The department celebrates three new faculty joining us in fall 2022. Professor Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Chair of Holocaust Studies. A historian whose research focuses on European Jewry in the twentieth century, she will teach history courses as a member of the Center for Jewish Studies. She received a first doctoral degree in history at Warsaw University before completing a PhD in Jewish history at New York University and joining the faculty at Touro University, Graduate School of Jewish Studies in New York. Aleksiun is the author of dozens of articles on Polish-Jewish history. In 2021, she published the book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust in The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization series. You can listen to her speak about her book on the New Books in Genocide Studies podcast. She is co-editor of East European Jewish Affairs. This fall, Aleksiun is teaching History of the Holocaust.
Credit: CLAS Communications
Assistant Professor Justin Gage specializes in Native American history and the history of the American West. He received his PhD in 2015 at the University of Arkansas. In 2020 he published the book We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Monograph from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures and the Outstanding Western Book Award from the Center for the Study of the American West. You can hear an interview with him on New Books in Native American Studies podcast. This fall, Gage is teaching Native American History to 1815 and Imagining the Western Frontier.
Credit: CLAS Communications
Matthew Blake Strickland is returning to the Department of History for the year as Visiting Assistant Professor. He finished his PhD here in 2019. Strickland is completing a book manuscript that analyzes the Anglican underpinnings of race-based slavery in the British Atlantic. He is also developing a website called Religion & Slavery for students and scholars to explore the connections between the diverse religious groups and Black enslavement in the Atlantic region through essays and primary sources. Strickland taught high school social studies from 2020 to 2022.