Antwain K. Hunter

antwain.hunter@unc.edu

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

418 Pauli Murray Hall
anasilva@unc.edu


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.]

Graduate Students:

Courses Offered:

History 89: First Year Seminar: Witchcraft and Magic in the Early Modern World

History 142: Latin America Under Colonial Rule

History 280: Women and Gender in Latin America

History 314: Law and Society in Latin America

Notable Publications:

“Through the Gate of the Media Luna: Slavery and the Geographies of Legal Status in Colonial Cartagena de Indias,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review 100: 3 (August 2020): 391-421.

“Fragile Fortunes: Afro-descended Women, Property Seizures, and the Remaking of Urban Cartagena,” in Colonial Latin American Review 30: 2 (May 2021): 197-213.

Erik Gellman

egellman@unc.edu

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:

• Hannah Fuller (Co-advised with Katherine Turk)
• Cristian Roberto Walk (Co-advised with Benjamin Waterhouse)
• Benjamin Fortun

Courses Offered:


• 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.

Notable Publications:


• 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).

Joseph W. Caddell

409 Hamilton Hall
caddellj@email.unc.edu
919.843.4517

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

515 Hamilton Hall
andrewsm@email.unc.edu

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:

DeSimone, Joseph

Research Interests:

Graduate Students:

There are no graduate students studying under this faculty member at this time.

Courses Offered:

Notable Publications:

Molly Worthen

506 Hamilton Hall
mworthen@unc.edu


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:

• Luca Azuma (Co-advised with Benjamin Waterhouse)
• Aaron Pattillo-Lunt
• Joseph Block
• Francesca Langer

Courses Offered:

HIST 121—History of Religion in North America

HIST 249—World Christianity since 1450

HIST 359—Global Evangelicalism since 1600

HIST 360—Modern American Intellectual History

HIST 398—Sin and Evil in Modern America

HIST 728—Introductory Colloquium in United States History since 1900

HIST 905—Dissertation Design

Problems in American Religious History

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

457 Hamilton Hall
bwhalen @email.unc.edu

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:

Spencer Scott

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)

Harry L. Watson

568 Hamilton Hall
hwatson@email.unc.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

Harry Watson’s research interests lie in the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War, with special attention to the antebellum South and Jacksonian America. His work has explored the intersection of social, economic, and political change in this period, the formation of political parties, the influence of market development on political mobilization, reform movements, uses of the environment, and the relationship between race and class under slavery. He directed the UNC Center for the Study of the American South from 1999 to 2012, and edited its quarterly journal, Southern Cultures, from 1993 to 2019. He has served as president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2010–2011 and the Historical Society of North Carolina.

Graduate Students:

After more than four decades in the History Department, Professor Watson has entered the University’s Phased Retirement Program. He is no longer available to serve as adviser or sponsor to entering graduate students.

Courses Offered:

• HIST 127—United States History to 1865
• HIST 366—North Carolina History to 1865
• HIST 398—Before the War: Exploring the Antebellum American South
• HIST 563—Jacksonian America, 1815–1848
• HIST 586—The Old South
• HIST 727—Introductory Colloquium in United States History, 1788 to 1900

HIST 835—Readings in the Antebellum South

Notable Publications:

• “On the Banks of the James or the Congaree: Antebellum Political Economy,” in Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, eds., Reinterpreting Southern Histories: Essays in Historiography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 166-196. With John D. Majewski.
• “Democrats and Whigs: The Second American Party System,” Paula Baker and Donald Critchlow, eds., The Oxford Handbook of American Political History, Oxford University Press, 2020.
• Building the American Republic: A Narrative History to 1877, Volume I. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)
• “The Man with the Dirty Black Beard: Race, Class, and Schools in the Antebellum South,” Journal of the Early Republic 32, 1 (Spring 2012), 1–26
• Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. 2nd rev. ed., with new Preface and Afterword (Hill & Wang, Inc., 2006)
• “The Common Rights of Mankind: Subsistence, Shad, and Commerce in the Early Republican South,” The Journal of American History, vol. 83, no. 1 (June 1996), 13–43
• An Independent People: The Way We Lived in North Carolina, 1770–1820 (University of North Carolina Press, 1983)
• Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Louisiana State University Press, 1981)

Katherine Turk

500 Hamilton Hall
kturk@email.unc.edu

Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website

Research Interests:

Katherine Turk specializes in the histories of women, gender and sexuality; law, labor and social movements; and the modern United States. Her first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), examines how sex equality law has remade the world of work, eroding some inequalities and affirming others. Equality on Trial won the 2017 Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians, and the dissertation from which it is drawn received the OAH’s Lerner-Scott Prize. Her next book, The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August 2023.

Professor Turk is an award-winning teacher and scholar. She was a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law in 2011-12 and the 2018-19 Mary I. Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her two university-wide teaching prizes include, most recently, UNC’s 2023 Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Her research has been supported by the American Society for Legal History, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. In addition to many academic articles and book chapters, her public writing has appeared in Slate, the Washington Post, and Public Seminar. Professor Turk’s current projects include a history of debates over feminized labors and, with Leandra Zarnow, a study of the origins and intellectual trajectory of the field of women’s history.

More information about Professor Turk is available on her website: https://katherineturk.com.

Graduate Students:

• Hannah Fuller (Co-advised with Erik Gellman)
• Hooper Schultz
• Isabell Moore

Courses Offered:

• HIST 89: Gender and the Law in United States History
• HIST 144/WMST 144: Women in United States History
• HIST 289: America in the 1970s (co-taught with Benjamin Waterhouse)
• HIST 356: United States Women’s History from 1865
• HIST 361/WMST 360: United States Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Histories
• HIST 389/WMST 389: Maid in America, Made in China: Laboring Women in Global Perspective
• HIST 398: Social Movements in the Twentieth Century United States
• HIST 475/WMST 476: American Feminist Movements Since 1945
• HIST 890: Women, Gender and Sexuality in United States History

Notable Publications:

• “‘We’re the Backbone of This City’: Women and Gender in Public Work,” in Public Service Workers in Service of America: A Reader eds., Frederick Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin, University of Illinois Press, 2023 (paper)
• “‘Saints’ or ‘Scabs’: Contesting Feminized Labors, Social Needs, and the Welfare State in the Volunteering Wars of the 1970s,” Modern American History 5 (July 2022): 187-208
• “ ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Should Rock the U. of C.’: The Faculty Wife and the Feminist Era,” Journal of Women’s History 26 (Summer 2014): 113-134
• “ ‘Our Militancy is in Our Openness’: Gay Employment Rights Activism in California and the Question of Sexual Orientation in Sex Equality Law,” Law and History Review 31 (May 2013): 423-469
• “Out of the Revolution, Into the Mainstream: Employment Activism in the NOW Sears Campaign and the Growing Pains of Liberal Feminism,” Journal of American History 97 (September 2010): 399-423