Faculty Publications and Awards 2023–2024

The award-winning history faculty once again published important and pioneering research that will shape their fields moving forward. As faculty at a research university, their job is both to introduce students to and include them in cutting edge research, and to set the agenda through their publications for future work in history. 

We published four books this year:

L Heidenreich co-authored Writing that Matters: A Handbook for Chicanx and Latinx Studies (University of Arizona Press, 2024). While it includes a brief history of the roots of the fields of Chicanx literature and history, Writing that Matters emphasizes practice: how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx history paper; how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx literature or cultural studies essay; and how to conduct interviews, frame pláticas, and conduct oral histories. Women’s and queer scholarship and methods are not addressed in a separate chapter but are instead integral to the work.

Eugene Smelyansky published Medievalisms and Russia: The Contest for Imaginary Pasts (Arc Humanities Press, 2024). The book explores how the medieval past has been wielded to propagandic effect in Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia. From politicians’ speeches to popular culture, from Orthodox Christianity to neo-paganism, the medieval Russian past remains crucial in constructing national identity, mobilizing society during times of crisis, and providing alternative models of communal belonging. Frequent appeals to a medieval Slavic past, its heroes and myths, have provided―and continue to provide―a particularly powerful tool for animating imperialist and populist sentiments. 

Jesse Spohnholz co-wrote Dutch Reformed Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire, c.1550–1620: A Reformation of Refugees (University of Rochester Press, 2024). The book is available open access, and the book is the final product of the project Spohnholz co-directed from 2015 to 2023 based at the Free University Amsterdam and funded by a €750,000 grant from the Dutch Research Council. 

Charles Weller published Moses, Muhammad and Nature’s God in Early American Religious-Legal History, 1640–1830: A Global Crosscultural Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Based on a thorough study of primary sources, the book traces how, from both theological and naturalist political vantages, attitudes toward, as well as understandings and appropriations of the laws of Moses and Muhammad (Sharia) in comparative relation to one another, transformed over time in the pre-founding, founding, and early post-founding periods of American history, playing a unique, debated role in the formulation of the American Constitutional and national (common) law traditions.

Faculty also published a handful of important articles, including:

Ryan Booth, “‘As So Many Bengal Tigers’: The U.S. Army, Native Scouts, and the Imagined Martial Races of the Southwest,” Journal of Arizona History 64:2 (Summer 2023): 111–137.

Alan Malfavon, “Loyalty, Subjecthood, and Violence: Veracruz’s Afro-descendants in the Early Mexican War of Independence, 1812–1813,” The Latin Americanist 67:4 (December 2023): 357–398. 

Brenna Miller and Jesse Spohnholz, “Backward Design and Forward Thinking in the Introductory World History Course: Recentering World War I as an African and African Diasporic Experience,” World History Bulletin 89:2 (2023); and “Collaboratively Reforming General Education History Education: A Roadmap for the 21st Century,” The Proceedings of the H-Net Teaching Conference 1 (2023): 77–87. 

Nikolaus Overtoom, “Logistics and Strategy in the Hellenistic World: Parthians and Seleucids,” in Brill’s Companion to Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare (Brill, 2023).

Sue Peabody, “Bissette and the Police des Noirs in the Nineteenth Century: Free Soil and Patronage,” French Colonial History, 21–22 (2023): 1–40. 

Jeff Sanders, “History Uncontained at the B Reactor,” in Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure (Oregon State University Press, 2023).

Faculty also received numerous awards and honors:

Andra Chastain received an Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association for a new book-length research project, “Urban Air: A History of Smog in the Americas.” 

The Clements Center at Southern Methodist University selected Ryan Booth as a symposium scholar for a project entitled “Rethinking the Indian Wars.” Booth will contribute a book chapter on the subject of death and burial of US Army soldiers (particularly the US Indian Scouts and Black regulars). Clements Center symposia are held at SMU’s Taos campus. 

History was again well represented among the winners of the annual College of Arts & Sciences awards. Jesse Spohnholz won the Faculty Peer Mentoring Award and Brenna Miller won the Excellence in Teaching by Career Track Faculty Member Award. Miller also won the 2024 Learning Communities Excellence Award from First-year Programs. Ray Sun won WSU’s 2023 Library Excellence Award.