Assistant Professor William Robert Billups is a historian of the United States in the 20th century. He defended his Ph.D. at Emory University earlier in 2024. In his dissertation, Professor Billups examines racial politics and far-right extremism in the United States after World War II, focusing on violence against the civil rights movement between the 1950s and 1970s. His work combines detailed qualitative research with digital tools that map historical political violence in the United States and beyond. He has published articles in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Southern History.
Associate Professor Paige Glotzer joins the department from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was Assistant Professor after finishing a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Glotzer studies the economic and social history of infrastructure. Her major work is How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, which won best book awards from Urban History Association and Society for American City and Regional Planning History. An interview with Professor Glotzer is available on the New Books Network podcast. Her work has also appeared in a number of academic publications like the Journal of Urban History and Enterprise and Society, as well as in digital platforms.
Assistant Instructional Professor Christopher Goodwin takes up his position after a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Professor Goodwin is a historian of modern Germany. His dissertation explores the story of disabled veterans in Nazi Germany. He published award-winning articles about the complicated relationship between Nazism and its disabled soldiers in Central European History and Journal of Family History. Professor Goodwin is also a specialist in digital history and has published work in The Programming Historian.
Professor David Silkenat is the department’s new Richard J. Milbauer Chair of Southern History. After receiving his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Professor Silkenat taught at North Dakota State University and, most recently, at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, UK. Professor Silkenat is the author of four books. Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (UNC Press, 2011) and Driven From Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (UGA Press, 2015), both won the North Caroliniana Society Book Prize. His third book, Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (UNC Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Abraham Lincoln Prize. His latest, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford University Press, 2022), is a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. He gave an interview about Scars on the Land on the New Books Network.