John Wood Sweet

521 Hamilton Hall
sweet@unc.edu

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 2024-2025 application 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: Tuesdays 2:00-3:00pm (in person) and via zoom at any mutually convenient time.
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 not accepting applicants for the 2024-2025 application cycle
• Alexandra Ramsland
• Clare Byers
• Glenn Callihan
• Steven Weber

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

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:

• This faculty member is accepting students for the 2024-2025 application cycle.
• 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: Wednesdays 1:30-3:00pm in Hanes Art Center 109, and Thursdays 10:00-11:00am via Zoom
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 2024-2025 application 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
On Leave Fall 2024
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 2024-2025 application 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

Morgan Pitelka

301 New West, CB# 3267 Chapel Hill, NC 27599
mpitelka@unc.edu


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 2024-2025 application 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.

Jerma A. Jackson

512 Pauli Murray Hall
jaj@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: Thursdays 12:00-2:00pm or by appointment

Research Interests:

Jerma A. Jackson’s main research interest is twentieth century social and cultural history, with a special interest on African American life, religion, music and women’s history. In her first book Jackson engaged music to examine black life and culture, tracing gospel from its beginnings as a mode of worship to its expansion into commercialized culture during the forties and fifties. Jackson uses the music to examine some of the mounting changes that unfolded in the twentieth century—expanding industrialization and urban migration, the growth of consumer values and materialism, and the emergence of mass produced culture.

Graduate Students:

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

Courses Offered:

• HIST 128—United States History Since 1865
• HIST 569—African American Women’s History

Notable Publications:

• Singing in My Soul: Black Gospel Music in a Secular Age (UNC Press, 2004)

Louis A. Pérez, Jr.

550 Hamilton Hall
perez@email.unc.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 2:00-3:00pm and Thursday 2:00pm-4:00pm
Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

Principal research interests center on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean, with emphasis on Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Current research explores the character of society and gender in nineteenth-century Cuba.

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is not accepting applicants for the 2024-2025 application cycle
• Daniella McIvor
• Anthony Rossodovito

Courses Offered:

• HIST 143—Latin America Since Independence
• HIST 531—History of the Caribbean
• HIST 532—History of Cuba

Notable Publications:

• Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2019)
• Intimations of Modernity: Civil-Culture in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. University of North Carolina Press: 2017.
• The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)
• Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 5th edition (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (University of North Carolina Press, 2008)
• To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
• On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)

Susan Dabney Pennybacker

507 Pauli Murray Hall
pennybac@email.unc.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests:

Susan Dabney Pennybacker’s research centers upon the political culture of modern Britain and the former British Empire. Her book-in-progress, entitled Fire By Night, Cloud by Day: refuge and exile in postwar London (Cambridge), concerns the movement of individuals between South Africa, Trinidad, India, and metropolitan London between 1945 and 1994. It is based in both archival and ethnographic research conducted in London, New Delhi, Port of Spain, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. She has a keen interest in visual media sources, especially in documentary photography and film. Pennybacker is a founding member and co-convener of the Triangle Global British History Seminar and the Transnational and Global Modern History seminar; she is a member of the convening board of the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar. Pennybacker serves as an associate editor of the Journal of British Studies; a member of the editorial board of the series, Critical Connected Histories (Leiden University Press); and, an advisory board member of the American Friends of the Institute for Historical Research (University of London).

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is not accepting applicants for the 2024-2025 application cycle
• Katie Laird
• Morgan Wilson (Co-Advised with Morgan Pitelka)

Courses Offered:

• HIST 164—The History of Britain in the 19th Century
• HIST 165—The History of Britain in the 20th Century
• HIST 398—Modern London: The Imperial Metropolis
• HIST 490 (Honors)—Topics in British Imperial History, 1715–Present
• HIST 722—Contemporary Global History
• HIST 771—Topics in Modern European History
• HIST 775—Studies in Modern English History

Notable Publications:

• “Fire By Night, Cloud By Day: refuge and exile in postwar London,” Presidential address, North American Conference on British Studies, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 50, 1, January 2020.
• “A Cold War Geography: South African Anti-Apartheid Refuge and Exile in London, 1945-1994, in, Nathan Riley Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrence, eds., Africans in Exile: mobility, law and identity (Indiana University Press, 2018), 185-99.
• “Anti-apartheid testimony: unmaking the histories of South African Jewish communists” in Carol S. Gould, Simone Gigliotti and Jacob Golomb, eds., Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Berel Lang (Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)
• From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton University Press, 2009)
• A Vision for London, 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the London County Council Experiment (Routledge, 1995, paperback edition, 2013)

Michael Cotey Morgan

Hamilton Hall 424
morgan@unc.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 11 am–2 pm. Please make an appointment here.

Research Interests:

Michael Cotey Morgan specializes in modern international and global history. He is the author of The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War, which received the 2018 Edgar S. Furniss Award for best first book in international security.

At UNC, he teaches courses on international history, the Cold War, and human rights. He previously taught at the US Naval War College and the University of Toronto, where he was the inaugural holder of the Raymond Pryke Chair.

Graduate Students:

• This faculty member is accepting applicants for the 2024-2025 application cycle
• Sivan David (Co-advised with Klaus Larres)
• Michael Ferguson (Co-advised with Wayne Lee)
• Mark Thomas-Patterson (Co-advised with Klaus Larres)
• Dana Mendes (Co-advised with Wayne E. Lee)
• Zach Alessi-Friedlander (Co-advised with Wayne E. Lee)

Courses Offered:

• HIST 58—History and the Meaning of Life
• HIST 205—Statecraft, Diplomacy, and War, 1618-1815
• HIST 206—Statecraft, Diplomacy, and War, 1815-1945
• HIST 207—The Global Cold War
• HIST 398—Cold War Summits
• HIST 510—Human Rights in the Modern World
• HIST 700—Thinking Historically
• HIST 722—Readings in Contemporary Global History
• HIST 723—Readings in Global Cold War History

Notable Publications:

Book

The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Selected Articles and Chapters

“Kant, Paine, and Strategies of Liberal Transformation,” The New Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Hal Brands (Princeton University Press, 2023).

“Helsinki 1975: Borders and People,” co-authored with Daniel Sargent (UC-Berkeley), Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970-1990, ed. David Reynolds and Kristina Spohr (Oxford University Press, 2016).

“Confidence and Distrust at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE),” Trust but Verify: The Politics of Uncertainty and the Transformation of the Cold War Order, 1969-1991, ed. Martin Klimke, Reinhild Kreis, and Christian Ostermann (Stanford University Press, 2016).

“The Ambiguities of Humanitarian Intervention,” The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft, ed. Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

“The Seventies and the Rebirth of Human Rights,” The Shock of the Global: The International History of the 1970s, ed. Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent (Harvard University Press, 2010).

“The United States and the Making of the Helsinki Final Act,” Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations 1969–1977, ed. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (Oxford University Press, 2008).

“North America, Atlanticism, and the Helsinki Process,” At the Roots of European Security: The Early Helsinki Process Revisited, 1965–1975, ed. Andreas Wenger, Vojtech Mastny, and Christian Nuenlist (Routledge, 2008).

“Michael Ignatieff: Idealism and the Challenge of the ‘Lesser Evil,’” International Journal 61:4 (Autumn 2006): 971–85.