CU Department of History Faculty Short Biographies

Fred Anderson (Ph.D., Harvard University; Professor).
Fred Anderson received his B.A. from Colorado State University in 1971 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1981. He has taught at Harvard and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he is currently Professor of History. His publications include Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2000) and, with Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (2005). He can be reached at Fred.Anderson at Colorado.EDU

Virginia Anderson (Ph.D., Harvard University; Professor)
Professor Anderson’s area of specialization is the history of Colonial and Revolutionary America. Her publications have until now focused on the seventeenth century. Her most recent book (Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, 2004) combined ethnohistorical and environmental history approaches to examine the impact of imported livestock on Anglo-Indian relations in the North American colonies. More recently, her new book project moves into the eighteenth century, exploring the history and public memory of the American Revolution. She is also co-author of a U.S. history textbook, The American Journey. She can be reached at Virginia.Anderson at Colorado.EDU

Scott G. Bruce

Brian DeLay (Ph.D., Harvard; Assistant Professor)
Professor DeLay teaches classes on Native American history, inter-ethnic borderlands, the American Southwest to 1900, and contact-era history in the Americas. He specializes in nineteenth-century United States and Mexican history, and has a particular interest in connections between independent native peoples and the interlocked histories of American nation states. His dissertation, "The War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Politics in the Era of the U.S.-Mexican War," has won awards from Harvard University and Phi Alpha Theta/Westerners International. He spent the academic year 2005-06' as a fellow at the Clements Center for the Southwest at Southern Methodist University, revising his book manuscript for Yale University Press. He has two articles forthcoming this year: "Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War," American Historical Review, Feb. 2007; and "The Wider World of the Handsome Man: Southern Plains Indians Invade Mexico, 1830-1846," Journal of the Early Republic, spring 2007. His next project will be a study of the international arms trade and Indian freedoms in the Americas during the long nineteenth century. He can be reached at Brian.DeLay at Colorado.EDU and his website is http://www.colorado.edu/history/delay

Barbara Alpern Engel (Ph.D., Columbia University; Distinguished Professor)
Professor Engel specializes in the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. A social historian by training, she has focused on the history of women and the family, making numerous research visits to Russia since 1985. She has published numerous articles as well as three co-authored and three solely-authored books on these subjects. She has been the recipient of Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently completing a book entitled "Family Matters: Marriage, its Discontents and the State in Late Imperial Russia, 1881-1914." Other Publications: Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994; reprinted in paperback, 1996); A Revolution of Their Own: Russian Women Remember their Lives in the Twentieth Century, co-edited, introduced and annotated with Anastasia Posadskaya -Vanderbeck (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998); Women in Russia: 1700-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) "In the Name of the Tsar: Competing Legalities and Marital Conflict in Late Imperial Russia," Journal of Modern History, v. 77, no. 1 (March 2005) . She can be reached at Barbara.Engel at Colorado.EDU

Robert Ferry (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Associate Professor)
Professor Ferry specializes in early Spanish American history. He is particularly interested in the changing composition of colonial societies. His earlier research examined the ways African slavery and cocoa agriculture shaped social relations on the South American Caribbean coast: The Colonial Elite of Colonial Caracas, 1567-1767, University of California Press (1989). His more recent interest is focused on the social and cultural history of early seventeenth-century Mexico. A recent publication, which anticipates the book that is as yet unfinished, is: "Don't Drink the Chocolate; Domestic Slavery and the Exigencies of Fasting for Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth-Century Mexico," Nuevo Mundo-Mundos Nuevos (Paris) 5 (May 2005). He can be reached at: Robert.Ferry at Colorado.EDU.

Sanjay K. Gautam (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2005; Assistant Professor)
Professor Gautam’s work focuses on the cultural, religious, and political history of India, particularly in the pre-modern period. His research interests also include war, sexuality, cinema and popular culture, historical consciousness, Islam in South Asia, and theories of history. He is currently working on a book that looks at the interface of politics, religion, and literature as it relates to the nature of historical consciousness in twentieth-century India. He is also working on a second project that focuses on the social and political history of the English language in India. He can be reached at Sanjay.Gautam at Colorado.EDU

Matthew Gerber (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley; Assistant Professor)
Professor Gerber is a specialist in the social, cultural, political and legal history of early modern France. After receiving a B.A. in Humanities from Yale Univerity in 1991, he spent two years teaching intensive acquaculture with the Peace Corps in Cameroon. He then undertook graduate study in History at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his M.A. in 1996 and his Ph.D. in 2004. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled, The End of Bastardy: Politics, Family and the Law in Early Modern France. His next research project will be on the politics of terror in early modern Europe. He can be reached at Matthew.Gerber at Colorado.EDU

David L. Gross (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin; Professor)
Professor Gross's main area of specialization is Modern European Intellectual History from the eighteenth century to the present. He teaches a two semester lecture course in Intellectual History, as well as more focused courses in the History of Ideas, European History in general, Historiography, and Historical Method. Over the past few years Gross's research has dealt with issues having to do with the decline of tradition in the modern era, remembering and forgetting in contemporary culture, and the emergence of anti-modern forms of thought in the West since l789. Recent publications include: The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity (l992), Lost Time: on Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (2000), and "Objects from the Past," in Waste-Site Stories: the Recycling of Memory (2003). Gross is also the editor of a book series with The University of Massachusetts Press entitled "Critical Perspectives on Modern Culture," and Associate Editor of the journal Telos: a Critical Quarterly. He can be reached at David.L.Gross at Colorado.EDU.

Martha Hanna (Ph.D., Georgetown; Professor)
Professor Hanna is a specialist in the history of modern France, with a particular interest in the First World War. She is the author of The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During the Great War, published by Harvard University Press (1996) and several articles on the cultural history of France during the early twentieth century, most recently "A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in World War I France" which appeared in the American Historical Review (December 2003). During a research trip to Paris in June 2000 she unearthed a previously unknown collection of wartime letters written by a peasant couple, Paul and Marie Pireaud. Numbering well over a thousand letters, the Pireaud collection – perhaps the only extant collection of letters written by French peasants that includes the letters of both husband and wife – is the foundation of her current book, a micro-history of France during the Great War that examines the lived experience of war from the vantage points of both the military and home fronts. Tentatively entitled, In Love and War: The Wartime Marriage of Paul and Marie Pireaud, the book will be published by Harvard University Press in 2006. She can be reached at Martha.Hanna at Colorado.EDU and her website is: http://spot.colorado.edu/~hanna/

Robert Hohlfelder (Ph.D., Indiana University; Professor)
Professor Hohlfelder is a professor and former chair of the Department of History at the University of Colorado in Boulder. His research interests are in ancient maritime history, Late Antiquity, and ancient numismatics. He has published or edited six books, 84 articles, and 59 reviews, and presented 131 papers at professional conferences in 13 countries and given over 300 public lectures at universities and museums around the world. Bob has been awarded 59 post-doctoral grants and has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Sp 1999, Sp2001, Sp2003, and Sp 2005), Wolfson College, University of Oxford (Fall2004 and Sp2006) and Edith Cowan University, Perth Australia (Summer 2003 and 2005) and has been a research fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (1976-7 and Sp1986). He has participated in or directed 40 maritime archaeological expeditions throughout the Mediterranean. Currently, he is preparing the archaeological data from the submerged harbor area of ancient Aperlae (Turkey) for publication and is also co-directing a pan-Mediterranean study of the development, properties, and use of Roman hydraulic concrete in maritime environments . He currently serves as a senior maritime archaeologist for an international, interdisciplinary team research group engaged in a deep-water search for shipwrecks off the coast of Greece dating from Persian War era in the 5th century BC. He can be reached at: Robert.Hohlfelder at Colorado.EDU

Susan Kent (Ph.D., Brandeis University; Professor & Chair)
Professor Kent specializes in modern British history, focusing on gender, culture, imperialism, and politics. Her publications include Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (1987); Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (1993); and Gender and Politics in Britain, 1640-1990 (1999). She is currently at work on a co-authored book on the Igbo Women's War of 1929 and is finishing up a manuscript entitled Aftershocks: The Politics of Trauma in Interwar Britain (Palgrave, forthcoming). She can be reached at Susan.Kent at Colorado.EDU

Anne E. Lester (Ph.D. Princeton University; Assistant Professor)
Professor Lester studies the social and religious history of Europe during the High Middle Ages (1000-1400). She became interested in medieval history while working on an archeological excavation of a medieval French abbey as an undergraduate. She completed her B.A. at Brown University (1996) during which time she also studied at Oxford University for a year. She is currently completing a book that examines the social and spiritual functions of Cistercian convents in the context of new religious movements in thirteenth-century northern France. Lester teaches courses on the medieval church, legal history, colonization and the crusades, and women in the pre-modern world. Her research interests also include the history of foundling homes and hospitals, the institutionalization of charity as well as the development and definition of urban centers during the Middle Ages. During the 2004/5 academic year Professor Lester was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Medieval Institute at University of Notre Dame. She can be reached at Anne.Lester at Colorado.EDU and her website is http://spot.colorado.edu/~alester/

Patricia Limerick (Ph.D., Yale; Professor)
Professor Limerick teaches a variety of courses, both undergraduate and graduate, and is the Associate Director of CU's Minority Arts and Sciences Program, where she teaches a Summer Bridge class on writing for entering freshmen of color. She also currently chairs the Board of the Center of the American West. She is a recipient of numerous awards and honorary appointment--State Humanist of the Year, 1992, from the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities; a recipient of the University of California, Santa Cruz 1990 Alumni Achievement Award; and Official Fool of the University of Colorado from 1987 to 2008. In 1995, she was named a MacArthur fellow. She has served on a number of advisory boards and committees; most recently the Board of Advisors for Ken Burn's and Stephen Ives's eight-part PBS series, "The West". She has published many books, articles, and reviews, her best known work is The Legacy of Conquest. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and book reviews, she writes frequent columns and op-ed pieces for a variety of news sources. Her recent books include Something in the Soil (a collection of essays) and The Atomic West, (in progress). As an advocate for bringing academic knowledge into the community, she has spoken to audiences as diverse as the American Association of Law Schools, and a National Aeronautics and Space Administration conference on the future of space exploration. She can be reached at Patricia.Limerick at Colorado.EDU

Eric Love (Ph.D., Princeton University; Associate Professor)
Professor Love earned his BA in history from Brown University and MAs from the University of Vermont and Princeton. His teaching and research focuses on the United States from the early national period through World War I, with principle emphasis on how political, social, cultural, economic, and racial developments shaped the nation historically, both domestically and in its global relations. These interests came together with the publication of his book Race Over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (2004) and are being expanded in his current projects. The first is a revisionist study of America's war against Spain in 1898. The second expands the concept of the nation's "founding generation" to encompass the Atlantic world in order to retell the story of how and why the US removed itself in 1808 from legal participation in the slave trade. His long term intellectual works include a study of the culture of death in Victorian America, titled The Way of All Flesh. He has presented the first finding of this project to the Shelby Cullum Davis Center at Princeton University, the Walter Chapin Simpson Center at the University of Washington, and at the 2003 American Historical Association convention. He can be reached at Eric.Love at Colorado.EDU

Ralph Mann (Ph.D. Stanford University, Associate Professsor)
Professor Mann teaches 19th Century US Social History and Civil War and Reconstruction. His research centers on the social impacts of Western mining and of guerrilla warfare in the Civil War Appalachian South. His most important historical works are: After the Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, and Neighbors and Kin: War and Subsistence in Appalachian Virginia (forthcoming). He has won two CU awards for undegraduate advising, the Boulder Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, the Kayden Faculty Book Manuscript Award, and is currently the Department of History's Distinguished Teaching Professor. He can be reached at Ralph.Mann@Colorado.EDU Ralph.Mann at Colorado.EDU

Mithi Mukherjee (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2001; Assistant Professor)
Professor Mukherjee specializes in the legal, political, and cultural history of modern India. Her interests include colonialism and nationalism, law and empire, human rights, comparative democracies, gender, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and subaltern histories. She is currently completing a book that explores the nature and evolution of the British imperial political formation in India from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and its implications for postcolonial Indian democracy. She recently published "Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke's Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings." in Law and History Review, 23:3 (Fall 2005), 589-630. Professor Mukherjee can be reached at Mithi.Mukherjee at Colorado.EDU

Mark Pittenger (Ph.D., University of Michigan; Associate Professor)
Professor Pittenger holds a Ph.D. in American Culture and has taught at the University of Colorado since 1989. As a U.S. intellectual historian focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he is especially interested in the circulation and deployment of ideas—in their variable readings and misreadings, and their social and political uses—beyond the precincts of their production. He has written in the past about the impact of evolutionary theory on American socialist thought and political practice. In his current project, a study of class passing, he is piecing together the history of undercover investigations of poverty and working-class life, and of the attendant construction of ideas about American poverty and social class, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. He can be reached at Mark.Pittenger at Colorado.EDU

Robert Schulzinger (Ph.D., Yale University; Professor)
Professor Schulzinger is the Director of the International Affairs Program at CU-Boulder, and a College of Arts & Sciences Professor of Distinction. He born in Cincinnati, Ohio, received his B.A. degree magna cum laude from Columbia University, and his Ph.D., from Yale University. He also studied at the London School of Economics. He has taught at CU since 1977. Bob is the author or co-author of twelve books and over sixty articles on the history of U.S. foreign relations and recent American history. Among his books are The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relation, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975, and Present Tense: The United States since 1945. His book, A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War will be published in 2006 by Oxford University Press. Bob is a past-president of the Society fo Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). He has been the editor-in-chief of SHAFR's journal Diplomatic History since 2001. He was a member of the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation from 1996 to 2005. He can be reached at Robert.Schulzinger at Colorado.EDU

David Shneer (Ph.D., Univ. of California, Berkeley; Associate Professor)
Called a "taboo-breaking scholar" by Tikkun magazine, Professor Shneer's work concentrates on modern Jewish society and culture, modern Russian and Jewish history, and the history of Jews and sexuality. His books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary award, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora. His newest book project, tentatively titled Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, looks at the lives and works of two dozen World War II military photogrpahers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. He has lived and worked as a scholar and writer in Russia, Germany, and Israel and has written for the New York Times, Huffington Post, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as well as magazines dedicated to Jewish life and culture, including Forward, Pakntreger, Jewcy, and Nextbook. Dr. Shneer has taught or been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis, and at the University of Illinois, the National Yiddish Book Center, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Graduate Theological Union. He now serves as the director of education for the Genesis Philanthropy Group, which supports programs to build Jewish identity among global Russian Jewry, and consults to numerous Jewish agencies on questions of contemporary Jewish identity. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies. He can be reached at David.Shneer at Colorado.edu and his website is currently at http://portfolio.du.edu/dshneer. In addition to being History faculty, Prof. Shneer will head the Jewish Studies program at UCB.

David N. Spires (Ph.D., University of Washington, Senior Instructor)
Professor Spires specializes in military, space, and German history. He is a Senior Instructor in the Department of History, and has also taught at the United States Air Force Academy. His publications include Patton's Air Force: Forging a Legendary Air-Ground Team (2002), A Theater in Conflict and Transition: United States European Command Operations During the Tenure of General George A. Joulwan, 1991-1997 (2004), Active Engagement and Preparedness: United States European Command Operations During the Tenure of General Wesley K. Clark, 1997-2000 (2004), Orbital Futures: Selected Documents in Air Force Space History (2004), and Beyond Horizons: A Half-Century of Air Force Space Leadership (1997). He can be reached at David.Spires at Colorado.EDU

Mary Ann Villarreal (Ph.D., Arizona State University, Assistant Professor)
Dr. Villarreal joined the department in Spring of 2008. Her research focuses on south Texas and the formation of a Texas Mexican identity through the lens of business. Her teaching areas include oral history, the American West, and Chicano/a History. She is currently working on her manuscript tentatively titled, Con Ganas y Amor: Texas Mexican Women and Family Owned Businesses, 1930-1950. An oral historian, Professor Villarreal published “Finding Our Place: Reconstructing Community through Oral History,” The Oral Historian (Vol. 33, Issue 2), 2006. The article focused on conducting interviews in rural south Texas and writing about women cantantes [singers] in South Texas. She has an article forthcoming, “Becoming San Antonio’s Own: Reinventing “Rosita,” Journal of Women’s History. She can be reached at:  Maryann.Villarreal at Colorado.EDU

William Wei (Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Professor)
Prof. Wei’s primary research interests center on modern China, especially the themes of revolution and counterrevolution. His secondary ones are on Asian America, focusing on Chinese Americans within the context of the overseas Chinese Diaspora. Reflecting these intellectual pursuits are his major works: Counterrevolution in China: The Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet Period (University of Michigan Press, 1985) and The Asian American Movement (Temple University Press, 1993). He has held a Rockefeller Fellowship, Mellon Fellowship, and Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. In the summer of 1997, he worked as a journalist covering the historic handover of Hong Kong to China. In the summer of 2006, he served as the Academic Dean of the Semester at Sea faculty aboard the S.S. Universe Explorer, visiting various countries around the Pacific Rim. In the summer of 2008, he participated in an international faculty development seminar on the Silk Road, China. He is frequently invited to lecture on Asian history and culture, and the Asian American experience. Professor Wei can be reached at:  William.Wei at Colorado.EDU

Tim Weston (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; Associate Professor)
Professor Weston earned his Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. His research focuses on intellectuals, political culture, workers and unemployment, and public life in modern China. In 2000 he published a co-edited collection of essays entitled China beyond the Headlines (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) and in 2004 he published The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929 (University of California Press). Professor Weston is currently finishing up a second, completely revised, edition of China beyond the Headlines (to be published under a new title by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers in 2006) and is doing research for a book on journalists and journalism in early twentieth century China. Professor Weston teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate classes on Chinese history. He is also interested in the field of World History and is preparing to teach courses in that field as well in the near future. He can be reached at Timothy.B.Weston at Colorado.EDU and his website is http://www.colorado.edu/history/weston/

John M. Willis (Ph.D., New York University; Assistant Professor)
Professor Willis' research area is the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East and especially the Arabian Peninsula. He is particularly interested in the relationship between state power and the geographical imagination, both as part of colonial modernity and movements of Islamic reform. His current work deals with both of these concerns through a comparison between colonial indirect rule in South Yemen and the rule of a reformist Zaydi Imamate in North Yemen in the first half of the twentieth century. Publications: "Leaving Only Question-Marks: Geographies of Rule in Modern Yemen," in Counter Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, eds. Madawi al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis (New York: Palgrave, 2004). He can be reached at John.Willis at Colorado.EDU

Marcia Yonemoto (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; Associate Professor)
Professor Yonemoto's research focuses on the cultural history of early modern Japan (c. 1590-1868). Most of her publications, including her first book, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868) (University of California Press, 2003), examine popular discourses of geographical consciousness as expressed in maps, travel writing, and popular fiction. She is presently researching her second book, which is on the history of women and gender in early modern Japan. Her publications include "The ‘Spatial Vernacular' in Tokugawa Maps." The Journal of Asian Studies 53:3 (August 2000), 647-666. "Envisioning Japan in Eighteenth-Century Europe: The International Career of a Cartographic Image." Intellectual History Newsletter 22 (2000), 17-35. "Maps and Metaphors of Japan's ‘Small Eastern Sea' in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868)." The Geographical Review 89:2 (April 1999): 169-187. "Nihonbashi: Edo's Contested Center." East Asian History 17/18 (1999): 49-70. She can be reached at Marcia.Yonemoto at Colorado.EDU and her website is: http://www.colorado.edu/history/yonemoto

Tom Zeiler (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Professor)
Professor Zeiler teaches American diplomatic history, modern United States, and America through baseball. He has written on U.S. diplomacy and globalization, including American Trade and Power (1992), Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (1999), Dean Rusk (2000), Globalization and the American Century (2003), and Unconditional Defeat: Japan, America, and the End of World War II (2004). Tom will soon publish a book on the Spalding world baseball tour of 1888-89 and globalization, called Global Games and is writing a global history of the Second World War. He spent the 2004/05 academic year on a Fulbright in Tokyo and in 1999 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tom is the executive editor of the journal Diplomatic History. He can be reached at Thomas.Zeiler at Colorado.EDU and his website is: http://spot.colorado.edu/~zeilert/

Home | Contact Us
© Board of Regents of the University of Colorado
234 UCB
Hellems, Room 204
Boulder, CO 80309
Phone: 303-492-6683
Fax: 303-492-1868
history@colorado.edu

For information on our Graduate Program, use this link .
For graduate program questions not covered in our extensive online information, contact our graduate assistant directly.