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.
More than a hundred years ago, in 1911, University of Florida Professor of History Enoch Banks was hounded out of the university for his views on the Civil War. Last spring students from UF’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta (PAT), the history honors society, paid tribute to Dr. Banks by spearheading an initiative to rename […]
Every year the Department of History awards the Bridget Phillips Scholarship to undergraduate students traveling abroad for study or research toward an honors thesis. Bridget Phillips finished her undergraduate degree in the history department at UF before entering graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in 1988. Tragically, Bridget was murdered in her apartment in 1989 […]
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 …
I’ve just come across an old newsletter issued by the Department of History in 2005 called “History Matters.” Like a medieval parchment, it describes a world that no longer exists. At the time of the newsletter’s publication, the department had nearly 1,000 history majors and 135 graduate students. In 2022, those numbers have fallen to […]