Faculty

Adjunct & Affiliated Faculty

Faculty Emeriti

Visiting Scholars and Lecturers

New and Visiting Scholars

Staff

The History Department Faculty

Name Index
a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z

Luis Alvarez (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin 2001; associate professor) has teaching and research interests in comparative race and ethnicity, popular culture, Chicana/o studies, Latina/o studies, African American studies, U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transnationalism, resistance, identity and community formation, cultural theory. His book, The Power of the Zoot: Identity and Resistance in US Youth Culture during World War II, will be published by the University of California Press. Phone: (858) 534-6499. Email: l2alvarez@ucsd.edu
H&SS Room: 4086A Hours:

Frank P. Biess
(Ph.D., Brown University 2000; associate professor) specializes in Twentieth-Century German History. His teaching interests include Modern German and Italian History, the history of World War II, post-1945 European history as well as 20th century world history. His broader thematic interests include the history of war and violence, gender (especially masculinity), memory, and the history of emotions. His current research project focuses on the history of fear and anxiety in postwar Germany.
Phone: (858) 822-2643. Email: fbiess@ucsd.edu
H&SS Room: 4070 Hours: On Leave 2008-2009

Nancy Caciola
(Ph.D., University of Michigan 1994; associate professor) is a European medieval historian with an emphasis on the religious and popular culture of the later Middle Ages. She is interested in attitudes towards women in the Middle Ages, in sainthood, and in the genre of stories known as mirabilia ("wonders"). Her current research investigates medical, theological, and popular-cultural definitions of life and death in the period from 1000 to 1400.
Phone: (858) 822-0676. Email: ncaciola@ucsd.edu
H&SS Room: 6084 Hours:
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Robert S. Edelman
(Ph.D., Columbia University 1973; professor) teaches the history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union as well as the history of global sport. His past work has focused on the political history of the late Russian Empire and rural history. More recently, he has worked on sport both in the USSR and in the rest of the modern world. His research has centered on spectator sport and popular culture and politics, the construction of masculinities and the development of culture bodily cultures. A contributor to the New York Times and public radio, he has served as a consultant for CBS, PBS, ESPN, HBO, ABC, and the BBC.
Phone: (858) 534-4096. Email: redelman@ucsd.edu
H&SS Room: 6056 Hours:
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Joseph W. Esherick
(Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley 1971; professor and Hsiu Chair in Chinese Studies) teaches modern Chinese history. His research interests focus on the intersection of social and political history, social movements, and popular culture. He has published books on the 1911 Revolution, the Boxer Uprising, Chinese local elites, Chinese cities, and Chinese archives. He is currently working on a family history and a book on the Chinese revolution.
Phone: (858) 534-8939. Email:jesherick@ucsd.edu
H&SS Room: 3070 Hours:
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Takashi Fujitani (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley 1986; associate professor) teaches and researches across a range of areas and topics. He focuses especially on modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia Pacific). Much of his past and current research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues. He is currently completing a transnational and comparative study of ethnic and colonial soldiering (Koreans in Japan, Japanese in the U.S.).
Phone: (858) 534-7881. Email address: tfujitani@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 3073 Hours: On Leave Fall 2008, Winter 2009
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Tom Gallant (Ph.D., Cambridge University, UK, 1982; professor and Nicholas Family Endowed Chair in Modern Greek History) specializes in modern Greek history with special interest in rural society and culture, banditry, piracy and violence, masculinity and gender, cultural identity, imperialism and law, and the social history and anthropology of the Mediterranean. His most recently published books are Modern Greece, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity and Power in the British Mediterranean, and The 1918 Anti-Greek Riot in Toronto. His new books are Murder on Black Mountain: Love and Death on a Nineteenth Century Greek Island and Blood on Their Hands: Crime, Criminal Justice and Policing in the British Mediterranean. He is the editor of the ten-volume Edinburgh History of the Greeks and author of volume nine on the Nineteenth century.
Phone: (858) 534-9597. Email address: tgallant@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 2302 Hours :
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Cathy Gere (Ph.D., Cambridge University, UK, 2001; Assistant Professor) specializes in the history of medicine, the life sciences, and the historical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her current research project on the "The Utilitarian Self" concerns the intersection of moral philosophy and the neurosciences in nineteenth century Britain. It examines how the experimental investigation of sensory-motor psychology and localization of brain functions were entangled with the political project of British Utilitarianism.
Phone: (858) 534-6051. Email address: cgere@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4040 Hours :
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Tal Golan (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley 1997; associate professor) specializes in modern History of Science, and the relations between science, technology and law. Golan teaches courses on the development of modern science from the 17th century forward. His broader thematic interests are in the growing relations between science, technology, professionalization, and the modern state. His present research is focused on the history of Israeli science. It argues that the very viability of the Zionist project, and later of the State of Israel, has been largely based on scientific and technological excellence, which has guaranteed military superiority, economic prosperity, and cultural rejuvenation.
Phone: (858) 534-3883. Email address: tgolan@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4044 Hours :
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David Goodblatt (Ph.D., Brown University 1972; Distinguished professor and Endowed Chair in Judaic Studies) is a specialist in Jewish history, the history of Judaism, and the Middle East in the pre-Islamic. Since he focuses on a transnational community living in a worl of multi-ethnic empires, he of necessity deals with issues of group identity, diaspora, colonialism, imperialism, and subaltern studies--all wheels recently re-invented. His most recent book is Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism.
Phone: (858) 534-0617. Email address: dgoodblatt@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4024 Hours :
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David Gutierrez (Ph.D., Stanford University 1988; professor, Academic Senate Distinguished Teacher) focuses on Chicano history, comparative immigration and ethnicity, and the history of the citizenship. His current work focuses on the dynamic historical tension between citizens and non-citizens in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Exploring how the forces of global capitalism often trumped the interests of exclusive nationalists in the American context, he examines the changing definition of citizenship over time, the shifting contours of the international debate over immigration, and the growing importance of non-citizens in contemporary life.
Phone: (858) 534-3040. Email address: dggutierrez@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6062 Hours: On Leave Winter, Spring 2009
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Mark Hanna (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2006; Assistant Professor) Mark's dissertation, The Pirate Nests: The Impact of Piracy on Newport and Charles Town, 1670-1730, not only challenges prevailing interpretations of piracy; it also uses the phenomenon of piracy to illuminate the history of early America in the Atlantic World. His research is quintessentially multidisciplinary, with a legal historical base grounded in the Navigation Acts, early trials from the Admiralty courts, and shipping records; an interdisciplinary historical analysis of the economic underpinnings, social networks, and political support of pirate activity on land and sea; and the cultural nuance of print culture, both the literary world of historical fiction and the more ephemeral rough-and-tumble of early newspapers.
Phone: (858) 822-1532. Email address: m1hanna@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4059 Hours: On Leave Fall 2008-Spring 2010
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Deborah Hertz (Ph.D. University of Minnesota 1979, professor and Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies) specializes in Modern Jewish History, history of women in Europe, and modern German history. Hertz's research to date (Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin), and the forthcoming How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin has focused on understanding how Jewish assimilation in Germany can illuminate broader issues relevant to the history of ethnic and religious minorities. Her current project is a history of radical Jewish women in the era between 1874 and 1918, where she seeks to explain what various movements for social change offered to Jewish women.
Phone: (858) 534-5501. Email address: dhertz@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6024 Hours:
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Judith M. Hughes (Ph.D., Harvard University 1970; professor and adjunct professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine) is a specialist in modern European diplomatic and political history, British history, and the history of psychoanalysis.
Phone: (858) 534-1074. Email address: jhughes@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4085 Hours: Fall: W 2:15-3:15; On Leave Spring 2009
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Christine Hunefeldt (Ph.D., University of Bonn 1982; professor) specializes in Andean nineteenth and twentieth centuries history with research on gender and family relations, ethnicity and race, power relations, and sustained development. Her present research projects include politics on the border between Peru and Bolivia, German migration to the Andes, and the political representation of indigenous populations after the implementation of the decentralization laws in Peru and Bolivia in the 1980s.
Phone: (858) 534-8917. Email address: chunefeldt@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6072 Hours:
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Hasan Kayali (Ph.D., Harvard University 1988; associate professor) is a specialist in modern Middle Eastern history. His work focuses on the late Ottoman Empire and the transition to nation-states. He teaches courses on the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, with emphasis on Turkey and the eastern Arab lands. His current research is on the relationship of Anatolian and Syrian socio-political processes and the re-fashioning of collective identities in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
Phone: (858) 534-1071. Email address: hkayali@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6040 Hours:
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Rachel N. Klein (Ph.D., Yale University 1979; associate professor) teaches courses in U.S. cultural history from the 18th through the mid-20th centuries. Her past research and publications dealt with the American South and the politics of slavery during the Revolutionary and Early National Eras. More recently, her research has focused on art institutions and their relation to bourgeois notions of citizenship. She is completing a book that is tentatively titled, "Culture Wars: Art, Authority, and the Transformation of Taste in 19th-Century New York."
Phone: (858) 534-6777. Email address: rklein@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4056 Hours: On Leave Winter, Spring 2009
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Jane Kuo (Ph.D., Arizona State University 1992; Lecturer with Potential Security of Employment) Chinese language
Phone: (858) 534-6779. Email address: j3kuo@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 3085 Hours:
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Nancy Kwak (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2006; Assistant Professor) specializes in twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on urban development and housing policy.
Phone: (858) 534-4695. Email address: nhkwak@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6086A Hours:
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Weijing Lu (Ph.D. University of California, Davis 2001, associate professor), specializes in gender and women's history in the Ming and Qing eras. More broadly, she is interested in the social and cultural history of pre-modern China. She teaches courses on women, family, culture and society, and East Asian history. The topics of her research range from the family, marriage, the female chastity cult and women's work, to the cultural and intellectual shifts of China's late imperial period. She is currently working on a project that explores the meanings of marriage as defined by the classics, interpreted by educated men and women, and manifested in daily conjugal and familial interactions in the Qing period.
Phone: (858) 822-0586. Email address: w1lu@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 3044 Hours: On Leave 2008-2009
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John A. Marino (Ph.D., University of Chicago 1977; associate professor and chair) is a specialist in early modern European history and Renaissance and Reformation Europe. He has received Fulbright, Newberry Library, and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and has served as the Vice-President and President of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. He is the author of Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Naples (1988); Early Modern History and the Social Sciences; Testing the Limits of Braudel's Mediterranean (2002); Early Modern Italy 1550-1796 (2002); A Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain (2004); Spain in Early Modern Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion, 1500-1700 (2006). He works on the historical anthropology of the Mediterranean, the history of the book, pre-modern social, economic, and cultural history in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy.
Phone: (858) 534-3041. Email address: jmarino@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 5072 Hours:
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Everard Meade (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2005; assistant professor) studies the history of modern Mexico, with an emphasis on capital punishment, human rights, journalism, and the relationship between Mexico, Central America, and the United States. He is completing a book on the policy, practice, and elimination of capital punishment in Twentieth-Century Mexico.
Phone: (858) 534-7001. Email address: emeade@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6044 Hours: On Leave 2008-2009
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Michael P. Monteon (Ph.D., Harvard University 1974; professor) specializes in Latin American political and economic history, with a special emphasis on Argentina, Chile and Mexico. He teaches courses on these countries and on urban history, dictatorship, and U.S. interventions in the region. He is currently writing a study of government and society in the Mexico of Plutarco Elías Calles, 1920-1935, and a general survey of Latin America in the 20th Century.
Phone: (858) 534-4792. Email address: mmonteon@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4073 Hours:
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Naomi Oreskes (Ph.D., Stanford University 1990; professor) teaches the history of earth sciences, twentieth century science and technology in America, and gender and science
Phone: (858) 534-4695. Email address: noreskes@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6086 Hours: On Administrative Leave 2008-2009
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Michael Parrish (Ph.D., Yale University 1968; professor)specializes in 20th century United States history, with a special emphasis upon the history of American law, constitutional change, and law and religion. He offers undergraduate and graduate courses in American legal history (1600-present), the constitutional history of the United States, and law and religion in American history. He is completing a biography of civil rights lawyer Joseph L. Rauh, and his current research focuses on the Supreme Court and capital punishment, and the California Supreme Court during the tenure of Chief Justice Rose Bird.
Phone: (858) 534-4696. Email address: mparrish@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6073 Hours: On Administrative Leave 2008-2010
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Patrick H. Patterson (Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2001; J.D., University of Virginia, 1988; assistant professor) specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, with emphasis on cultural and political history, nationalism and ethnicity, and religion. He teaches courses on the history of these regions, on the historiography of modern Europe, on Islam and immigration in contemporary Europe, and on the history of the international law of war crimes and genocide. His present research projects focus primarily on consumption, business culture and advertising, tourism, and everyday life in socialist Eastern Europe; chief among these is a book project on consumer culture in those countries--Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR--that managed to deliver a socialist version of the "Good Life" following WWII. He is now embarking on a new project that addresses the relationship between political Christianity and Islam in contemporary Eastern and Western Europe.
Phone: (858) 534-1999. Email address: patrickpatterson@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4084 Hours: On Leave Fall 2008, Winter 2009
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Paul G. Pickowicz (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973; Distinguished professor; UC San Diego Endowed Chair in Modern Chinese History) is a specialist in twentieth century Chinese history. His research deals with fragile urban-rural alliances in peasant-based revolutions, explosive tensions in village-state relations, the rise and fall of state socialist societies, and the vicissitudes of culture--including popular cultures of resistance and the many political dimensions of fillmmaking. He is currently working on a book entitlted Dilemmas of Victory, a study of the social, political, and cultural "messiness" of the post-revolutionary era in China, 1949-1953.
Phone: (858) 534-2697.
H&SS Room 3072 Hours: On Leave Fall 2008
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Rebecca Plant (Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 2001, assistant professor) specializes in twentieth-century U.S. history. She teaches courses that focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, women's and gender history, and the emergence of a therapeutic culture. Her primary interests lie in the history of emtions, the rise of the psychological professions and the construction of gendered subjectivities. She also has expertise in the area of maternalist politics and welfare state development. Currently, she is completing a book on the history of motherhood from the 1920s through the early 1960s, focusing on motherhood as a familial role, civic identity, and bodily experience. In the future, she intends to study the problem of combat fatigue among American servicemen during and after World War II.
Phone: (858) 534-8920. Email address: rplant@ucsd.edu
H&SS Room 6016, Hours:
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Jeremy Prestholdt (Ph.D., Northwestern University 2003; associate professor) research interests include Globalization, Consumer Culture, and African History. His book, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization, is being published by the University of California Press.
Phone: (858) 534-4962. Email address: jprestholdt@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6058 Hours: On Leave Fall 2008
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William Propp (Ph.D., Harvard University 1985; professor;Harriet & Louis Bookheim Professor of Biblical and Related Languages) specializes in the civilizations and languages of the ancient Near East, as well as in biblical and Judaic Studies. He gives instruction in northwest Semitic epigraphy, Assyriology, Aramaic, Near Eastern history, the Hebrew Bible, and modern Hebrew languages, and literature. His particular interest is applying models from cultural anthropology to the study of ancient texts.
Phone: (858) 534-6187. Email address: wpropp@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4016 Hours:
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Michael Provence (Ph.D., University of Chicago 2001; associate professor) specializes in Modern Middle Eastern history, with an emphasis on the late Ottoman and colonial Arab world. His current project is a history of the Arab East in the period of direct colonial rule between 1920 and 1950. The project views the period by understanding the rebellions in each of the new colonial states as part of a unified regional movement. The work explores both the shared Ottoman past of the region and the shared experience of colonial military occupation and martial law.
Phone: (858) 534-3541. Email address: mprovence@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4086B Hours:
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Pamela Radcliff (Ph.D., Columbia University 1990; associate professor) specializes in 20th century Spanish history, teaches courses on interwar Europe, European women's history, and world history, and has broader thematic interests in gender, citizenship, labor, transitions to democracy and imperialism. She has published a book on labor and community mobilization in pre-Civil War Spain, and co-edited a volume on women's history in 19th and 20th century Spain. Her present research project, Making Democratic Citizens: Associations, Gender and the Origins of the Democratic Transition in Spain, examines the discursive practices of the civil society associations of the 1960s-70s and their contribution to the construction of new forms of citizenship within the framework of the dictatorship.
Phone: (858) 534-8919. Email address: pradclif@popmail.ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6070 Hours: On Leave Fall 2008
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Sarah Schneewind (Ph.D., Columbia University 1999; associate professor) has published two books on the relations between state and society during the Ming era: Community Schools and the State in Ming China, which studies the local implementation of one central policy, and the more popular A Tale of Two Melons: Emperor and Subject in Ming China. She has edited a collection of essays on the creation and use of the image of the Ming dynastic founder through today. She teaches Chinese history up to about 1850, and Japanese history through the Hei'an period at the lower-division level. Her current interests include omenology and shrines to living men; thinking about the production and use of historical sources; the long history of East-West sharing of ideas and things and the related historiography; and popular involvement in the autocratic, bureaucratic Ming government.
Phone: (858) 822-0814. Email address: sschneewind@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 3062 Hours:
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Nayan B. Shah (Ph.D., University of Chicago 1995; associate professor) specializes in Asian American history, United States cultural and political history, race and sexual politics.
Phone: (858) 822-2544. Email address: nbshah@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 6086B Hours: W 1-3
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Stefan Tanaka (Ph.D., University of Chicago 1986; professor) is a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993), and New Times in Modern Japan (2004). His current work inquires into the social constitution of time in modern societies. In particular, he is interested in the technologies of communication and the ways that pasts have been formulated through various media.
Phone: (858) 534-3401. Email address: stanaka@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4062 Hours:
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Cynthia Truant (Ph.D., University of Chicago 1978; associate professor) has taught at UCSD since 1988. Her expertise is in European social and cultural history, particularly that of France, from about 1650 to 1850. Some of her specific interests are: the working classes, gender studies, the European Enlightenment, European and French Revolutions (from 1688 to 1871), and the urban history of Paris. She has many cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary interests as well: comparative gender studies, comparative revolution and social movements, and cross-national urban studies. She has, for example, taught "Introduction to Social Movements" which focuses on the late 20th century across cultures for the Program in Critical Gender Studies three times in the recent past. Her aim is to incorporate interdisciplinary and cross-cultural issues in all of her courses.
Phone: (858) 534-6543. Email address: ctruant@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 5085 Hours:
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Eric Van Young(Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley 1978; professor) focuses on colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American history, with an emphasis on Mexico. His thematic interests include rural history, peasant movements and political violence, cultural history, historiography, and biography. Currently, he is in the research phase for a biography of Lucas Alaman, 19th-century Mexican statesman, entrepreneur, and historian, within the larger context of post-independence political culture. He has chaired the Department of History (2000-2004) and is serving as Interim Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities for 2007-2008.
Phone: (858) 534-6891. Email address: evanyoung@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 5073 Hours:
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Robert S. Westman (Ph.D., University of Michigan 1971; professor) teaches the cultural history of early modern science, especially the Copernican question and occult philosophies of nature.
Phone: (858) 534-6317. Email address: rwestman@helix.ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4072 Hours: M 3-3:40 Room 3023 H&SS, W 1-3 Room 4072
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Daniel Widener (Ph.D. New York University, 2002; assistant professor) teaches African-American and Californian history. His work examines expressive culture, race and ethnicity and political radicalism
Phone: (858) 534-8918. Email address: dwidener@ucsd.edu.
H&SS Room 4063, Hours: On Leave Fall 2008
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