Letter from the Chair

Enrollments have been in “free fall” nationwide for more than a decade, leading to the shrinking or elimination of humanities programs at many institutions. The History Department has certainly felt those pressures. I’m happy to say that things are looking up. We’ve managed to reach close to 400 majors once again, and we hope to surpass that number this year. We’ve no doubt benefited from the easing of the pandemic, but our faculty have also vigorously recruited new students. We also benefit from a vibrant, history-advertising social media presence, and we’ve organized well-attended activities such as a World Cup soccer watch party last fall that left standing room only at Pugh Ocora Hall. Students today know that the study of history can help them understand the hyper-politicized world they will inherit.

Awards

Faculty Assistant Professor Sandy F. Chang won an American Councils of Learned Societies (ACLS) award. The award grants her a year of research leave, during which she will focus on her book project “Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migrants in British Malaya, 1870s-1930s.” Professor Chang also won best article prizes from the […]

Retirement

This summer one of our longest-serving colleagues, George Esenwein, stepped down from his position. Professor Esenwein joined the faculty in the Department of History in 1993, after spending several years at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and finishing his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1987. In addition to […]

Graduate Program News

Chris Calton defended “Monstrous Monopolies and Vicious Competition: The General Incorporation Movement in Nineteenth-Century America” with supervisor Professor Sean Adams. Daniel Fernandez defended his dissertation, “Comrades and Internationalists: Forging Identity and Cuban Solidarity with the Other Spain, 1902-1961,” with supervisor Professor Lillian Guerra. Oren Okhovat defended his thesis, “Cosmopolitan Empire: Portuguese Jewish Merchants and Iberian Imperialism in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic,” under the supervision of Associate Professor Nina Caputo.

Publications

Our faculty and graduate students had another banner year for publications in 2022-23. Here we would like to celebrate our faculty’s book publications: Associate Professor Seth Bernstein published Return to the Motherland: Displaced Soviets in World War II and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023). During World War II, millions of people from Eastern […]

Bridget Phillips Award

The Department of History gives the Bridget Phillips Award to undergraduate students traveling abroad for study or research. The award was established by the Phillips family to honor Bridget’s memory. After graduating from UF’s Department of History in 1988, Bridget entered graduate school at Johns Hopkins University. She was murdered in her apartment in 1989 […]

UF History Goes International

The Department of History prides itself on its connections with the broader world. After two years of pandemic-related travel restrictions, it welcomed new friends from abroad and saw faculty and students go abroad on prestigious grants. Keene-Flint welcomed two international guests in 2022-23, Wawrzyniec Kowalski and Irina Makhalova. Kowalski is a specialist in medieval European […]

Undergraduate Honors Program

Last year was a banner year for the History Honors Program. Twenty-four students undertook honors theses, with topics ranging from witchcraft trials in 1600s Latin American colonies to the historical development of hip hop in the United States of the late twentieth century. Under the guidance of their faculty mentors and honors coordinator and Assistant […]

Historians in Law

When someone asks a history major what they plan to do with their degree, increasingly, the answer is “law school.” In U.S. Census Data from 2017-21, more than eight percent of all history graduates in the United States were working as lawyers, judges, law clerks, or paralegals. We asked our majors, alumni, and faculty what […]

Alachua County Public Schools Internship

In the Spring 2023 semester, Alachua County Public Schools partnered with the Department of History to create a new internship: Curriculum Development in K-12 Social Studies Education. In Spring 2023, the internship focused on writing curriculum on women’s history. Jon Rehm, the Alachua County Public Schools Curriculum Specialist in Social Studies, oversaw the internship. The four student interns worked to create curriculum guides for each grade level. The guides provide teachers with historical topics and primary sources for classroom use. As students in the Department of History, the interns brought the knowledge they gained in the classroom to provide unique perspectives. Rehm said, “They could really expand the topics and make connections.” The students also deployed their awareness of key primary and secondary sources that they could access in the university’s libraries, found key passages, and provided them for teachers.

Undergraduate Studies

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