Department of History

This past summer, Florida Humanities announced the inaugural members of the Florida Humanities Hall of Fame.  Alongside remarkable Floridians like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Mary McLeod Bethune are two legendary members of the UF History Department, Michael Gannon and David Colburn.  Their inclusion in this ...

Faculty Associate Professor Max Deardorff was awarded tenure for his impressive research and teaching record in the Department of History. Associate Professor Heather Vrana won the University of Florida Foundation Research Term Professorship. Both Assistant Professor Phil Janzen and Master Lecturer Steve Noll won the John Mahon Teaching ...

Program Placements Davis Elordi (M.A., 2024) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan. Ronan Hart (M.A., 2024) is now a project coordinator for the Underground Railroad Project at UF’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Project. Robert Lierse (Ph.D., 2024) was appointed assistant professor at Ashford University. Lance Maulsby ...

The Department of History welcomes  four new faculty members in the Fall 2025 semester!   Assistant Professor Olivia Barnard is a historian of the Gulf South in early America. She focuses on the history of slavery and the history of the Atlantic slave trade. She is currently ...

Associate Professor Nina Caputo has retired. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and Florida International University. She was the recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Penn Humanities ...

Faculty Publications The Department of History had a great year of placing research in the world. Collectively, the faculty published a book, book chapters and journal articles. Here are a few highlights: Assistant Professor Philip Janzen published “An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the ...

Bridget Phillips (‘89) was one of the department’s outstanding students. Her UF program enabled her to spend a summer semester at Cambridge and to go on archeological expeditions to Austria. After finishing her honors thesis in history at UF, she began a Ph.D. at Johns ...

Undergraduate members of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society, are provided funds for travel and research through the generous support of the Noll Family Fund. Through supporting off-campus research projects, students broaden their intellectual horizons, said Steven Noll, an instructional professor in the Department of History. Noll ...

The highlight of the department’s academic calendar each year is our Undergraduate Honors Symposium. The 2025 edition did not disappoint. On April 6, Smathers Library hosted 21 presenters plus dozens of faculty mentors, family members and friends. Under the supervision of honors program director Associate ...

Graduate Student Highlight: Hélio A. de Souza Alves on Reforms, Reversals and Contradictions in Cuba during the Late Twentieth Century I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Caribbean History, working under Dr. Lillian Guerra. My dissertation explores the policy shifts and ideological contradictions ...