Education

Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 1992
MA., The Johns Hopkins University 1986
MA., University College Cork (Republic of Ireland) 1983
B.A., Swarthmore College, 1982

Research and Teaching Interests

Holocaust and Genocide Studies; Rescue and Resistance in the Holocaust; History of the World Wars; History of Nazi Germany; War, Memory, and Society.

Publications

Book

Before the Enemy Is Within Our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885–1912: A Social, Cultural and Political History (Boston: Humanities Press, Inc., a subsidiary of Brill Academic Publishers, 1999).

Articles

“Hiding in Plain Sight:  Gender, Faith, and the Conflicted Legacies of a Dutch Rescuer,” in Judy Baumel-Schwartz, ed., Their Brothers’ Keeper: Jews Saving Jews During the Holocaust (Peter Lang Publishing, Bern, Switzerland), forthcoming 2021.

“Teaching During the Pandemic:  Agency, Empathy, and Humility,” in Creating Under Corona, Judy Baumel-Schwartz, ed.  Digital book in English and Hebrew (The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, 2020), pp. 139-40. 

“’Remembering is Not an Innocent Act’:  Reflections on Postwar German War Memory and Peace Studies,” in Noriko Kawamura, Yoichiro Murakami, and Shin Chiba, eds., Building New Pathway to Peace  (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011)

“Finding Light in the Darkness? The Historical Treatment of Genocide as a Template for the Field of Hate Studies,” Journal of Hate Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (2003–04): 167–75.

“‘Hammer Blow”: Work, the Workplace, and the Culture of Masculinity among Catholic Workers in the Weimar Republic,” in Central European History 37, No. 2 (Summer 2004): 245–71.

“Catholic–Marxist Competition in the Working-Class Parishes of Cologne during the Weimar Republic,” in Catholic Historical Review 83, No. 1 (January 1997): 20–43.

Media and Public Outreach

Fallen Cougars, a digital exhibit of +225 war dead from Washington State College during the Second World War, 2017 to the present.  Opened December 2021.  Fallen Cougars (wsu.edu)

Honors & Awards

2020-2021 WSU Center for Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship

2018 WSU Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction

2007 Elected to the WSU President’s Teaching Academy

1999–2000 William F. Mullen Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005

Research and Teaching Interests

Sutton teaches courses in 20th century United States history, cultural history, and religious history.

Publications

Sutton is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, which will be published by Basic Books. His book will explain why Christianity has been so central to American history, and why Americans have been so tied to the Christian tradition in terms of their politics, culture, economics, and foreign policy. Sutton’s latest book entitled Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War is the never-before-told story of the missionaries, priests, rabbis, and other religious activists who went to work as spies for the United States government during World War II. Sutton draws on newly de-classified government documents and the private papers of some of the nation’s most colorful and intriguing clandestine agents to tell this long-buried story of the godly spooks who fought to balance their religious convictions with their commitment to making war on their nation’s, and their God’s, enemies. Through faith and doubt, frustration and perseverance, they struggled to make sense of the unique and dangerous path that they believed God had set before them. The unheralded holy spies at the heart of this book helped American leaders in the 1940s understand the complex ways in which the religious identities of peoples and nations impacted global conflict. Without necessarily anticipating the long-term consequences of their actions, they crafted new and important relationships for the United States with Muslims, Catholics, and Jews and they ran covert operations at the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine. Missionary recruits played an outsized role in leading the US to victory and, once the war was won, two of them helped launch the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Their work inspired American leaders to draw up a new playbook for using religion to craft and meet foreign policy objectives, which then shaped everything from the US’s cold war crusade against “godless” communism to the “war on terror.”

American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) is the first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation. It was named a Choice (American Library Association) “Outstanding Academic Title of 2015.” He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of American Religion and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), which uses history to explore how religion is shaping the modern world. He has written a textbook, Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents, as part of the popular Bedford “History and Culture” series (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012). His first book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007), won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, awarded annually to the best book in any discipline by a first-time author. The book also served as the basis for the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Sister Aimee, part of PBS’s American Experience series.

Sutton has published articles in the Journal of American History, Religion & American Culture, Church History, the Journal of Policy History, and the Public Historian as well as in numerous edited collections. His article, “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Anti-liberalism in a Global Age,” won the Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award for the best article published in the Journal of American History in 2012. Sutton has also written for the New York Times on the Obama presidential campaign and on the origins of Christian fundamentalism, in the New Republic on the Christian Right and the Capitol insurrection, the Washington Post on Putin and the end times, Trump and evangelicalism, and sex scandals in the religious right, the Guardian on the legacy of Billy Graham and on abortion rights, and the Seattle Times (here, here, and here).

Sutton was named a 2016 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. He spent the 2012-2013 academic year in Ireland as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College Dublin (on a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant) and the 2014-2015 academic year in Germany as the Marsilius Kolleg Visiting Professor and Scholar-in-Residence at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Heidelberg University. He has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Sutton has been featured on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and MSNBC’s The Last Word, among many other news shows. He has lectured on religion, politics, and American culture across the U.S. and in universities in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

Education

Ph.D., University of Toledo, 1982

Academic & Professional Interests

Svingen teaches Public History and American Indian history, with research, and publication interests in American Indian history.

Two of his cross-listed classes, History of North American Indians, (History 308/Comparative Ethnic Studies 375) and American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law, (History 410/Political Science 410/Anthropology 410), are now offered online in Washington State University’s Global Campus.

Publications

Svingen’s refereed publications include The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, 1877-1900 (University Press of Colorado, 1994), The History of the Idaho National Guard (Idaho Military Division, 1995), and Splendid Service, A History of the Montana National Guard, 1867-2006 (Washington State University Press, 2010 – Video). He has published scholarly articles in the Western Historical Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Indian Quarterly, and Montana, The Magazine of Western History.

Contracted Reports

Covering topics such as traditional land use, treaty rights, water rights, hunting and fishing rights, and repatriation, he has authored, edited, and collaborated on contracted reports for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Idaho, The Fort Lemhi Indian Community, the Crow Tribe of Montana, the Navajo Nation, the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the Native American Rights Fund (Pawnee repatriation), the Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho, and the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Chippewa Indians.

Currently, Svingen works with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, just north of Pocatello, Idaho. His area of expertise involves the Mixed-Band of Shoshone, Bannock, and Sheepeater Indians (Sacajawea’s people) whose aboriginal lands included the Lemhi Valley of central Idaho and the Three Forks drainage of southwestern Montana.

He is also working on a historical documentary with Naka Productions, an independent film production company located in Charlotte, North Carolina. The “In Good Faith Project” focuses on unresolved historical questions involving the Mixed Band of Shoshone, Bannock, and Sheepeater Indians of central Idaho and southwestern Montana.

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2007

Academic & Professional Interests

Professor Thigpen is a Nineteenth Century U.S. historian whose work focuses on women and gender, the U.S West, and Colonialism.

Awards and Fellowships

Center for Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Washington State University (2020)
James H. Bradley Fellowship, Montana Historical Society (2020)
Western History Association’s Jensen-Miller Award for best  article in the field of women and gender in the North American West (2011)
Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize Finalist (2008)
Chancellor’s Club Dissertation Fellowship(2006)
Mayers Fellowship, The Huntington Library (2005)

Publications

H-Diplo Roundtable on Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World (Spring, 2016).

“Converting Hawai‘i: Race, Gender, and the Hawaiian Islands Mission.” In Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, edited by Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.  

Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World. University of North Carolina Press, Gender and American Culture Series (2014).

“Desperately Seeking Mary: Materializing Mary Richardson Walker, Missionary,” The Public Historian Vol. 34, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 68-81.

“‘You Have Been Very Thoughtful Today’: The Significance of Gratitude and Reciprocity in Missionary-Hawaiian Gift Exchange” Pacific Historical Review (2010).

” ‘Something Wonderful is About to Happen’: Americans and the Open Frontier” ABC-CLIO’s Analyze Project (August 2008).

“Looking ‘West’–Perspectives on a Changing Nation, HOT Themes in American History Humanities Out There, UCI California History-Social Science Project and the Santa Ana Partnership (2007).

Education

Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 2008.

Academic & Professional Interests

Wright’s research focuses on the British empire in South and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book analyzes opium policy in colonial Burma, and she is currently working on a project about marginal women in the British empire, funded by an NEH Summer Stipend fellowship. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of empires, modern Britain, and World history.

Book

Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Articles

“Gender, Violence and Justice in Colonial Assam: the Webb case, c. 1884” Journal of Social History (2020), 1-18.

“Not just a ‘place for the smoking of opium’: the Indian opium den and imperial anxieties in the 1890s.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 18, 2 (2017)

“Maintaining the bar: regulating European barmaids in colonial Calcutta and Rangoon”  Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45,1 (2017), 22-45.

“Opium in British Burma, 1826-1881.”  Contemporary Drug Problems 35,4 (2008), 611-646.