History Department welcomes six new faculty members
NEW FACES AROUND THE DEPARTMENT
Additional news can be found in the Fall 2009 Departmental Newsletter
Marni Sandweiss (Professor), is the author or editor of numerous books on American history and photography, including most recently Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Her courses this fall are entitled “Writing from the Document: Reconstructing the American Past” and “Public History in the United States.”
Adam Beaver (Assistant Professor) is a historian of late medieval and early modern Spain. His research focuses primarily on Spaniards’ interactions with the Levant, both real and imaginary. His scholarship aims to generate a richer and more imaginative understanding of the common origins of Orientalism and nationalism—that is, how early modern Europe’s deepening contact with the wider world influenced the evolution of Western identities. Prof. Beaver currently offers courses on early modern Iberia and the premodern Mediterranean world.
Katja Guenther (Assistant Professor) specializes in the history of modern medicine and the mind sciences. She is a trained doctor (M.D., University of Cologne) who has worked in hospitals in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, and holds a research degree in neuroscience. Her research focuses on the history of subjectivity and the ways in which modern ideas of the self have been constituted through the interplay of cultural and scientific norms. This fall, she is teaching a junior seminar “Medicine and Deviance – Defining Disease in the Modern World” that focuses on the ways in which disease categories have been used to rationalize socially deviant behavior. In the spring of 2010, Professor Guenther will offer a lecture course in the history of medicine that focuses on the history of health and disease in the West from Antiquity to the present.
Eleanor Hubbard (Instructor) specializes in the social and cultural history of early modern Britain. Her current project, City Women: Sex, Money, and the Social Order in London 1570-1640, addresses the lives of ordinary women in the English capital during a period of extraordinary change.
Robert Karl (Instructor) studies 20th century Latin America, with a focus on the political and social histories of Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Brazil. Karl's research and teaching interests also include U.S.-Latin American relations, Cold War and international history, commodity history, labor history, and the integration of GIS and other technological/inter-disciplinary approaches into history.
Yair Mintzker (Assistant Professor) specializes in German-speaking Central Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, though his broad interests include urban history as well as intellectual, cultural, and political history of Early Modern and Modern Europe. Prof. Mintzker is currently teaching a course on “The Early Modern City, 1450-1800.”