The Department of History has been very fortunate to hire several new people who are making a big imprint on our department!  

Two new Assistant Professors, Brad Nichols and Cindy Ewing have joined our faculty.  Dr. Nichols is a historian of Modern Germany, with specialties in the Third Reich, Genocide Studies, and digital history.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee was most recently Visiting Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech.  His dissertation, “Nazi Germanization Policy in Occupied Europe,” received the Fritz Stern Prize for Best Dissertation in German History from the German Historical Association in 2017.  Dr. Ewing completed her doctorate at Yale, specializing in Global History, modern South Asia, and modern Southeast Asia, with research interests in decolonization, human rights, comparative constitutions, international institutions, and the global Cold War.  Her dissertation won the Arthur and Mary Wright Yale Dissertation Prize, the Oxford University Press USA Dissertation Prize in International History, and the Lynne Rienner Publishers Award for Best Dissertation.  She is currently working on turning her dissertation into a book entitled Gatekeepers: Human Rights and the International Solidarities of the Third World.  We are in the final stages of completing a third new faculty hire, who we will tell you more about in our next newsletter.

Finally, over the summer, Andy Emerson joined our department as Senior Business Support Specialist. A strong fiscal officer is always essential, and he joins us at a particularly critical time. A pandemic is a strange time to begin a new job or move to a new town and some of us have yet to meet our new colleagues in person. We are nonetheless enormously pleased to have them on board and doing everything we can to make them feel welcome.