Thematic Areas of Faculty Strength
African American/Africa/Diaspora
The African and African American Diaspora cluster brings together faculty whose research explores the history and culture of black people. In addition to locating African peoples within the larger context of regional, national, and global change, our scholarship examines intra-racial as well as inter-racial dimensions of the black experience. Based upon empirical case studies of particular time periods and regions, the principal topics and themes of our research include migration, work, technological change, class formation, gender relations, institutions, community-building processes, culture and identity formation, politics, and movements for social justice. This cluster also addresses problems in theories, methodologies, and approaches to research and writing on people of African descent. We not only encourage graduate students to prepare their own primary research on the subject, but to use this research to craft their own specialized courses in the field.Faculty
Edda Fields-Black’s research focuses on the development of agricultural technology and cultural change in early and pre-colonial West Africa, and the impact of these processes on the history of blacks in the Diaspora.Paul Eiss focuses on the anthropology and history of southern Mexico and the Caribbean, from the eighteenth-century to the present.
Lisa Tetrault studies the history of gender, social protest, political economy, and memory, with a focus on nineteenth-century America.
Joe W. Trotter examines twentieth-century African American urban and labor history, with an emphasis on the transformation of black communities.
Culture and Power
This cluster comprises historians and anthropologists who investigate the processes that have constituted and transformed classes, ethnicities, nationalities, races, religions, states, and other collectivities. History and anthropology both being sciences of the particular, our studies focus on the articulation, in cultural space and time, of specific communities, events, and struggles. Central to our aims in these investigations is to address fundamental problems in the study of human societies such as the use and abuse of power, the contested character of meanings and symbolic representations and performances, the relation between modes of production, exchange, communication, knowledge, and value, and the formation of subjectivities and identities. We are interested not only in global and local causes of change and persistence but also in the force of historical knowledge and of social memory as ways of comprehending the present and the past. Our work engages classical and contemporary theory and proceeds through research in archives and field sites.Faculty
Allyson Creasman studies religion and civic order in early modern Germany.Paul Eiss explores community, politics, and historical memory in Mexico.
Richard Maddox studies the cultural politics of European liberalisms.
David W. Miller does research on Irish religion and its transatlantic impacts
Roger Rouse studies the formation of transnational social fields across the U.S.-Mexican border.
Scott Sandage is researching racial identity among mixed-blood Native Americans.
Judith Schachter studies the construction of moral communities in the Pacific islands.
Donald Sutton studies ethnicity and religion in China’s frontier regions.
Gender and the Family
A core of five faculty members conducts research on gender and the family. Faculty members approach gender and the family from a variety of perspectives and methodologies, such as social history, policy history, politics and ideology, cultural analysis, and demography. Areas of research include the social history of the family; family policy; population history; women’s waged labor; race and gender; women’s rights, feminism and social protest; sexuality and reproductive rights. Regions and periods of research encompass the United States, early modern and modern Western Europe, Communist Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union.Faculty
Wendy Goldman focuses on family policy, the sexual division of labor in the workforce, the relationship between Stalinist repression and family ties, and women’s labor during World War II in the Soviet Union.Donna Harsch studies the social history of the family, women at work, reproduction and sexuality, and women as consumers; her research focuses on modern Germany.
Katherine Lynch is a social historian working in the fields of family history, historical population studies, and charity and welfare institutions in the European past.
Judith Schachter does research on adoption and foster care, including U.S. and international adoption policies and conventions; her theoretical approaches to adoption reflect studies of family and gender in historical and anthropological perspective.
Lisa Tetrault specializes in the history of feminism, gender and social protest, and memory; her research focuses on nineteenth-century America.
Labor and Politics
Faculty members cover a wide range of national and transnational fields. All share a strong commitment to the histories of working people as an important basis for understanding developments in politics and society. We conceptualize labor broadly to include waged workers, household labor, peasants, slaves, and dispossessed peoples. Faculty research spans the globe, including the United States, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Russia. Several faculty members explore the relationship between labor and politics, researching social movements, state policies, nationalism, and resistance. Others focus on race, labor under socialism, women’s work in and outside the household, and the environment. The cluster aims to acquaint graduate students with a new, global labor history broadly conceived that includes workers within a variety of social formations, including communalism, capitalism, and socialism, with particular attention to the complex interplay of class, politics, gender, race, and ecology.Faculty
Paul Eiss explores the politics of labor, ethnicity and state formation in Yucatan, with a focus on indigenous Mayan subsistence agriculturalists and hacienda workers.Edda Fields focuses on West African rice farmers, the development of their localized and specialized agricultural technology in early and pre-colonial West Africa, and its transfer to rice plantations in antebellum South Carolina and Georgia as a means of understanding cultural change in pre-colonial West Africa and the African Diaspora.
Wendy Goldman works on labor, gender, and the family in the Soviet Union, focusing in particular on Stalinism, the social history of ‘the Great Terror,’ and workers in World War II.
Richard Maddox investigates the cultural politics involved in the transformation of labor and class relations in post World War II Spain, and Western Europe more generally, in the context of broader shifts in the global political economy.
Roger Rouse works on the cultural politics of class dynamics, especially in Mexico and the United States, with a focus on transnational migration and contemporary capitalist restructuring.
John Soluri’s research melds labor and environmental history in order to provide new perspectives on the production and consumption of commodities in 19th and 20th C. Latin America and the United States.
Lisa Tetrault’s interests center on the labor of activism, how people labor within movements and the effects of that labor on the shape and content of social activism.
Joe Trotter’s research focuses on the dynamics of African American working class formation and the impact of this process on the development of black urban communities, politics, and movements for social change, mainly within 20th century America.
Science, Technology, Medicine, and Environment
STME faculty share an interest in understanding the historical, political, and social dimensions of science, technology, the environment, and health. Faculty strengths lie in drug policy and public health; biotechnologies and the law; technological innovation; and urban and rural environmental history. Our research and teaching engages these topics using interdisciplinary methodologies in a wide range of settings both within and beyond the United States. STME faculty are committed to engaging contemporary policy issues and have forged productive links to government, business, the law, and civil society.Faculty
Caroline Acker studies the relationship of public policy to risk factors in drug use and infectious disease transmission with an emphasis on the history of drug use patterns and the emergence of the harm reduction movement.Jay Aronson's research focuses on the legal and political history of biotechnology. His work examines the use of genetic identification technologies in criminal justice and post-conflict resolution contexts.
David Hounshell studies innovation in both its technological and organizational dimensions. His scholarship addresses the rise of industrial research and development in the U.S. and the problems of managing scientific and technical research in organizations.
John Soluri's research traces the social, cultural, and ecological changes associated with the production and consumption of commodities in Latin America.
Joel Tarr studies the environmental history of cities and their technological systems. He is particularly interested in using history to understand contemporary problems.