Fall 2007

George Alter, Associate Director at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and a Research Professor in the Population Studies Center (PSC) and the ICPSR within the Institute for Social Research, joins the History Department this fall. He is one of the leading historical demographers in the world. He has a long list of impressive publications, a solid record in securing external funding for his research, and outstanding skills as teacher and mentor. Professor Alter was trained at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. and PhD.), and at the University of Michigan where he received an M.A. in applied economics and did a post-doc in the Population Studies Center. He has taught at Indiana University and served as Director of Indiana’s Population Institute for Research and Training (PIRT).

We welcome Micah Auerback as assistant professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures.

Anthony Mora is currently an assistant professor of History and American Culture. He received his BA from the University of New Mexico and his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. Mora’s principal research interests focus on the historical construction of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. His first project, "Local Borders" (under contract with Duke University Press), explores the ways that racial and national ideologies influenced the meaning of Mexican identity along the nineteenth-century border. In addition, Mora has started research on a second major project that explores the relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans in the early-twentieth-century Midwest. Before joining the University of Michigan, Mora served as a history faculty member at Texas A&M University and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mora teaches courses on Mexican American History, Latino/a History, and the History of Sexuality.

Ian Moyer joins the department as assistant professor of ancient Greek history. He completed his Ph.D. at University of Chicago, and before coming to Michigan, he taught in the History and Classics departments at Pomona College.

His current research project is a book based on his dissertation research, 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 interchanges between ancient Greeks and Egyptians. This work has drawn him into the disciplinary intersections between history, classics, Egyptology, and the history of religions, as well as questions of culture and identity that have been at issue in fields such as anthropology and post-colonial studies.

He is also now developing a new project that reassesses relations between the Graeco-Macedonian state and the indigenous élite in Ptolemaic Egypt, and examines new political and cultural practices that were developed through transcultural interactions and negotiations.

Rachel Neis joins us as Assistant Professor of Ancient Jewish History. She completed her dissertation at Harvard entitled, “Vision and Visuality in Late Antique Rabbinic Culture” (2007). Rachel Neis also holds a law degree from the London School of Economics and an M.A. in Philosophy of Religion from Boston University. She has previously taught at Rutgers University and at the University of Michigan Law School, where she is a Visiting Professor. Her interests and research encompass visuality in late antiquity and law and religion in the late ancient world.


Teaching Visitors

Howard Lupovich returns as a visiting associate professor in the fall of 2007, offering courses on the Holocaust (386) and modern Jewish history (383).

Ellen Poteet is teaching African history (246) in fall 2007.

Alice Ritscherle will teach modern British history (320) in fall 2007.

Geoffrey Schmalz returns to teach Greek (200) history this year.

David Smith will teach a first-year seminar (196.003) on US/Canadian relations in fall 2007.

Ulrike Weckel also returns to the department to teach modern German history (420) this fall.

Two one-credit mini-courses (History 590) will be offered by visitors in the fall term. Alf Luedke's course is Reading Clues and Evidence of Violence in Modern History from October 23 to December 7. Catherine Burns will teach African history.

EIHS Post-Doctoral Fellows for 2007-2008 are Roberta Pergher (Modern Germany and women's history) and Tamar Carroll (Post-World War II U.S. history, 20th century U.S. political history, women and gender,, urban, and oral history).

Two fellows of the Michigan Society of Fellows are with us this year. Jeremy Mumford is a fellow through 2009. His fields of study are Colonial Latin America and Americas in the Early Modern World. Hussein Fancy begins a three-year post-doc in September 2007. He is investigating the interactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Mediterranean during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.