2009-2010 EIHS RESIDENCY RESEARCH FELLOWS
Cynthia Bouton is Associate Professor of History at Texas A& M University, received her PhD from SUNY Binghamton. Her publications include: The Flour War: Gender, Class and Community in Late Ancien Regime France. (Penn State University Press, 1993); “French Food Riots: Provisioning, Power, and Popular Protest, from the 17th-19th Centuries” in Riot: From Resistance to Rebellion in Britain and France, 1381 to the Present, eds. Brett Bowden and Michael Davis (Palgrave Macmillan Press, forthcoming 2009); and “’La Liberté, l’égalité, et la libre circulation des grains’: le problème de l’économie morale,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française (2000). She is completing a book project that explores the resonances of social violence in French culture. Currently, she seeks to imbed her work on the French people’s use of contentious histories of unequal resource distribution in a transnational, twenty-first-century context of struggles of abundance and scarcity.
Denver Brunsmanis an Assistant Professor of History at Wayne State University. He completed his MA and PhD at Princeton University and is currently writing a book, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, to be published by the University of Virginia Press. The book explores the impact of forced naval service on sailors and communities in colonial America and the early United States, the British West Indies, and the British Isles. Brunsman is also the co-editor of the forthcoming books, Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development and Revolutionary Detroit: A Global Legacy. During the 2007-2008 academic year, he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Christopher Phelpsis Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, teaching primarily on the Mansfield campus, which awarded him its Excellence in Scholarship Award in 2006. A specialist in twentieth-century U.S. intellectual and political history, Phelps completed his PhD at the University of Rochester and was twice a Fulbright scholar. He served in 2000 as senior lecturer in the history of philosophy at the University of Pecs in Hungary, and in 2004-2005 as distinguished chair in American Studies and Literature at the University of Lodz in Poland. He is the author of Young Sidney Hook and has written for periodicals such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, New Politics, American Quarterly, The Journal of American History, and The American Historical Review.
Lewis Siegelbaumis Professor of Russian History at Michigan State University. He received his D. Phil. From Oxford in 1976 after which he taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He came to Michigan State in 1983. He is the author of Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (1988), Stalinism as a Way of Life (2000, coauthored with Andrei Sokolov), and Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (2008). In 2007-08 he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). His work in Soviet history has been animated by an interest in the intersection of technology, ideology, and material culture. He currently is editing The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc,a collection of articles, and is just beginning a large project with Leslie Page Moch on repertoires and regimes of migration in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states.
Keely Stauter-Halstedis Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the History Department at Michigan State University. She specializes in Polish and East European history, nationalism studies, gender history and Polish-Jewish relations. Her first book, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1914, was awarded the Orbis Prize in Polish Studies for 2001. She is currently working on a monograph that traces debates about regulated prostitution in the partitioned Polish lands, focusing especially on female urban poverty, rural-urban migration, international trafficking, bourgeois charity workers, and early eugenics organizations.
Faculty Fellows (2009-2010)
Jay Cookis Associate Professor of History and American Culture. Cook received a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of California-Berkeley in 1996. He is the author of The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Harvard, 2001) and The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2005). With Lawrence B. Glickman and Michael O’Malley, he co-edited The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (University of Chicago Press, 2008). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “The Lost Black Generation: African-American Performers and the Birth of Modern Show Business.”
Martha S. Jonesis Associate Professor of History and CAAS, and Visiting Professor of Law. Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University (2001) and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law (1987). She directs the Law and Slavery and Freedom Project, with Rebecca J. Scott (Michigan) and Jean Hébrard (EHESS), and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Women’s History. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Her current work includes two book projects: “Overturning Dred Scott: Everyday Life at the Intersection of Race and Law in an Antebellum City” and “Riding the Atlantic World Circuit: One Household’s Journey through the Law of Slavery and Freedom.”
Michelle McClellanis Assistant Professor of History at the Residential College. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2000. She is interested in issues of place and memory, and has embarked on a study of heritage tourism at the sites associated with the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In her courses, McClellan, a Michigan native, encourages students to engage in public and community history. She also specializes in medical history, particularly the history of addiction. She is currently completing a book manuscript that uses the figure of the alcoholic woman as a way to explore the complex intersection of gender and medicalization in modern American history.
Ian Moyeris Assistant Professor of History and Interdepartmental Program in Greek and Roman History. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2004. Moyer is currently completing a book, entitled “At the Limits of Hellenism: Egyptian Priests and the Greek World,” in which he explores the ancient history and modern historiography of cultural and intellectual encounters between ancient Greeks and Egyptians. This work has drawn him into the intersections between history, classics, Egyptology, and the history of religions, as well as the questions of culture and identity that have been at issue in fields such as anthropology and post-colonial studies.
Brian Porter-Szucs is Associate Professor of History. He was awarded the 2006 LSA Excellence in Education Award by the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. His most recent publications include For God and Fatherland: Poland, Catholicism, and Modernity (Oxford, forthcoming 2009); “Hetmanka and Mother: Representing the Virgin Mary in Modern Poland,” Contemporary European History 14:2 (May 2005): 151-70; and “Anti-Semitism and the Search for a Catholic Modernity,” in Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Cornell, 2005). His book, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Oxford, 2000), will appear soon in a Polish translation published by Pogranicze Press.
Penny Von Eschen is Professor of History and American Culture. She is the author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard, 2004) and Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Cornell, 1997). She is co-editor, along with Manisha Sinha, of Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History (Columbia, 2007); and co-editor along with Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines, and Barry Shank of American Studies: An Anthology (Blackwell-Wiley Press, 2008). Von Eschen was awarded the 2008 Dave Brubeck Institute Distinguished Achievement Award and has co-curated the photography exhibition, Jam Sessions: America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World, with Curtis Sandberg, Vice-President for the Arts at Meridian International Foundation in Washington D.C. She is currently working on a transnational history of Cold War nostalgia.
Stephen Ward is Assistant Professor of the Residential College and CAAS. Ward received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas in 2002. His teaching and writing focus on two areas of recent American history. One is African American political thought and social movements, particularly the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The other area is the evolution of cities since World War II, with an emphasis on grassroots activism and community-based approaches to urban redevelopment. He is completing a dual-biography of two long-time Detroit activists, James and Grace Lee Boggs, and he is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, a community-based organization in Detroit.
Post-Doctoral Fellow (2009-2010)
Allison Abra completed her PhD in modern British history at the University of Michigan in spring 2009. Her dissertation, entitled "On With the Dance: Nation, Culture, and Popular Dancing in Britain, 1918-1945," considers the evolution, experience, and public understanding of popular dancing in Britain during the interwar and wartime years, with a specific focus on the increasing influence of American popular culture and the relationship between dancing and national identity. She is also the author of an article, "Doing the Lambeth Walk: Novelty Dances and the British Nation," which will be published in Twentieth Century British History in September 2009. Her broader research and teaching interests include women’s and gender history, the social and cultural history of war, and the transnational history of popular culture.
