Stephen A. Berrey joins the faculty as assistant professor of History and American Culture in the fall of 2009, coming from Indiana University. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include African American history and culture, the African Diaspora, the U.S. South, and U.S. cultural and social history. His current project, “Breaking the Jim Crow Routine: Racial Performances, Surveillance, and Propaganda in 1950s Mississippi,” explores black repression, resistance, and State racial projects.

Deirdre de la Cruz received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2006.  She joins the Departments of History and Asian Languages and Cultures after spending three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows. Her current book project is a historical and ethnographic examination of several apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines from the mid nineteenth century to the present, especially as they articulate with projects and practices of colonial and post-colonial modernity.  In addition to Philippine history and ethnography, her research interests include theories of religion, colonialism and conversion, visual culture, histories and theories of the mass media.

Brandi Hughes received her Ph.D from Yale University in the fall of 2009. Her research concerns African American religious and intellectual history across the turn of the twentieth century, and she is completing a manuscript project that studies the entanglements of evangelical nationalism and diaspora in African American missions to colonial Africa. Her dissertation, Middle Passages: African America and the Missionary Movement in West Africa, was supported by fellowships and grants from the Carter G. Woodson Institute (UVA), the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the MacMillan Center for International and Areas Studies at Yale. Hughes is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford and will join the Department of History and the Program in American Culture in the fall of 2010.

Michelle McClellan (Ph.D., Stanford) begins an appointment this fall as assistant professor of U.S. and public history.  She is especially 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.  McClellan also specializes in medical history, particularly the history of addiction. She is completing a book that uses the figure of the alcoholic woman as a way to explore the complex intersection of gender and medicalization in modern American history.

Ellen Muehlberger received her Ph.D in Religious Studies from Indiana University in 2008 and her BA in Comparative Religion and Biomedical Science from Western Michigan University. Her area of research is Christianity in late antiquity, with specializations in Coptic and Syriac studies and theories of the religious imagination. She is currently revising the manuscript of Angels in the Religious Imagination of Late Antiquity, a project which grew from her dissertation, and joins the faculties in History and Near Eastern Studies this fall after a year in the department of Religious Studies at DePauw University.

Derek Peterson received a Ph.D. in African History from the University of Minnesota in 2000. He taught for several years at the College of New Jersey, then took up a lectureship in African History at the University of Cambridge. From 2004 to 2009 he was Director of the Centre of African Studies and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. In 2007 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, given to scholars based at Britain universities (under 36 years old) for accomplishments in research. In 2009 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He joined the History Department at Michigan in 2009.

Daniel Ramírez, a Yale College graduate, received his Ph.D. in American Religious History from Duke University in 2005. He arrives from Arizona State University.  He has been a guest researcher at institutes in Mexico and the University of California San Diego. His fourteen publications and current book project, “Migrating Faiths: A Social and Cultural History of Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico, 1906-1966” (supported by a Louisville Institute First Book Grant for Minority Scholars), reflect his interest in the intersections of migration, religion, and culture (especially music), and in religious cultural encounter in Reformation, colonial and modern periods.

Teaching Visitors 2009-2010

Steven Aschheim, from Hebrew University Department of History, will teach modern Jewish History (384) and European Cultural History (481.001) in the fall term.

Robert Donia will teach Central and Eastern European history (333) in the winter term.

Jean Hebrard, visiting Professor, will teach a graduate level course in the winter term.

Ellen Poteet returns to campus for the full year, teaching African history courses.

Alexander Semyonov will teach History 433, "Russia Under the Tsars," in the fall term. He is an Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Smolny College of Liberal Arts, St. Petersburg State University, Russia and at Bard College.

David Smith, Adjunct Assistant Professor, will teach History 363, "U.S. Foreign Relations and International Politics since World War II," in the fall term and History 218, "The Vietnam War," in winter 2010.

Jeremy Smith, visiting Associate Professor, will teach modern Russian history (434) in the winter term.

Ken Sylvester is teaching Canadian history this year, as a lecture in the fall and a 396 colloquium in the winter term. He is affiliated with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research and the Population Studies Center.

Ulrike Weckel, visiting Associate Professor, returns this year to teach modern Germany (420) and the Holocaust (386)

The EIHS Post-Doctoral Fellow for 2009-2010, Allison Abra, recently completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan. She is teaching a fall term course titled "Americanization and British Invasion: A Transnational History of Popular Culture" (230.010)

Three fellows of the Michigan Society of Fellows are with the department this year. Hussein Fancy is in the last of his three-year post-doc and will join the faculty in Fall 2010 as assistant professor of Medieval history. He is investigating the interactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Mediterranean during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Miranda Johnson will be a fellow through 2011. Her fields are colonial and post-colonial history and the indigenous history of Australasia and North America. Elise Lipkowitz will be a fellow through 2010 after receiving her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in June 2009. Her fields are science and technology.

The Armenian Studies Program welcomes two visitors this year. Fuat Dundar is teaching a fall term topics course on "Tribe, Community, Nation: The History of the Kurds and the Middle East" (302.002). Sarah Mekdjian will teach in the winter term after completing her degree at the University of Paris X Nanterre.

Two mini-courses will be offered in the fall term. Claudia Kedar is teaching a graduate/undergraduate mini-course in September and October titled “The New Economic Order: Latin America and the International Monetary Fund” (HIst 390.001/LACS 490.001 ). Graduate students Kristin Goff and Eric Schewe are teaching an undergraduate course on "The Iranian Revolution: Society, Religion and Regional Ambition"(Hist 390.002) in October and November.