholars, and public history projects. In February, it hosted a discussion with Richard Bell on his book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World in honor of the US's 250th anniversary. Samantha Seeley (University of Richmond) joined CGMS on-campus for comments and discussion. In March, CGMS welcomed a panel of editors and contributors to the anthology Hidden Histories of Unathorized Migrations from Europe to the United States, including S. Deborah Kang (University of Virginia), Danielle Battisti (University of Nebraska), Carly Goodman (Temple University), and Ashley Johnson Bavery (Eastern Michigan University). Willow Lung-Amam (UMD Urban Studies and Planning) presented her book The Right to Suburbia: Combating Gentrification on the Urban Edge in April with comments from Tanya Golash-Boza (UC California, Merced, Washington DC Program) Finally, CGMS hosted the 250 Years of Immigrant Stories: Podcast Launch & Conference in May. This conference and its panels examined the evolving paths of migration scholarship, the conceptual and methodological challenges in podcasting, and strategies for sharing immigrant stories with public audiences. The connecting podcast, 250 Years of Immigrant Stories, was created with support from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Through narratives of featured immigrants, the podcast explores varying experiences of immigration, settlement, and the emergence of immigration regulation over time. Explore the podcast website here!
The Nathan and Jeanette Miller Center for Historical Studies also hosted a full semester of events and discussions. In February, the Miller Center joined the CEDAR Gallery in welcoming Beronda Montgomery (Grinnell College), plant biologist and author of When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical History. The Miller Center also welcomed Elizabeth Urban (West Chester University) for a talk titled “Beyond the Family Tree: Enslavement and the Edges of Family in Early Islam.” In March, Prakash Kumar (Penn State) presented “Green Revolution Has a History,” drawing on his recent book, A History of India’s Green Revolution: Reign of Technocracy. April featured three events. First, in conjunction with Persian Studies, the Miller Center welcomed Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (University of Toronto) for a talk titled “The Long War on Iran: How Did We Get Here?” Later that month, Stacey Murrell (Amherst College), Debra Blumenthal (UC Santa Barbara), and Michelle Armstrong-Partida (Emory University) participated in a discussion, “Negotiating Sex: A Roundtable on Race, Sex, & Power in the Medieval Mediterranean.” Finally, Karin Rosemblatt shared work from her ongoing project, Indigeneity, Mexican Narratives of Conquest, and the Cold War Controversy over Cuauhtémoc’s Remains. In May, the Miller Center contributed to the symposium History of Public Health in the Maghreb, which explored emerging directions in the history of health in colonized and postcolonial North Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Next semester, the Miller Center will welcome David Sartorius as its new director!
Nathan and Jeanette Miller CenteR For Historical Studies
Paige Little (B.A. 2022) is the manager of the Department of History’s digital content (including this newsletter!), website, and social media pages. Please give the Department of History a follow on our accounts to stay updated on our news, events, publications, and more throughout the year! Instagram: @umdhistory Facebook: UMD Department of History Bluesky: @umdhistory.bsky.social
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