Katherine Turk

500 Pauli Murray Hall
kturk@email.unc.edu
On Leave Spring 2024
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), 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 second book, The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) was named one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023.

Professor Turk is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Elected to the Society of American Historians in 2024, Turk was the 2018-19 Mary I. Bunting Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law in 2011-12. 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. Her research has also been featured in outlets ranging from the Christian Science Monitor, the Economist, the Guardian, the New Yorker and Signs Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism to PBS and CNN International, and she has been interviewed by media including the New York Times, the Associated Press, The Lily, the Washington Post, and many podcasts. Among Turk’s dozens of academic and popular publications are recent pieces for The Atlantic, Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and the Washington Post. Her two university-wide teaching prizes include, most recently, UNC’s 2023 Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

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. Her next book (co-authored with Sarah Milov), on the life and afterlives of labor activist, nuclear whistleblower, and feminist icon Karen Silkwood, is forthcoming from One Signal (Simon & Schuster).

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

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is not accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
• Kate McHugh (Co-advised with Erik Gellman)
• 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

Michael Tsin

460 Hamilton Hall
tsin@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: R 3:00-4:30pm and by appointment

Research Interests:

Michael Tsin’s current research focuses on exploring the social processes of identity formation through the prism of late nineteenth and twentieth century China. The project is part of his ongoing interest in the historical processes through which ideas and practices were translated into established norms and values, disseminated through the social body, transplanted across different times and places, and contested and challenged by the populace. At a broader level, he is curious to learn more about how the forces of global capitalism, whether through the instrument of formal colonial possessions in the last century or through the mechanisms of transnational institutions in the twenty-first century, manage to continually make and unmake the world in its different forms.

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
• Xinong Wang (Co-advised with Michelle King)
• Jim Sojourner
• Arianne Rivard (Ekicini)
• Dalvin Tsay
• Justin Wu (PhD ’22-’23)

Courses Offered:

• HIST 133—Introduction to Chinese History
• HIST 292—Unity and Difference in Twentieth-century China
• GLBL 390—Colonization, Migration, and National Identity
• HIST 398—Mao Zedong and the Chinese Cultural Revolution
• HIST 890—Colonial Encounters

Notable Publications:

• Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World From 1000 CE to the Present, 4th edition (Norton, 2014), in collaboration with Robert Tignor et al.
• “Overlapping Histories: Writing Prison and Penal Practices in Late Imperial and Early Republican China,” Journal of World History, 20:1 (March 2009), 69–97
• “Rethinking ‘State and Society’ in Late Qing and Republican China,” in Jens Damm and Mechthild Leutner, eds., China Networks, Berliner China-Hefte/Chinese History and Society, 35 (LIT [Münster], 2009), 20–32
• Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1927, paperback edition (Stanford, 2002)

Eren Tasar

464 Pauli Murray Hall
etasar@email.unc.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

Religion and Politics, Central Asia, Soviet Union

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
• Abdul Basith Basheer (Co-advised with Molly Worthen)
• James Britt (Co-advised with Wayne Lee)
• Nicole Harry
• Frederick Cochran (Co-Advised with Chad Bryant)
• Nurlan Kabdylkhak
• Kara Irvin
• Alexandr Shtumpf (Co-Advised with Chad Bryant)

Courses Offered:

• HIST 140-The World since 1945
• HIST 163—Modern Central Asia
• HIST 484—Islam in Russia
• HIST 511–9/11 in World History
• HIST 890—Readings in Modern Central Asian History

Notable Publications:

• Muslim Atheism in Central Asia (in progress)
• Central Asia from Ancient Times to the Present (under review)
• From the Khan’s Oven: Studies on the History of Central Asian Religions in Honor of Devin DeWeese. (Edited with Allen J. Frank and Jeff Eden) Leiden: Brill, 2021.
• Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017
• “Mantra: A Review Essay on Soviet Islam.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 63:3 (2020): 389-433.

My other publications are available on academia.edu.

John Wood Sweet

521 Hamilton Hall
sweet@unc.edu
Office Hours: Th 3:15 – 4:15 pm and by appointment
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website

Research Interests:

John Sweet is an historian of Early America and the former director of UNC’s interdisciplinary Program in Sexuality Studies. He specializes in the social and cultural histories of race, gender, and sexuality during the periods before and after the American Revolution.

Graduate Students:

This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle

Courses Offered:

• HIST 070—Seeing History in Everyday Places
• HIST 236—Sex and American History
• HIST 278—The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
• HIST 395—Sex and the Law
• HIST 561—The Colonial Experience in North America
• HIST 566—The History of Sexuality in America

Notable Publications:

• The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., forthcoming in July 2022)
• Biography and the Black Atlantic, co-edited with Lisa A. Lindsay (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
• “Rebecca’s Ordeal, from Africa to the Caribbean: Sexual Exploitation, Freedom Struggles, and Black Atlantic Biography,” with Randy M. Browne and Lisa A. Lindsay, Slavery & Abolition, 2022 (published online ahead-of-print), DOI 10.1080/0144039X.2021.1938399
• Biography and the Black Atlantic, co-edited with Lisa A. Lindsay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
• Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, edited with Robert Appelbaum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)
• Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)

Digital History

Chapel Hill 1930, project director, October 2020. Geo-located dataset of household enumerations from the 1930 Federal Census for Chapel Hill, District 6 (township), with other geo-referenced boundaries.

Jay M. Smith

564 Pauli Murray Hall
jaysmith@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: R 12:00-1:45pm
Or by appointment on Zoom: https://unc.zoom.us/j/98631334739
Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

Jay M. Smith is a specialist of early-modern France, especially in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of his work traces the negotiation of change over time, and he often uses the history of language to gain access to processes of change. Smith has written about the development of royal absolutism, the emergence of patriotic habits of thought under the old regime, the origins of the French Revolution, the history of the nobility, and the fascinating legend surrounding the beast of the Gévaudan. He also wrote, with Mary Willingham, an exposé of the UNC athletic-academic scandal. He is now working on a comparative study of the emergent concept of political accountability in the eighteenth-century North Atlantic.

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
• Burak Bulkan (Co-advised with Sarah D. Shields)
• Clare Byers
• Glenn Callihan
• Steven Weber
• Lindsay Ayling

Courses Offered:

• HIST 84— (First Year Seminar)–Monsters, Murder and Mayhem in Microhistorical Analysis
• HIST 309—Old Regime France, 1661-1787
• HIST 310—The French Revolution
• HIST 383— Big-Time College Sports and the Rights of Athletes, 1956-Present
• HIST 516—Historical Time
• HIST 711—Introductory Colloquium on Early Modern Europe
• HIST 765—Problems in the History of the French Revolution

Notable Publications:

• The French Revolution. A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo Publishing, 2020) (Potomac Books, 2015)
• Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports (Potomac Books, 2015)
• Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Harvard University Press: 2011)
• The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches (Penn State University Press, 2006)
• Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Cornell University Press, 2005)
• The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–1789 (University of Michigan Press, 1996)

Sarah D. Shields

467 Pauli Murray Hall
sshields@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: On Leave Spring 2024
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website

Research Interests:

Sarah Shields’s book, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford University Press, 2011), is a social and diplomatic history of the contest between France and Turkey over the Sanjak of Alexandretta (1936–1940), an important coastal province. The book explores the development of Turkish nationalism and diplomacy in the early decades of the new republic, and analyzes French policy (and perfidy) as Paris struggled to balance her commitment to the League of Nations, promises to her Damascus protégés, and the need to protect her interests in the eastern Mediterranean as anxiety about war escalated. Her previous book, Mosul before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (State University Press of New York, 2000), analyzes the economy and society of nineteenth-century Mosul and the region surrounding it. She is currently researching the long-term impact of the League of Nations on the Middle East.

Graduate Students:

• Kylie Broderick (Co-advised with Cemil Aydin)
• Burak Bulkan (Co-advised with Jay M. Smith)
• Charalampos I. Gappas (Co-advised with Cemil Aydin)

Courses Offered:

• HIST 62—First Year Seminar: Nations, Borders, and Identities
• HIST 138—Introduction to Islamic Civilization
• HIST 139—Later Islamic Civilization
• HIST 176H—A Century of Protest in the Middle East
• HIST 273-Water in the Middle East
• HIST 275—History of Iraq
• HIST 276—The Modern Middle East
• HIST 277—The Conflict Over Israel/Palestine
• HIST 536—Revolution in the Modern Middle East
• HIST 537—Women in the Middle East
• HIST 538—The Middle East and the West

Notable Publications:

• “Flags and Blood: European Jews, Refugee Restrictions, and Rioting in 1929 Palestine,” in Catherine Horel and Bettina Severin-Barboutie, eds., Population Displacements and Multiple Mobilities in the Late Ottoman Empire, Brill, 2023, 124-143.
• “The Mosul Question: Lausanne and After,” in Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavci, eds., They All Made Peace—What is Peace?: The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the New Imperial Order, Ginko Library, 2023, 209-230.
• “The Vatican and the 1929 Riots in Palestine,” Archivum Ottomanicum 38 (2021), 193-210.
• “The League of Nations and the Transformation of Representation: Sectarianism, Consociationalism, and the Middle East,” in Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley, ed. The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations . Routledge, 2018.
• “Manufacturing Collective Identities: Contesting Territories in the Interwar Middle East: Antioch,” in Fatma Müge Göçek, ed. Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey: Politics of the Urban, Secular, Legal and Environmental (IB. Tauris, 2017).
• “Teaching the Introductory Middle East History Survey Course,” Review of Middle East Studies 51 (2017), 35-39.
• “Forced Migration as Nation-Building: The League of Nations, Minority Protection, and the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange,” Journal of the History of International Law 18 (2016), 120-145.
• “The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange: Internationally Administered Ethnic Cleansing,” Middle East Report 279 (2013).
• Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Daniel J. Sherman

109 Hanes Art Center
dsherman@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: M 2:30-4:00 pm (Hanes Art Center 109) and by appointment
Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

Daniel Sherman’s research interest encompass the history of museums, monuments and commemorative practices in modern Europe and the United States, and the broad history of modernism in the visual arts in France. His current research explores the connections between archaeology, empire, and the media in France in the first half of the twentieth century.

Graduate Students:

This faculty member is not accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle

Courses Offered:

• HIST 468: Art, Politics, and Society in France, 1850-1914
• HIST 514: Monuments and Memory

Notable Publications:

• Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in 19th Century France (Harvard University Press, 1989)
• Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (co-edited; University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
• The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
• Museums and Difference (edited; Indiana University Press, 2008)
• French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-75 (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Donald M. Reid

554 Hamilton Hall
dreid1@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: M 2:00 – 5:00 pm and by appointment
Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

Donald Reid is an historian of modern France. He is a labor historian, but works on the “long 1968” as an intellectual, social and political phenomenon and on the history of collective memory in modern France as well.

Graduate Students:

This faculty member is not accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle

Quinn Shepherd

Courses Offered:

• HIST 89.002—Watching TV to Understand History
• HIST 140—The World Since 1945
• HIST 256—France Since 1940
• HIST 291 Literature and History
• HIST 398—Undergraduate Seminar in History: A Change is Gonna Come: Ideologies and Practices of Liberation in the 1968 Years
• HIST 776—Modern France
• HIST 905—Dissertation Design

Notable Publications:

Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968-1981 (London: Verso Books, 2018).Translated with additions as L’Affaire Lip, 1968-1981 trans. Hélène Chuquet. Preface by Patrick Fridenson (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2020)

“Un Village français: Imagining Lives in Occupied France,” French Cultural Studies 30:3 (August 2019): 220-231.

“Le grand récit des établis (et ses multiples entrées),” Les Temps modernes 684-685 (July-October 2015): 34-53.

Didier Daeninckx: Raconteur of History,” South Central Review 27:1-2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 39-60.

Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); paperback with additions (2008).

Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Translated as Égouts et égoutiers de Paris: Réalités et représentations trans. Hélène Chuquet. Preface by Michelle Perrot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014).

The Miners of Decazeville: A Genealogy of Deindustrialization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). Translated as Les Mineurs de Decazeville: Historique de la désindustrialisation trans. Robert Laumon and Michel Delagnes (Decazeville: A.S.P.I.B.D., 2009

Cynthia Radding

Hamilton Hall 516
radding@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: W 11:00am-1:00pm and by appointment (in person or via Zoom)
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website

Research Interests:

Cynthia Radding’s research interests in Latin American colonial history focus on the intersections between environmental and ethnographic history. Her current work exemplifies methods for comparative history, across North and South America and within the broad borderlands region of northern Mexico and southwestern U.S. Her scholarship is rooted in the imperial borderlands of the Spanish and Portuguese American empires, emphasizing the role of indigenous peoples and other colonized groups in shaping those borderlands and transforming their landscapes. Her current project, “Bountiful Deserts, Imperial Shadows,” explores the ecological transition between wild and cultivated plants, the cultural intersections of sedentary and nomadic peoples, and the production of knowledge in northern Mexico.

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is not accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
• Javier Etchegaray
• Cody Love
• Daniel Velásquez
• Jose Manuel Moreno Vega

Courses Offered:

• HIST 240—Introduction to History of Mexico: A Nation in Four Revolutions
• HIST 529—Mexico, 1750–1870: Citizenship and Conflict in a New Nation
• HIST 393—Senior Seminar in Environmental History
• HIST 713—Space, Territoriality, and the Creation of Regions in Colonial Ibero-America.
• HIST 820—Ethnohistory as a Transdisciplinary Field
• LTAM 697—Senior Research Capstone Seminar

Notable Publications:

• Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914, co-edited with Paul Readman and Chad Bryant, London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014
• “The Children of Mayahuel: Agaves, Human Cultures, and Desert Landscapes in Northern Mexico,” Environmental History 17 (January 2012): 84-115
• Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Duke University Press, 2005)

Morgan Pitelka

301 New West, CB# 3267 Chapel Hill, NC 27599
mpitelka@unc.edu
Office Hours: M 11:30 am – 12:30 pm and F 1:30 – 2:30 pm (New West 301)
(919) 843-5561
Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Profile

Personal Website

Research Interests:

I am a specialist in late medieval and early modern Japan, with a focus on material culture, environmental history, and urban history.

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2023-2024 cycle
• Jason Castro (Co-advised with Cemil Aydin)
• Megan McClory
• Morgan Wilson (Co-Advised with Susan Dabney Pennybacker)

Courses Offered:


• ASIA 63: First-Year Seminar: Japanese Tea Culture
• JAPN 231: Ancient and Medieval Japanese History and Culture
• JAPN 246: Early Modern Japanese History and Culture
• JAPN 363: Samurai, Monks, and Pirates: History and Historiography of Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century
• JAPN 451: Swords, Tea Bowls, and Woodblock Prints: Exploring Japanese Material Culture
• HIST 890: Material Culture and Material histories

Notable Publications:


• Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Letters from Japan’s Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Correspondence of Warlords, Tea, Masters, Zen Priests, and Aristocrats, with Reiko Tanimura and Masuda Takashi. University of California, Berkeley, IEAS Publications, 2021.
• Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016. Winner, 2016 Book Prize, Southeastern Conference of the Association of Asian Studies.
• Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods: The Arts of Reinvention. Co-edited with Alice Tseng. New York: Routledge, 2016.
• What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context. Co-edited with Jan Mrazek. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.
• Handmade Culture: Raku Potters, Patrons, and Tea Practitioners in Japan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.
• Japanese Tea Culture: Art, History, and Practice. Editor. London and New York: Routledge, 2003; paperback edition, 2007.