Author: spillane@ufl.edu

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, President Kent Fuchs formed a task force to investigate UF’s historical relationship to Black and Indigenous peoples. Department of History faculty played an important role in the Presidential Task Force.

Hélio Alves, a second-year PhD student focusing on modern Cuba, spent one month working at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection as a 2022-2023 Goizueta Pre-Prospectus Fellow.

The History Department Honors Program is a mainstay at Keene-Flint for producing excellent undergraduate research. This academic year, Assistant Professor Sandy Chang will take over as program director from Associate Professor Sheryl Kroen, who will be on a research sabbatical. Last year 12 students graduated with honors. For the first time in three years, on …

The academic year 2021-22 was a great year for faculty publications. History faculty and graduate students produced dozens of books, academic articles, and magazine and newspaper articles. Here are the highlights from last year: Professor Florin Curta published The Long Sixth Century in Eastern Europe (Brill, 2021). Continuing his work on medieval Eastern Europe, Curta …

Assistant Professor Fernanda Bretones Lane will join the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture (OIEAHC) at William and Mary College for seven months starting in January 2023 as the OIEAHC Fellow to work on her book project “Shores of Asylum: Fugitivity, Empire, and Slavery in the Caribbean, ca.1656-1791.” Professor Elizabeth Dale won a …

Four graduate students defended their PhD dissertations in the last year: Kevin Bird defended “From the Field to the Shop Floor: The Black Freedom Struggle and Its Challengers in McComb, Mississippi” under the supervision of Paul Ortiz. Richard Brust defended “The Pompano Boys: How Florida’s ‘Little Scottsboro Case’ Led to a Revolution in Criminal Justice” …

After 27 years teaching at UF, Alice Freifeld retired at the start of Fall 2021. Freifeld is a historian of Eastern Europe, particularly Hungary. Her book Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (Johns Hopkins University Press) won several prizes from Hungarian and Slavic studies organizations, and she has published many articles and chapters …

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 …