Jennifer Grayson
August 17, 2023
Jennifer Grayson
jgrayso@unc.edu
Office Hours: M 1:00-3:00pm
Research Interests:
Graduate Students:
Courses Offered:
Notable Publications:
Faculty
Henry Gruber
August 17, 2023
Henry Gruber
Pauli Murray 506
hgruber@unc.edu
Office Hours: MW 11:00am-12:00pm
Curriculum Vitae
Research Interests:
Henry Gruber studies the ancient Mediterranean world, with particular focus on the late Roman economy and the transition from a Classical to post-Classical world. His work is deeply informed by material evidence, and reflects his experience on eleven seasons of archaeological projects in Italy, Israel, and Spain. His current book project, Wars and Rumors of War: Archaeology, Violence, and the End of Roman Spain, integrates the archaeological research that comprised his dissertation with an analysis of the particular kind of plundering violence that characterized the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Henry has subsidiary interests in ancient pandemics, especially the outbreak of bubonic plague known as the “First Plague” or “Justinianic” Pandemic; so-called “Silver Age” Latin authors like Seneca and Petronius; and social history of women in Late Antiquity, especially as revealed through hagiography. He is an ongoing participant in the Falerii Novi Archaeological Project, in Lazio, Italy.
Graduate Students:
Courses Offered:
Notable Publications:
and conciliar legislation in Visigothic Hispania,” Journal of Late Antiquity (Spring 2018): 193-2015
Raquel Escobar
August 7, 2023
Raquel Escobar
Pauli Murray 509
Raquel.Escobar@unc.edu
Research Interests:
Raquel Escobar’s research focuses on 20th-century race, Indigeneity, and political and intellectual history in the Americas. As a postdoctoral fellow, Escobar is working on her book manuscript Indigenous Diplomacies which examines transnational Indigenous politics, diplomacy, and shifting twentieth-century racial scripts. Utilizing the Inter-American Indian Institute and the transnational political and intellectual networks that animated it, her work highlights how Indigenous people negotiated and utilized Inter-American state programs and examines the impact of US-sponsored institutions and research across the Americas. Her research documents transnational Indigenous political and intellectual networks that blossomed across the Americas during the twentieth century as the United States, Mexico, and other American nations sought to incorporate and transform Indigenous populations. In doing so, Escobar highlights Indigenous intellectuals, politicians, artists, and boarding school youth who demonstrate their continued ties and investment in community-specific notions of kinship, diplomacy, and autonomy across the hemisphere.
Graduate Students:
Courses Offered:
Notable Publications:
Theresa Rocha Beardall and Raquel Escobar, “What Then Remains of the Sovereignty of the Indians? The Significance of Social Closure and Ambivalence in Dollar General v. Mississippi Choctaw,” The Indigenous Peoples’ Journal of Law, Culture, and Resistance 3, no. 1 (2016): 3-38.
Antwain K. Hunter
July 26, 2022
Antwain K. Hunter
Hamilton Hall 421
antwain.hunter@unc.edu
Office Hours: T 11:00am-12:30pm, W 2:00-3:30pm
Curriculum Vitae
Research Interests:
Antwain K. Hunter is a historian of slavery and freedom in North America, with a current focus on North Carolina. He is finishing a book—tentatively titled A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1729-1865—on the legal and community dynamics of free and enslaved black North Carolinians’ firearm use in the colonial and antebellum eras. The project frames firearm use as a multifaceted tool which black people were able to use in a variety of beneficial ways, ranging from subsistence, to defense, to rebellion. Further, the General Assembly, county court officials, and individual enslavers tried to use black people’s armed labor for their own benefit while also trying to protect themselves and their property from any potential problems. This historical examination of race, firearms, and the law offers a compelling look at the American past and better contextualizes the present. Hunter is also in the very early stages of another book project which will explore black North Carolinians’ engagement with vice, as understood by antebellum Americans. He is interested in how gambling, alcohol, and sex work fueled an interracial economy of both pleasure and profits for black North Carolinians, who were the producers, purveyors, and consumers in these areas.
Graduate Students:
Courses Offered:
HIST 376: History of African Americans to 1863
HIST 398: on North American Slavery
Notable Publications:
“‘Patriots,’ ‘Cowards,’ and ‘Men Disloyal at Heart:’ Labor and Politics at the Springfield Armory, 1861-1865”, Journal of Military History, vol. 84, No. 1 (JAN 2020), pp. 51-81.
“‘In the Exercise of a Sound Discretion, Who, of This Class of Persons, Shall Have a Right to the License…’: Family, Race, and Firearms in Antebellum North Carolina”, Journal of Family History, vol. 44, no. 4 (JUL 2019, [digital], OCT 2019 [print]), pp. 392-412.
“‘A nuisance requiring correction’: Firearm Laws, Black Mobility, and White Property in Antebellum Eastern North Carolina”, North Carolina Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 4 (OCT 2016), pp. 386-404.
Ana María Silva Campo
July 6, 2021
Ana María Silva Campo
418 Pauli Murray Hall
anasilva@unc.edu
Office Hours: W 1:00-3:00pm and by appointment
Personal Website
Research Interests:
Ana María Silva Campo is a historian of race, gender, religion, and the law in colonial Latin American cities. Her book manuscript, Travelers of the Half Moon Gate, studies the formation of religious, gendered, and increasingly racialized hierarchies in Cartagena de Indias, the main port for the trade in African captives in Spanish South America during the seventeenth century. It examines the tension between the political economy of the trade in African captives and Spain’s imperial project to enforce religious orthodoxy. Using the rarely studied financial archives of the tribunal of the Inquisition in Cartagena, Travelers of the Half Moon Gate shows how the Inquisition transformed the city by confiscating and reselling the houses of free women of African descent while preserving the networks that sustained the trade in African captives during the seventeenth century.
[Dr. Silva Campo will be on leave 2022-2023.]
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Erik Gellman
August 28, 2018
Erik Gellman
Pauli Murray Hall 469
egellman@unc.edu
Office Hours: TR 11:00-12:30pm and by appointment (Please email to confirm in advance Zoom or in-person meeting.)
Curriculum Vitae
Research Interests:
Erik S. Gellman researches and teaches about working-class and urban life, visual culture, and comparative social movements in modern American history. He’s the author of Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (UNC Press, 2012) and The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (IL Press, 2011, coauthor Jarod Roll).
His most recent book, Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay, offers a synthetic textual and visual narrative of Chicago’s postwar urban history and protest politics. He’s also collaborating on two research and publication projects: an edited volume called New Black Chicago Histories (Black Metropolis Research Consortium and University of IL Press) and a 1930s-1940s labor and political history called, Organizing Agribusiness from Farm to Factory: A New Food and Labor History of America’s Most Diverse Union (UNC Press). Gellman also serves as contributing editor to Labor: Studies in Working-Class History and serves as national secretary for the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). From 2006-2018, Gellman taught History and African American Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
Graduate Students:
- This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
- Ruochen Cao(Co-advised with Michelle King)
- Kate McHugh (Co-advised with Katherine Turk)
- Hannah Fuller (Co-advised with Katherine Turk)
- Cristian Roberto Walk (Co-advised with Benjamin Waterhouse)
- Benjamin Fortun
- HIST 89-First Year Seminar: Special Topic, Rebuilding the Modern South: Work and Identity in Modern History
- HIST 128-American History since 1865
- HIST 352-The Great Depression and Its Legacies
- HIST 365-The Worker and American Life.
- HIST 584-The Promise of Urbanization: American Cities in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
- HIST 728 – Introductory Colloquium in United States History since 1900.
- HIST 864 – 19th and 20th Century American Labor.
- HIST 890 – Readings in Urban History.
- HIST 890 – Topics in History: Social Movements in the Americas.
- Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles through the Lens of Art Shay (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
- “Black Freedom Struggles and Ecumenical Activism in 1960s Chicago” in Chris Cantwell, Heath Carter, and Janine Drake, editors, Between the Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the Working Class in Industrial America (University of Illinois Press, March 2016).
- Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights, University of North Carolina Press, John Hope Franklin series, 2012 (paperback, 2014).
- The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America, coauthor Jarod Roll, University of Illinois Press, 2011 (paperback and hardcover, winner of the H.L. Mitchell Prize of the Southern Historical Association, 2012).
- “In the Driver’s Seat: Chicago’s Bus Drivers and Labor Insurgency in the Era of Black Power,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 11:3 (Fall 2014).
- “Charles White and the Laboring of the African American Artistic Renaissance,” in Darlene Clark Hine, editor, The Black Chicago Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
Courses Offered:
Notable Publications:
Joseph W. Caddell
August 9, 2018
Joseph W. Caddell
409 Hamilton Hall
caddellj@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: TR 4:00-5:00pm and by appointment
Research Interests:
History of sea power, history of air power
Graduate Students:
There are no graduate students studying under this faculty member at this time.
Courses Offered:
- HIST212–History of Sea Power
- HIST213–Air Power and Modern Warfare
- PWAD352–History of Intelligence Operations
- PWAD360–History of Warning Intelligence
- PWAD361–History of Deception
- PWAD488–Nuclear Security in the 21st Century
Notable Publications:
Matthew Andrews
August 9, 2018
Matthew Andrews
515 Hamilton Hall
andrewsm@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: T 3:30-4:45pm, W 4:00-5:00pm, R 12:00-1:30pm
Research Interests:
Matthew Andrews is an American historian with an interest in the links between sports and American history and culture. He is particularly interested in the ways sports both reflect and affect American politics, race and gender identities, and social reform movements.
Matt Andrews has a podcast, “American Sport with Matt Andrews.” Each episode explores the sporting events that have defined our culture and changed the course of American history. It will go beyond the sports page telling of races won, touchdowns scored, and players rounding the bases, and explains how those moments on the field of play have been intricately tied to ideas and debates in our nation about race, class, gender, ethnicity, capitalism, and American identity.
To listen, please go to the American Sport Podcast website.
Graduate Students:
Courses Offered:
- HIST 120: Sport and American History
- HIST 127: The US to 1865
- HIST 128: The US since 1865
- HIST 220: The Olympic Games—A Global History
- HIST 362: Baseball and American History
- HIST 398: Sport and Civil Rights Research Seminar
- HIST 398: Sport and Politics in the 1980s Research Seminar
- HIST 398: Boxing and American History Research Seminar
- HIST 585: Race, Basketball, and the American Dream
Notable Publications:
Molly Worthen
April 11, 2018
Molly Worthen
Hamilton Hall 407
mworthen@unc.edu
Office Hours: On Leave Fall 2023
Personal Website
Research Interests:
Molly Worthen’s research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945. Worthen teaches courses in global Christianity, North American religious and intellectual culture, and the history of politics and ideology. In 2017 she received the Manekin Family Award for Teaching Excellence in Honors Carolina. She writes regularly about religion, politics and higher education for the New York Times and has also contributed to Politico, the New Yorker, Slate, the American Prospect, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She has also created courses for Audible and the Teaching Company on the history of charismatic leadership as well as the history of global Christianity since the Reformation. Worthen is currently working on a book about the history of charisma in America since 1600.
Graduate Students:
- Abdul Basith Basheer (Co-advised with Sarah Shields)
- Luca Azuma (Co-advised with Benjamin Waterhouse)
- Aaron Pattillo-Lunt
- Joseph Block
- Francesca Langer
Courses Offered:
Notable Publications:
- Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013)
- The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
- “The Chalcedon Problem: Rousas John Rushdoony and the Origins of Christian Reconstructionism” Church History 77 No. 2 (June 2008)
- New York Times Articles
Brett E. Whalen
August 7, 2017
Brett E. Whalen
457 Hamilton Hall
bwhalen@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: M 1:30-2:30pm and by appointment
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website
Research Interests:
Brett Edward Whalen works on Christian intellectual and cultural history during the European Middle Ages, mainly focusing on the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. He has published works on the crusades, apocalypticism, pilgrimage, and the medieval papacy. His first book, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard, 2009), explores the medieval belief that Christianity would spread to every corner of the earth before the end of time. His most recent book, The Two Powers: The Papacy, the Empire, and the Struggle for Sovereignty in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), reappraises the epoch-making clashes between two popes, Gregory IX and Innocent IV, and the Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II. He has published articles in journals including The American Historical Review, Traditio, and Viator. Whalen also serves as the series editor for Trivent publishing’s new book series The Papacy and Medieval Christendom: Critical Perspectives. He is currently in the early stages of a research for a new book, Medieval Jesus: The Son of God from the Middle Ages to the Present.
Graduate Students:
Courses Offered:
- HIST 50 (FYS)—Time and the Medieval Cosmos (co-taught with Chris Clemens)
- HIST 107—Introduction to Medieval History
- HIST 177H—The Apocalypse in the Christian Middle Ages (Honors Seminar)
- HIST 228—The Medieval Expansion of Europe
- HIST 398—The Crusades (Research Seminar)
- HIST 431—The Medieval Church
- HIST 432—The Crusades
- HIST 701—Medieval Studies (Graduate Seminar)
Notable Publications:
- “Political Theology and the Metamorphoses of The King’s Two Bodies.” The American Historical Review 125 (2020): 132-45.
- The Two Powers: The Papacy, the Empire, and the Struggle for Sovereignty in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
- The Medieval Papacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
- Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2011)
- “Corresponding with Infidels: Rome, the Almohads, and the Christians of Thirteenth-Century Morocco,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41 (2011): 487–513
- Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard University Press, 2009)