Jennifer A. Boittin

Pauli Murray 404
jboittin@unc.edu

Research Interests:

Jennifer A. Boittin is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global History. She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University and was previously a professor at Penn State University. Her research and teaching look at how colonial spaces in West Africa, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the French Caribbean were shaped by intersections between class, politics, and urban culture around the world wars and decolonization. Completed in part thanks to a Paris Institute for Advanced Studies fellowship, her second book is entitled Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919-1952 (2022, University of Chicago Press). Undesirable tells the virtually unknown history of hundreds of women in Southeast Asia (French Indochina) and West Africa (AOF) tracked by authorities because they were traveling alone and claiming Frenchness. Drawn from Cambodian, French, and Senegalese archives, Undesirable’s focus on how ordinary people react to being policed gives historical depth to pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence in France today and of similar reckonings on a global scale.

Boittin’s first book, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (2010, University of Nebraska Press) is an innovative, intersectional history of radical interwar politics. She has also published extensively on the Nardal sisters, Lamine Senghor, Tiémoko Garan Kouyaté, Black anti-imperialism, masculinity, Black and African diaspora, Josephine Baker, and women travelers. She is a Past President of the Western Society of French History, editor of French Colonial History, and founding member on the editorial committee for Marronnages, les questions raciales au crible des sciences sociales.

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

HIST 159 / EURO 159: Europe and the World

HIST 72: Women’s Voices, 20th c. European History in Female Memory

HIST 810: Colonial Encounters

Notable Publications:

BOOKS

Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919-1952. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Feminism and Anti-Imperialism in Interwar Paris. University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Paperback, summer 2015.

EDITED VOLUMES

“Intersections of Race and Gender in French History,” co-editor with Tyler Stovall, special issue, French Historical Studies, 33, 3 (Summer 2010).

“In the Crucible of Race: Lives That Matter in French and Francophone Spaces,” co-editor with Christy Pichichero, special issue, The Journal of the Western Society for French History, Vol. 48 (2022).

“Black Feminisms in France and the Francophone World,” co-editor with Jacqueline Couti, special issue, Journal of Women’s History, slated for publication in 2023.

ARTICLES

“Listening for the Non-Dits of a Post-Racial Utopia in Stories of Kinship and Intimacy,” in “France and Post-Racial Utopia,” special issue, ed. Audrey Brunetaux and Lam-Thao Nguyen, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: SITES 26, no.4/5 (2022).

“’The Great Game of Hide and Seek Has Worked’: Suzanne Césaire, Cultural Marronnage, and a Caribbean Mosaic of Gendered Race Consciousness around World War II,” French Colonial History 20 (2021): 145-173.

“Hierarchies of Race and Gender in the French Empire,” co-author with Christina Firpo and Emily Musil Church, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 37, 1 (2011): 60-90.

Jens-Uwe Guettel

Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 1:30-3:00pm in PM Hall 466

Research Interests:

I received my undergraduate degrees from the Freie Universität Berlin and my MA, MPhil, and PhD in History from Yale University. I am Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. My first monograph, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945, analyzes the intersections of U.S. and German imperialism. I have published, among other venues, in the Journal of Modern History, Central European History, and the Journal of Genocide Research. My research focuses on the domestic ramifications of empire and colonial expansion for Germany and the United States; on political scandals in the German Empire; on National-Socialist expansionism and genocide; and on German labor and social history. I am currently finishing my second book, which takes a broad look at opposition groups to the German Empire’s status quo before 1918, and on street violence and politics in German cities before and after the end of World War I. My research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; I have been a Research Associate at the Freie Universität Berlin; and I have been awarded The Pennsylvania State University’s Prestigious Research Award.

Graduate Students:

Dalton Erskin (Co-Advised with Chad Bryant)

Courses Offered:

Notable Publications:

Camille Goldmon

455 Pauli Murray Hall
cjg@unc.edu

Research Interests:

My research interests are twentieth-century United States history, Southern history, and agrarianism. I study the social and cultural history of African American farmers in the US South from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, as well as histories of agrarian and rural radicalism.

I am currently revising my doctoral dissertation, which won a Mellon/ACLS dissertation completion fellowship, into a book-length study of the relationship between political power and agricultural landownership.

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

HIST 128: United States History since 1865
HIST 363H: Pop Culture and American History

Notable Publications:

Lisa Wolverton

Pauli Murray 554
wolv@ad.unc.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 9:15-10:45am and Thursday 12:15-1:45pm
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website

Research Interests:

Lisa Wolverton has concentrated much of her published research on the Czech Lands in the early and central Middle Ages. Her current work engages Central Europe and Slav-German relations more broadly, and includes a study of Czech involvement in the German civil war of the late 11th century, a close analysis of Lampert of Hersfeld’s Annals and his modes of composition, and a broad reconceptualization of Frankish eastward imperialism over the course of many centuries.

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

HIST 89 – Dogs, Past and Present

HIST 431 – The Medieval Church

Notable Publications:

“The Elbian Region as Predatory Landscape, 900-1200 CE: Slavery, Slaughter, and Settler Colonialism,” Mediaevalia 43 (2022): 101-35 [Special issue: Medieval Unfreedoms in a Global Context, ed. Elizabeth Casteen].

“Why Kings?” in Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality, ed. Debra Blumenthal, Kathryn Reyerson, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, and Ann Zimo (London: Routledge, 2020), 91-107.

“The Deeds of Margrave Wiprecht of Groitzsch (d. 1124),” intro. and trans. by Jonathan R. Lyon and Lisa Wolverton, in Jonathan R. Lyon, Noble Society: Five Lives from Twelfth-century Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 22-91.

Cosmas of Prague: Narrative, Classicism, Politics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015).

Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen, ed. by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).

Cosmas of Prague, The Chronicle of the Czechs, trans. and intro. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009).

Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet, by Ian McNeely with Lisa Wolverton (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008).

—translations published in Korean (2009), Indonesian (2010), Arabic (2010), Japanese (2010), and Portuguese (2013)

Hastening toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

Andrew Walker

552 Pauli Murray Hall
ajwalk@unc.edu
Office Hours: Wednesday, 1:00-4:00pm in 552 Pauli Murray

Research Interests:

Andrew Walker is a historian of slavery, emancipation, nation-building, and racial formations in the Atlantic World, with a focus on Haiti and the Greater Caribbean in the nineteenth-century.

His current book project, Haitian Santo Domingo: From Emancipation to Separation, uses local notarial and administrative records from the city of Santo Domingo to tell the story of how Hispaniola, an island governed by independent Haiti for 22 years, became divided into two nations. The book argues that the transition from unification to division cemented revolutionary antislavery as a foundational legacy of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but also generated paradoxical silences surrounding racial inequalities in the modern Dominican Republic.

Dr. Walker’s published work has appeared in the William & Mary Quarterly, the Law and History Review, and Slavery & Abolition. He has also contributed book chapters to the Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America and the edited volume Santo Domingo, 1821-2021: Bicentenario de la Independencia Efímera, published by the Archivo General de la Nación of the Dominican Republic.

Previously, Dr. Walker held postdoctoral fellowships at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and at Wesleyan University. Dr. Walker received a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. in History and French Studies from Duke University.

Dr. Walker teaches courses on Caribbean history, modern Latin American history, and Latin American studies.

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

Notable Publications:

• “The End of Early America in Unified Haiti,” Forum: The End of Early America, ed. by Vanessa Holden and Michael Witgen, William & Mary Quarterly 81 (Forthcoming January 2024).
• “Illegal Under the Laws of All Nations? The Courts of Haiti and the Suppression of the Atlantic Trade in African Captives,” Law and History Review 37 (2019): 539-569.
• “All Spirits Are Roused: The 1822 Antislavery Revolution in Haitian Santo Domingo,” Slavery & Abolition 40 (2019): 583-605.
• “The Haitian Revolution and Independence in Latin America,” in The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. by Graciela Raquel Montaldo and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (New York: Routledge, 2024).
• “Una revolución armoniosa? Esclavitud e independencia efímera en Santo Domingo según los intelectuales haitianos de la época de la unificación, 1822-1844,” in Santo Domingo, 1821-2021: Bicentenario de la Independencia Efímera, ed. by Darío Tejeda (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2023).

Mike O’Sullivan

mbosull@unc.edu
Office Hours: Wednesday 1:30-3:00, Friday 8:30-10:00 in PMH 454

Research Interests:

Mike O’Sullivan is a historian of South Asia and its connections with the wider world in the early modern and modern periods. After completing his PhD at UCLA, he held fellowships at Yale Law School and the Center for History and Economics at Harvard. He joined the Department of History at UNC Chapel Hill in Fall 2024. To date, his publications have dealt with the religious and economic history of Muslim communities in South Asia and adjacent regions. In late 2023 his first book on the history of Gujarati Muslim business communities was published by Harvard University Press. His current project on the modern history of private Muslim banking in North Africa and Eurasia is also under contract with Harvard University Press.

In addition to his role as assistant professor of South Asian history, O’Sullivan is Senior Research Fellow for CAPASIA, a multi-year project funded by the European Research Council and based at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. CAPASIA examines the activities of more than 150 European ‘factories’ established in the Indian Ocean between 1500-1800. It operates under the direction of Professor Giorgio Riello (EUI/Warwick). The project website can be found here: https://www.capasia.eu/

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

HIST 136. History of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh: South Asia since 1750
HIST 270. Mughal India

Notable Publications:

No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800–1975
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023).

“A Hungarian Josephinist, Orientalist, and Bibliophile: Count Karl Reviczky, 1737-1793,” Austrian History Yearbook, 45 (2014), 61-88.

“‘The Little Brother of the Ottoman State’: Ottoman technocrats in Kabul and visions of Afghanistan’s future in the Ottoman imagination, 1908-23,” Modern Asian Studies 50:6 (2016): 1846–1887.

“Pan-Islamic Bonds and Interest: Ottoman Debentures, Red Crescent Remittances, and the Limits of Indian Muslim Capital, 1877-1923,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 55:2, (2018): 183-220.

“Paper Currency, Banking, and Islamic Legal Debates in Late Ottoman and Early Saudi Arabia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63 (2020): 243-285.

“Interest, Usury, and the Transition from ‘Muslim’ to ‘Islamic’ Banks, 1908-1958,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 52 (2020): 261–287.

“Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860-1868,” Journal of Asian Studies 80/2 (2020): 267–292.

“‘Indian Money’, Intra-Shīʿī Polemics, and the Bohra and Khoja Pilgrimage Infrastructure in Iraq’s Shrine Cities, 1897-1932,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2022) 32/1: 213-250.

“The Indian Muslim Salariat, Usury Laws, and the Moral Economy of Interest Transactions, 1855-1914,” Past and Present (Advanced Access, 2023).

“The Multiple Registers of Arabic in the Daudi Bohra Daʿwa and South Asian Public Life, c. 1880–1920,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 55/1 (2023): 1-7.

“Turkstroi: Soviet-Turkish Industrial Cooperation and the Dialectics of Divergence and Convergence in Interwar Statism, 1931-1941,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 67/1-2 (2024): 83-132.

with Kaleb Herman Adney, “Capitalism. Capitalism, Growth, and Social Relations in the Middle East: 1869-1945,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2023)

with Giorgio Riello, “Where is Asia in Global Histories of Early Modern Capitalism?,” EUI HEC Working Paper 2023/03

‘As Dictated By Friendship’: Ottoman Facilitation of Habsburg Maritime Ventures in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, 1718-1792” (under revision)

“Ottoman Shipping in the Indian Ocean, 1700-1900,” (in progress)

“A Portuguese Factory in Basra and the Predicaments of Ottoman-Portuguese Joint Vassalage, 1622-1722,” (under review)

“From the Seventh Clime to the Jewel Mine: Ottoman Visions of Sri Lanka from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” (Forthcoming)

Ian F. McNeely

ifm@unc.edu
Office Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Friday 2:30– 3:20pm
Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

I specialize in German history and European cultural history, but also have deep roots in global, comparative history and in historical sociology. As an historian of knowledge, I have always been drawn to “practical intellectuals”—thinkers who also do. Typically this leads me to study groups and individuals who found or reform institutions, infusing ideas from the Western intellectual tradition into the redesign of bureaucracies, parliaments, corporations, and schools. I have a particular interest in figures who found or reform institutions of knowledge and higher learning, such as universities.

My first two books examined practical intellectuals from within the framework of German history. One of them, “Medicine on a Grand Scale”: Rudolf Virchow, Liberalism, and the Public Health, was a short study of one of the nineteenth century’s most influential physicians and political reformers; in 2019, it appeared in Korean translation. The other, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s-1820s, analyzed the machinations of powerful local scribes (Schreiber) who participated in the profound civic and political transformation of southwestern Germany after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasions.

With Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet, coauthored with my wife and colleague Lisa Wolverton, I turned squarely to the comparative, long-term study of intellectuals and knowledge systems. The book chronicles the six institutions that have fueled the quest for knowledge in the Western tradition from ancient times to the present day: the library, the monastery, the university, the Republic of Letters, the disciplines, and the laboratory. Each, we argue, has superseded its predecessors in fashioning entirely new rationales and practices for pursuing knowledge in response to society’s needs. Reinventing Knowledge has been translated into Arabic, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese.

In other work, I have written about the Renaissance academies, the kindergarten’s roots in German philosophy, the Austrian-American management guru Peter Drucker, the global study of languages around 1800, the neoliberal reform of universities in Thatcher’s Britain, and the origins of “student development theory” in Sixties counterculture.

My latest book, The University Unfettered: Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption, will appear with Columbia University Press in 2025. Building on my decade of experience in academic administration, it conducts a retrospective stress test on higher education between the Great Recession and COVID-19, and offers a vision for the future of the public research university.

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

Notable Publications:

Jennifer Grayson

jgrayso@unc.edu
Office Hours: T/TR

Research Interests:

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

Notable Publications:

Henry Gruber

Pauli Murray 506
hgruber@unc.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays 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:

“Indirect evidence for the social impact of the Justinianic Pandemic: Episcopal burial
and conciliar legislation in Visigothic Hispania,” Journal of Late Antiquity (Spring 2018): 193-2015

Raquel Escobar

Pauli Murray 568
Raquel.Escobar@unc.edu

Research Interests:

Raquel Escobar is a historian of 20th-century race, Indigeneity, and political and intellectual history in the Americas. Broadly, Escobar is interested in examining the politics of Indigeneity in the Americas during the 20th century. Escobar is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled Indigenous Diplomacies. The manuscript 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 US/Mexico borderlands and throughout Latin America. 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.

Escobar earned her PhD in History with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UNC, Escobar was a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow for the Humanities Action Lab (HAL) at Rutgers University- Newark (2020-22) where she oversaw HAL’s COVID-19 Mass Listening project and a new Mellon funded fellowship program, which aims to foster leadership from Minority Serving Institutions and frontline communities to use public humanities for climate justice.

Graduate Students:

This faculty member is not accepting graduate students for the 2024-2025 application cycle.

Courses Offered:

Notable Publications:

Raquel Escobar and Wilmarie Medina-Cortes, “Climates of Inequality: Community Co-Curation and Action Oriented Public Humanities at Minority Serving Institutions” in The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship (2024), pp. 267-278.

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.