Selected notable works from previous years:

• Laura Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party
  “This is a very original and important book. Beers argues strongly against the conventional view that the Labour Party was reluctant to exploit the modern media.... She makes the convincing case that Labour was quick to take up modern media, (...) which was an essential element in the creation of the broad-based democratic electorate that gave the Party victory in 1945.” —Ross McKibbin, University of Oxford
• Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History
  In its scope it is unprecedented. Brenner has made a stellar contribution to Jewish intellectual history that should be of equal interest to all who would explore the nexus between historiography and ideology."—Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Columbia University 
• Andrew Demshuk, Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and the People's State in 1968
  Demshuk's book suggests that histories of urban space and public monuments should be more central to our understanding of a society at a particular historical moment, as they—when treated rigorously—have the potential to concatenate all of the complex social, political, and economic forces that impinged on people's lives into a cogent and compelling portrait.—Samuel L. Sadow, American University 
• Anton Fedyashin, Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904
  “An original and valuable contribution to illuminating another of those groups in imperial Russia who lost out in the game of history, but whose legacy is strikingly apropos at present in Russia’s shaky democracy. A major contribution.”—Richard Stites, Georgetown University
• Eileen Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920
  “[A] welcome addition to the emerging field of gender studies in Latin American societies and to the recent studies challenging the presentation of these societies as racial democracies. . . . Findlay has produced a challenging work on the moral values and struggles of working women and men.” —Aline Helg, American Historical Review
• Max Paul Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations
  "Highly original, and excellent, investigation of anti-Americanism cast in a brand new light … This remarkable book, fluidly written and very enjoyable to read, is based on thorough historical research in United States, Latin American, and Western European archives."—Sophie Meunier, Political Science Quarterly
• Mary Frances Giandrea, Episcopal Culture in Late Anglo-Saxon England
  There is much to be grateful for here.... An accessible synthesis of material not easily available and provides the first systematic, wider conclusions from those studies.( .English Historical Reiiew)
• Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America
  "Haulman's terrific examination of the gendered implications of fashion is magnificently subtle and detailed, particularly as she insists on linking them to political changes over the course of this era . . . important reading for scholars of gender, revolutionary political culture, and early American studies." — Carolyn Eastman, American Historical Review
• Dan Kerr, Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio"
  A tightly argued, effectively researched, and well-written book. Kerr successfully brings the voices of the unhoused and unemployed into his story at every turn, making a convincing case for their role in altering, if rarely determining, policy."—Mark E. Santow, coauthor of Social Security and the Middle Class Squeeze
• Alan Kraut, Silent Travellers
  "Mr. Kraut's narrative shows that it has always been easier to blame immigrants for epidemics than to attack the infrastructure of disease .A troubling theme underlying ilent Travelers is that when shoddy science is married to unenlightened political leadership, bad medical things will happen, and they will almost always happen to the disenfranchised—from the surgical removal of adenoids to disquieting associations made between ethnic origin and mental performance."" (New York Times)
• Peter Kuznick (with Oliver Stone), The Untold History of the United States
  “As riveting, eye-opening, and thought-provoking as any history book you will ever read...Can’t recommend it highly enough.” —Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian
• Lisa Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France
  "This is the story Lisa Moses Leff has to tell, a story of emancipation and religious fellow feeling, and she tells it with lucidity and a deep sympathy for her subject matter...She has recounted a tale of hope and optimism, of a community energized by the prospect of its own emancipation and mobilized to make its contribution to a France itself in the process of transformation."—Journal of Modern History
• Allan Lichtman, The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present
  “Lichtman’s important book emphasizes the founders’ great blunder: They failed to enshrine a right to vote in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights… The Embattled Vote in America traces the consequences through American history… [Lichtman] uses history to contextualize the fix we’re in today… Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change. With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame.”—James A. Morone, New York Times Book Review
• Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement
  Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award“Allan Lichtman’s new book breaks important ground. Based on an extraordinary range of archival sources, he reminds us that conservatism is not the recent product of Ronald Reagan or Karl Rove, but is deeply embedded in more than a century of American politics and culture.” —Robert Griffith
• Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union
  “An extremely rich and thought-provoking book. Lohr’s work will have a powerful impact upon the field of Russian history, and its arguments will feed into broader debates about citizenship, globalization, and the way in which Russian conceptions of membership in the state were or were not similar to those found across Europe. To my mind, Russian Citizenship is unique: there is nothing like it any language.”—Dominic Lieven, London School of Economics
• Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I
  “Lohr has mined unique and wide-ranging materials to make this invaluable contribution to one of the most crucial and unexplored periods of modern Russian history—the transformation of the Russian Empire into a modern nation.”—A.V. Isaenko, Choice
• Pamela Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985
  "In a lucid, accessible book on the long struggle for women's ordination to the rabbinate, Nadell brings to life figures, such as Regina Jonas and Ray Frank, who have been obscured by accounts that began with the 1972 ordination of Sally Priesand. Nadell makes clear that that event neither began the history of women's ordination in Judaism nor ended controversy about it. (…) She attends to each strand of US Judaism—Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox—and sets her subject in the context of the concurrent US women's rights struggle" (Library Journal).
• Theresa Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line
  “Runstedtler presents an unexpected yet wholly authentic take on the great African American boxer, Jack Johnson; namely, that his impact extended beyond the US to such far-flung nations as Australia, South Africa, the Philippines, even India and Sri Lanka, where indigenous dark populations were finding one black man’s success against his white opponents empowering in their own resistance to their dominant white populations.”—Alan Moores, Booklist
• April Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720
  Transforming the Republic of Letters is a formidable book about a formidable man: Pierre-Daniel Huet. A deft and vivid narrator, April Shelford recreates Huet's career, his friendships with learned men and women, his projects and his quarrels with erudition, tenacity and deep historical insight.... This finely observed biography is also an original and striking work of cultural history. —Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
• Elke Stockreiter, Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar
  ‘This captivating history establishes that Islamic courts contributed significantly to reconfiguring social relationships in post-abolition Zanzibar. Elke Stockreiter deftly explores rarely studied topics, such as women’s control of property, men’s material gains from divorce, and former slaves’ claims to inheritance, and reveals how the courts enabled these forms of individual agency while also constraining their social impact.’—Susan F. Hirsch, George Mason University 
• Katharina Vester, A Taste of Power: Food and American Identities
  "Through a series of zesty readings, A Taste of Power teaches us how to parse the politics of cooking and eating. A keen cultural analyst, Vester shows how the salt of normativity and the pepper of resistance have infused the recipes we live by and thus every bite we eat.” —Kristin Hoganson

Laura Beers published Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century with W.W. Norton in June, 2024. The book, which the New Yorker called “lucid and engaging,” considers the ongoing relevance of Orwell’s writing on truth, liberty, totalitarianism, and social inequality for our contemporary political moment. She argues that Orwell’s work offers a valuable blueprint for modern progressive politics, even as the author fails to consider the importance of feminism for social change. This book grew out of Prof. Beers’ experience teaching the AU Core course, HIST 235: The West in Crisis: George Orwell and the Making of the Modern World.

Michael Brenner gave numerous book talks on his In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University, 2019), which will appear in paperback in 2020. Together with the President of Germany, he was the keynote speaker at the anniversary of the College for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg in June 2019. His latest book on the rise of the Nazi Movement in Munich, which appeared in German in 2019, will be published in English by Princeton University Press in 2020. He served as consultant and is featured in a new CNN six-part series on Jerusalem to be screened later this year. He published a scholarly article "The Ever-Dying People? Prophets of Doom and the Survival of European Jewry" in The Future of the German-Jewish Past.

Andrew Demshuk received a 1-month grant from the Leibniz Association for July 2024 to conduct research in Germany for his next book project, Cold War Coal Pits: The Politics of Devastation in East and West Germany. He has applied for several other grants to support futher research. Demshuk’s new monograph, The Filthiest Village in Europe: Grassroots Ecology and the Collapse of East Germany, will soon be under contract with Cornell University Press for publication in 2025 or 2026. He was featured in a new documentary on the political and cultural effects of the bombardment of European cities during World War II. Finally, he published articles in Journal of Contemporary History, Urban History, and German Studies Review.

Anton Fedyashin is currently writing his book, Superpower Subconscious: The Cold War and the Spy Novel. Over the past year, he has published multiple book reviews, opinion pieces on current affairs, and given dozens of media interviews. He has also taken students and fellow academics on multiple Russian- and Soviet- themed museum trips to the National Gallery of Art, the National Air & Space Museum, Hillwood Estate, the Woodrow Wilson House, Dumbarton House Museum, and more. in December and June, he facilitated a course trip to Istanbul, Turkiye entitled “The Culture of Eastern Orthodoxy: From Constantinople to Eurasia.” He looks forward to continuing his service as the co-director of undergraduate studies for the department.

Eileen’s article “Cien por Cientos Cubanos: National Identity, Master Narratives, and Si-lencing Moves in a Transnational Caribbean Family History” was approved for publica-tion in the Latin American Research Review. She also delivered a paper at an interna-tional conference on Caribbean History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. This year, Eileen Findlay also stepped down as the History Department’s Director of Under-graduate Studies and became the Chair of a new interdisciplinary teaching unit—the Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies Collaborative. Eileen retains her appointment in the History Department while serving as Chair of the CRGC. She also has begun a 4-year term as the External Examiner for the Women and Gender Studies Programme at The University of Hong Kong. 

Kathy Franz continues to teach at American University in addition to working as a Supervisory Museum Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She will serve as the Public History Program Director for the coming academic year, 2024-25.

Max Paul Friedman published “A Latin American Third Way? Juan José Arévalo’s Spiritual Socialism, 1916-1963" in The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History and “La doctrine Monroe. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” in Idées d’Amériques. He and Prof. Núria Vilanova received a book contract for their edited collection, Transnational Humans and Transnationalism in the Humanities: Crossing Boundaries in the Americas with University of New Mexico Press. Friedman gave a paper He gave a paper, “Promises and Limits of the Good Neighbor Policy,” to the conference Washington et l’Amérique Latine entre hégémonie et partenariat, Aix-en-Provence, France, 2024 (via Zoom). He received an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant and did six commentaries on Germany’s national public radio network on the Israel-Gaza conflict, U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. political culture.

Mary Frances Giandrea has been busy on several committees as American University seeks to reconfigure its core curriculum. A key feature of the new vision is to develop stu-dent’s intellectual capabilities, while expanding their perspective and their ways of know-ing a complex world. This year, Dr. Giandrea has been teaching courses on the History of Britain, the Crusades, the Vikings, Medieval Europe, Ancient Greece and Religion and Con-flict in History. 

Kate Haulman’s co-curated exhibit, “All Work, No Pay: The History of Women’s Invisible Labor,” which opened in 2019 at the National Museum of American History, will run through March of 2021. She consulted on the exhibit “Girlhood: It’s Complicated,” to open in June 2020, and received a grant from the Smithsonian’s Women’s History Initia-tive for the project “In Her Own Words: Audience Centric Metadata for Women’s History Objects,” funds from which supported a student workshop that informed the production of enhanced records for objects in the NMAH’s digital catalog. 

Justin Jacobs published his fourth book, Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (Reaktion Books, 2024) and released his second Great Courses series, "World Heritage Sites II: 12 More of the World's Greatest Places." He is also overseeing a Chinese translation for Peking University Press of his last research monograph, The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Anna Kaplan joined the Department of History as a fully time faculty member for AY 2023-24. She is a recipient of the History Makers Digital Archive’s 2023-24 Faculty Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellowship. In February 2024, she published an article in Study the South, titled “Interpersonal Activism.” She is also continuing her work on a manuscript focusing on Black women’s contributions to early institutional oral history projects in the United States.

Julie Keresztes’s first book, Photography and the Making of the Nazi Racial Community, will be published by Cornell University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Dan Kerr focused much of his attention on the Humanities Truck, which is now moving into its third year of operations. In 2019 the project received a major grant from the Mellon Foundation. The three year grant funds six faculty and six graduate fellowships to work with and use the truck for community engaged projects, a speaker series, a commu-nity advisory board, and an exhibit production workshop. The truck project was as active as ever when it needed to shut down in person events as a result of the pandemic. As a result, Kerr initiated the From Me to You: A Covid-19 Oral History Project. In the summer, the truck resumed operations and worked with community partners to deliver food to people in need. In 2020-21 the truck will focus on the theme of Food and Communities. 

Alan Kraut chairs the History Advisory Committee of the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation. They are currently revising the exhibitry in the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. He is also the current president of the National Coalition for History, the lobbying group for the nation’s historians and archivists. He has been engaged with the current health crisis and its influence on migration. His article on anti-Asian nativism and the COVID-19 pandemic, “The Other Pandemic,” was published by the History News Net-work in April 2020. He was a panelist on a webinar sponsored by the Migration Policy In-stitute, “Migration & Coronavirus: A Complicated Nexus Between Migration Management and Public Health.” He has also been interviewed on the history of the 1918 Influenza epidemic on National Public Radio, Kojo Nnamdi’s program on WAMU, and the BBC News. He has been quoted by the Russia News & Information Agency, Ha’aretz in Israel, Spain’s International News Agency (EFE), and the Britain’s New Statesman. He has been consulting with the American Civil Liberties Union to support the rights of asylees who have been denied hearings on public health grounds during the pandemic. They also gave a presentation on a panel, "The Natural World and the Border," at "Geography 2050: Borders & a Borderless World, a conference sponsored by the American Geographical Society at Columbia University on November 22, 2019. He chaired a panel, "In the Hands of the People: Negotiating US Immigration Policy from Below," at the American Historical Association's Annual Meeting in New York, January 3, 2020.

Dr. Kuznick had another busy year plus with speaking and media tours in India (twice), Sin-gapore, Russia, Spain, Belgium, Canada, mainland Japan, and Okinawa, where he received the Ikemiyagushiku Award on behalf of the international support for the anti-base movement in Okinawa from the Okinawan newspaper Ryukyu Shimpo, as well as several talks in the United States. He brought 26 participants (mostly AU students) to attend Victory Day commemorations in Moscow, recognizing the end of World War II. He conducted a couple hundred interviews, mostly with international television, newspapers, and radio, plus a couple major press conferences. He and Oliver Stone wrote a 160-page chapter “How the Unthinkable Became Thinkable Again” on the years 2012-2019 for the new edition of The Untold History of the United States, which came out in April. The new chapter was pub-lished as a stand-alone book in many countries. He also worked on the second volume of the young readers edition of Untold History, which came out in January 2019. He and Oliver Stone recorded a day-long symposium with former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoya-ma, which was published as a co-authored book in Japan in spring 2020. He was also very active with scores of talks, interviews, and op-eds around the end of the European War and the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Lisa Leff is still serving as the Director of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, alongside her work with students and colleagues in the AU Department of History.

Allan Lichtman is an active commentator on the upcoming presidential election, including conducting hundreds of interviews with news outlets. In July, he published the 2024 edition of Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House (Rowman & Littlefield). Lichtman was also the lead author in an amicus brief filed by 25 historians on the Supreme Court Colorado ballot disqualification case.

Eric Lohr is in his fourth year as chair of the department. He published “The Bolshevik Revolution is Over” in the Journal of Modern History in September 2020 and is working on a book titled "Russia's World War I and Revolution: From Total Mobilization to Total Demobilization." 

Pamela Nadell spent her sabbatical year writing her upcoming book, Antisemitism: An American Tradition and actively engaging with the public and media on the rising antisemitism crisis in the United States. In November, 2023, she testified in the widely publicized congressional hearing with the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT. Other speaking engagements included speaking before the House Judiciary Committee, meetings with MIT students, faculty, and presidents cabinet, and participating in a panel discussion with Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council of Education, for the NYU Board of Trustees.

Pedram Partovi published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era in January 2024. He contributed two articles to the Cinema Iranica Digital Compendium, generously supported by the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute. He has also been named to the Cinema Iranica editorial board. He has continued his work on a book manuscript about youth mobilization in Modern Iran, which he hopes to complete in the coming academic year.

Gautham Rao was appointed Editor-In-Chief for the Oxford Bibliography of Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024-). He has also been appointed to a program committee, “100 Years Later: J. Franklin Jameson and Revolutions on the Eve of the 250th” with the John W. Kludge Center, the Library of Congress, and McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Rao participated to the Littleton-Griswold Book Prize Committee with the American Historical Association. He co-authored a historian’s amicus brief in Donald J. Trump v. United States no. 23-939, and served as a plenary speaker at the American Political History Conference at Vanderbilt University, June 6, 2024. Finally, Rao secured a book contract with Hodding Carter Books for White Power: Policing American Slavery.

Theresa Runstedlter published Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA; Black Ball made the shortlist for Museum of African AMerican History’s 2023 Stone Book Award. She gave book talks at a variety of venues, including the University of Iowa, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Shippensburg University, the Schomburg Center, Humanities North Dakota, the Enoch Pratt Library, the Gilder Lehrman Center, and the Gaithersburg Book Festival. She has two forthcoming articles: “Unnecessary Roughness: The NFL’s War on Drugs in the 1970s” in Modern American History and “Self-Care is an Act of Athletic Activism” in Get in the Game: Sports and Contemporary Culture.

MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska completed a scholar residency at Heurich House Museum. Over the summer, she has been working with the Humanities Truck on a project entitled Visitor: Information? with help from Public History MA students Marie, Bennett, and Emma, and Humanities Truck Fellows Daiki and Inaya. She has also finished two chapters of her book entitled Our Nation’s Capital: How Visitors, Newcomers, and Outsiders Came to Dominate Washington, D.C. For AY 2024-25, Rymsza-Pawlowska has been selected for a Us@250 fellowship with New America to support her research, as well as a longform article on local and federal efforts for Bicentennial planning in D.C.

To pursue her research interests in former French West Africa, Elke Stockreiter took up learning Bambara, the most widely spoken language in Mali. Thanks to a Mellon Faculty Development Fund, she has obtained elementary proficiency in speaking and reading Bambara. She worked on articles in English and French that are forthcoming and further contributed to AU Core by designing two new courses: a first-year Complex Problems Seminar titled “Sex, Power, Human Trafficking” and HIST-120 Empires Past & Present, in which she offers an introduction to colonial Africa through mostly primary sources. 

Prof. Elizabeth F. Thompson announces the publication of her new book, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Liberal-Islamic Coalition. Using new Arabic sources, Thompson locates the origins of modern Islamism in the Paris Peace Conference’s exclusion of Arabs from the family of civilized nations accorded rights under international law. The book will appear in April from Atlantic Monthly Press. 

Katharina Vester won a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers that will grant her 14 months of research in Germany. Also this year her “‘POISE, Miss Lane!’ Super-Femininity in U.S. Comic Books in the 1940s and 50s” was published in Bodies in Flux: Embodiments at the End of Anthropocentrism, edited by Barbara Braid and Hanan Muzaffar. She was invited to talk about “Cleaning up the American Mess with Mari Kondo” in the DuBois Lecture Series at Humboldt University in Berlin and on "Diet Manuals from the 1920s as Proto-Feminist Literature“ at the Ruhr-Universitaet Bo-chum.