In a two part series on the top young historians/professors under 45 years of age HNN examines both the up and coming young historians in the field, and those that are well on their way to success in their field of study. We have polled some of the most prominent universities and historians in North America to create our list. Among the historians that were consulted for this feature include: David Bell of Johns Hopkins University, Jack R. Censer of George Mason University, Frank Couvares of Amherst College, David Herbert Donald of Harvard University, Paul Freedman of Yale University, Michael Gomez of New York University, Lynn Hunt of UCLA, Brian Lewis of McGill University, David Kennedy of Stanford University, Victor Koschmann of Cornell University, Luther Spoehr and Gordon Wood at Brown University, and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University. In total we received over 50 nominees for our feature.
We at HNN reviewed all the nominees, the criteria we looked for were the most outstanding historians in terms of their excellence both inside the university classroom and contributing to the historical profession beyond the walls of academia. Publishing was a major factor, all those chosen have at least one book published; all the historians have been award winning and with sucessful fellowship and grants to their credit; they are leaders in academia, involved in leaderships positions in their departments, many have been chairs of their departments, or heads of university related research institutes; they are popular and sought after professors Additionally those chosen add unique perspectives to the historical profession, ranging from journalistic endeavours, to literary pursuits to appearances in the media including television specials and news coverage.
The first part of the feature looks at the up and coming historians, those in the early to mid thirties. Although they are young they are already changing the scholarship with their research and publications.
Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Cornell University
Education: PhD in History and Humanities,
Stanford University 2004.
Areas of Research: Transylvania during WWII; identity and diplomacy; the Holocaust; ethnic violence; history of the"New Europe"
Major Publications: co-editor with Norman M. Naimark of Yugoslavia
and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford
University Press, 2003). She has also published"The Holocaust and the
Transylvanian Question in the 20th Century" in The Holocaust in Hungary:
Sixty Years Later (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, forthcoming 2005).
Awards: Stanford University's Elizabeth Spilman Rosenfield Prize for Outstanding
Dissertation Writing, for A City Between States: The Transylvanian
City of Cluj-Kolozsva'r-Klausenburg in the Spring of 1942.
Personal Anecdote:
Much of history writing, as I understand it, is being able to draw seamless connections between seemingly unrelated events or phenomena. In the grand historical tradition, then, I will try to explain briefly how growing up in South Dakota prepared me for academia and the study of East-Central European history. As is the case with many East-Central European states and sub-state regions (Slovenia, Slovakia, Slavonia, etc.) not many people are inclined to understand the quite salient differences between North and South Dakota. Indeed, I have found that, even shortly after hearing that I am from South Dakota, a new acquaintance will invariably ask me what it was like growing up in North Dakota. To confirm my suspicion that the conflation of the two in the minds of non-Dakotans is complete and indiscriminate, for a time I claimed to be from North Dakota. This control experiment-coupled with the testimonies of North Dakotans I knew-cemented the hypothesis I had drawn from previous encounters: namely, that"Dakota" is what Edward Said might call an undifferentiated, unchanging"other," whereas other states-New York, for example-are dynamic, etc. Similarly, the current President of the United States, George W. Bush, once famously confounded Slovenia with Slovakia during a conversation with the prime minister of the former. Despite the resentfulness that such conflations arouse (http://www.ccadp.org/slovenia.htm), there are advantages to being undifferentiated. Slovenia was credited with joining the" coalition of the willing" without actually having to do so, for example. And I met my now-husband thanks to the undifferentiated manner in which both Dakotans and Slavs are commonly viewed. A few years ago I was in my home town of Mitchell, South Dakota (home of the World's Only Corn Palace, a Kremlin-like structure the likes of which North Dakota does not-indeed cannot-possess) visiting my parents when a local professor friend said he'd like me to meet a Slovak student of his, and wasn't it fortunate that I speak Slovak (which I didn't) so that I could communicate with this young man. So I went to meet said"Slovak," whom I recognized immediately as a South and not a West Slav, and was thus able to address him in his own language: Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian. It turned out we had a lot in common, and shortly became even less differentiated than we had previously been.
Teaching Position: Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Early Modern British History (2005-2010 and renewable) and
Assistant Professor of History, (2004 - present), McGill University.
Formerly; Assistant Professor of History, Yale University, (2001 - 2004);
Lecturer in History, University of Sussex at Brighton, UK, (2000 - 2001).
Area of Research: British early modernity with a special interest in the social history of ideas.
Education: Ph.D., History, Princeton University, January 2000
Major Publications:The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse,
(London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
Awards: Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History, Tier II (2005-2010) at McGill University; renewable in 2010 through 2015.
Personal Anecdote:
I have worked, taught and researched in three different countries since receiving my Ph.D. in 2000. After finishing my dissertation on coffee culture in early modern England, I moved from Princeton, New Jersey to a flat in a Victorian building in Stoke Newington, London which had been built 'for the improvement of the dwellings of the industrious classes'. I may not have been the person the builders had in mind when I moved in, but I was certainly industrious. I took up a post-doctoral fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation at the University of Kent at Canterbury which allowed me to continue to do research on topics I did not have time to study while I was working on my dissertation. Along with the valuable time and access to archives provided by this post-doc, I enjoyed living in Britain and learning more about the society I studied through living there. Little did I suspect that I would end up staying even longer in England. My first job offer came from the University of Sussex at Brighton, so I settled into a new flat on Marine Parade overlooking the English Channel. Little did I know that this would be the rainiest year in England since the American colonies bid goodbye to the rule of King George III. The weather in 2001 may not have been decisive in encouraging me to accept a new appointment at Yale University, but it did help push me in that direction. Upon crossing back over to the other side of the Atlantic, I found myself ensconced in a residential suite in Berkeley College that was perhaps more English gothic than anything I had encountered in England. It was here where I found the time and place to finish writing up my first book, The Social Life of Coffee (2005), and to begin working on a number of new projects, including an article on the intellectual origins of art connoisseurship in early modern England and my current studies of the media politics of early eighteenth-century England. The latter project was in fact inspired by supervising the summer research of a student of mine. I moved to Canada in 2004 and now find myself in a ground floor condo in the newly fashionable plateau district of Montreal. Quebec and McGill have turned out to be marvelous places to think about British history, as the memory of the imperial experience is still quite strong here. One of the reasons why I chose history as a vocation was that I always wanted to see the world and I thought that history would allow me to travel and do so with an informed perspective. It turns out that I was right, but I had no idea that it would take me to so many places along the way.
Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Yale University, 2004-
Areas of Research: Latin American & Caribbean History
Education: Ph.D. 2000, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Latin American Studies
Major Publications:Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico
(University of Florida Press, 1998) and The Myth of Jose' Marti': Conflicting
Nationalisms in Early Twentieth Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press,
2005).
Awards: Best Dissertation Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS), 2000-2001
Personal Anecdote:
The most challenging part of graduate study was the process of writing the dissertation
and for me, it was definitely, monastic. (Living in Wisconsin where the winters don't
require one to find excuses to stay home and work certainly helped! ) I recall feeling
as if no-one in the world had any idea of what I had discovered in Cuban archives and
feeling that the ghosts of Cuba's past were my only intellectual company. In fact, I
would go as far as to say that I became something of a believer in the intervention of
spirits while researching my dissertation in Cuba as well as writing it: some of the
historical figures whose concerns seemed far from the ones that I was actually
researching just simply would not go away or leave me alone! They kept emerging in
the documents, appearing in sources that I picked up, always by" coincidence" and in
the end, I surrendered to doing work on topics that would otherwise have remained at
the margins of my study topics like cigar makers' strikes, state terror tactics during
an early republican regime or the life of a black civil rights activist (named Evaristo
Estenoz) about whom specialists believed we already knew"everything." In the end, I
realized that what all these historical figures who kept pursuing me had in common was
the experience of having been unjustly killed or morally discredited in popular memory
and published accounts. I came to develop a personal relationship with the men and
women whose hopes, dreams and failings filled the pages that no-one else cared to read
and they became three-dimensional people every time I sat down to write. I came to
believe that writing history is about recreating a universe of experience and emotion
that is otherwise lost to us. That's where my passion for history comes from-from the
conviction that it matters, both to those who lived it and are long dead, as well as
to those who take up their legacies.
I spent four years teaching Latin American and Caribbean history at what many people might consider"a historically white college" in Maine, Bates College. While I loved teaching Bates students for their high degree of enthusiasm and motivation, I found myself facing all-"white" classes most of the time and having to confront the myth of Latin American"exoticism" on a daily basis. I often felt that I was retracing steps in the development of my own political consciousness much too often, being drained of intellectual energies that in a different, more diverse setting, would have gone toward greater creativity, inside the classroom and out. At Yale, all of my undergraduate courses are packed with Latino, Latin American and Caribbean students and the difference is palpable: regardless of whether or not they are history majors or even humanities students, they contribute a passion for knowledge to the" community culture" of the class that is born of the need for self-discovery, self-knowledge and explanations to the myriad questions that they have confronted all of their lives. They refuse to take any moment for granted since most of them, even those from the Caribbean itself, have had few, if any, opportunities to learn about their own history as migrants or their society's history—even in their home countries. There is a great excitement to the atmosphere in the classroom at times, and all of the students benefit from it. I have never felt that those students with little or no connection to Latin America experienced alienation; on the contrary, they identify with the history all the more because the see, literally, how relevant it is to their classmates. If there is something that I love about being here, it is feeling that my work is"needed" by many students in this personal way. It is the greatest reward.
With regard to writing my second book, here's all I have to say about its publication:"YAHOOO!!!" Yes, I was brought up in a small farming town in Kansas by Cubans from the countryside, so I am not ashamed about expressing such raw relief and enthusiasm. While writing the dissertation was exciting, re-writing it several times was, well, less exciting, to say the least. I am pleased, in many ways, because as a Cuban, I know the work seeks to deal with some of our greatest myths—about unity, utopia and our many failed struggles to achieve them. I hope that it serves to explain what these things mean and why, as a people and a culture, they have been a part of our identity for so long. José Martí, the nationalist intellectual whose process of mythification forms the core of the book, has been a central part of my life for almost a decade now, so it is good to finally put him to rest! I am also free now to work on what is proving to be the greatest challenge, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and I am loving it.
Teaching Position: University of Kansas, Department of History;
Also Associate Director for Programming, Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics
Education: Ph.D., Princeton University 1996
Major Publications:Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil,
1824-1854 (UNC Press, 2004); The Routledge Atlas of African American History
(Routledge, 2000)
Awards: Best First Book, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
(2005); Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize (2004-5)
Personal Anecdote: I was already almost a year into research on a dissertation about the New York Anti-Rent Wars of the 1840s when I found out someone else was working on the same topic. This is exactly the type of horrific fantasy that keeps graduate students up in the middle of the night. The place I found out was more than a little ignominious - in the men's room of the Library Company of Philadelphia, where a senior scholar one urinal over remarked"I think there's someone at Yale working on that very topic." Well, I told myself, maybe this person had a peculiar or different take on the uprising from me. Maybe he or she had stalled and would never finish. Or perhaps the topic was meaty enough to support two dissertations.
A very long phone conversation with that particular graduate student convinced me that I should back off. He had a five-year head start on me, was working with David Davis, and was interested in the same political and cultural ramifications that I was among landless tenants in the Hudson Valley in the decades before the Civil War. I decided to take some of my preliminary conclusions about democracy, land, and antislavery politics from that project and broaden the study to look at the entire antebellum North. After that initial trauma, I couldn't be happier with my decision. Not only do we have an important study of the Anti-renters from Prof. Reeve Huston, but my own book on the origins of the free soil movement has begun to garner good reviews and even some praise from prize committees.
If there is any moral to this story, it's that oftentimes conflicts over shared topics can have positive outcomes for all parties. I may have added to my time in graduate school, but I think my dissertation and book benefited from my year with the Anti-Renters. There still in there - it's just a little harder to find them. And they're part of a larger story about how the politics of land and slavery collided in North the 1840s and 50s.
Teaching Position: Associate Professor, Northwestern University
Area of Research: African American history, with special interests in the
history of slavery and emancipation, property and family, and African Studies.
Education: Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1999
Major Publications: The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property
and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, University
of North Carolina Press, 2003 (The John Hope Franklin Series in
African American History and Culture)
Awards: His dissertation"Claiming Kin and Property: Black Life in the
Nineteenth-Century South" won the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of
American Historians in 2000; The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property
and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South won the 2004 Avery O. Craven Award
from the Organization of American Historians.
Personal Anecdote:
My specialty is the history of black life during and after slavery.
During graduate school I often talked with my relatives about my
research, and one day my Uncle Craig handed me a cassette. It turned
out that back in 1976, he had taken a tape recorder with him to go
see our great-uncle, Thomas Holcomb, who had migrated up to New
Jersey from Farmville, Virginia in 1927 or so (and who used to help
the 5-year-old me chase rabbits). And when I listened to the tape, I
heard Uncle Tom talking about"slavery time people": it dawned on me
that his father, and many of the people he grew up with, were
freedpeople. And the stories he told were amazing-not because they
did anything exceptional but because they did it at all, and they
were my family. He talked about moving up North ("we couldn't make it
farming") yet holding onto the farm anyway. He talked about how his
father, who was named Jackson Hall, used to run away from his master
and hide out in the Great Dismal Swamp. One story in particular made
a big impression on me. At that time, I was researching the legally
strange phenomenon of slaves who owned property, and was wondering
whether I should try looking outside the Lowcountry, where scholars
had shown it was common. On the tape, Uncle Craig asked if he
remembered any stories about the Civil War. He did. Late in the war,
Jackson Hall ran into a gang of Confederate soldiers who wanted him
to take them across the river in his boat. They were running from the
Union army in Virginia, probably desperate and definitely well-armed.
So what happened then? Uncle Craig asked. Well, Uncle Tom said, they
paid him. It was just the inspiration I needed.
Teaching Position: Associate Professor, Yale University
Area of Research: Central European History
Education: PhD, University of Oxford, 1997
Major Publications:Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe:
A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Harvard University Press, 1998);
The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999
(Yale University Press, 2003); and Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's
Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (Yale University Press, 2005);
Co-editor of Wall Around the West: State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe
and North America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001)
Awards: Postdoctoral fellowships: The American Council of Learned Societies,
Harvard University; IREX fellow at the Polish Academy of Sciences,
Warsaw; and The Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University.
Personal Anecdote:
Someone (I know who) stole all of my dissertation research
in New Haven, Connecticut, in May 1993. I had been living for months in Poland, visiting libraries
and archives, accumulating files on a Macintosh laptop that I
carried with me everyhere in a black leather backpack.
My digs in Warsaw were in a skanky dormitory which boasted more
standing than running water, and had rusty locks on the doors.
Every night I slept with my backpack by my head, lest
someone should break in to steal the computer.
My brother Phil was graduating from Yale that spring, so I flew back for the ceremony, bringing with me all the possessions that mattered: the computer, my backup disks, and a Banana Republic weekend jacket, all in the black backpack. As I was helping to move Phil's things to the family van, I noticed that my backpack had disappeared from his room. Feeling safe with family in my own country, I had let down my guard! Phil and I ran off in the two most likely directions, on the New Haven streets that he knew pretty well, looking for someone carrying a black backpack. My youngest brother Mike called the police.
When the police came, they asked my mother whether she wanted to prosecute the thief or recover the backpack. She chose the latter. The police officer then drove my mother to a pawn shop. Though scarcely twenty minutes had passed since the theft, my computer was there on a shelf."Oh," said my mother to the proprietor,"how much do you want for that computer?" He said he had paid $50 for it. Then she asked,"You wouldn't happen to have a backpack, would you?" The proprietor produced mine from under the counter, saying that someone who owed him $20 had given it to him as payment. Then my mother looked him up and down."Nice coat," said she. He said she could have it for another $20. My mother redeemed my scholarly future (and my Banana Republic weekend jacket) for ninety bucks in a pawn shop.
When I came back from running around New Haven, breathless and upset, I found my mother and the police officer standing outside Phil's room, the officer holding the computer."Can you identify this?" he asked. I told him that the hard disk drive was named"nosic," a Polish verb for carry. This seemed to suffice. By then my family and I were ready to leave, really ready to leave. We piled into my parents' big Chevrolet van. When the side door had slammed shut, my father began to wonder aloud about the arrangement between the police and the pawn shops. We had something to think about.
What does this teach us about young historians -- besides that they should back up their data in separate places and never keep all of the copies in one backpack that might be stolen and sold for quick money to buy crack? As I was running around New Haven that day, there were two sounds in my head. One was that of my feet pounding the pavement. The other was that of an inner voice, already reconciling me with reality. It said:"that research took three years to do; but I bet I could redo it in two years." If I had lost the research for good, I probably would have started again -- but then the dissertation would have been different, based on another review of the sources, written by an older and altered person. Many other changes in life would no doubt have followed that one.
Much hung on that absurd moment. Yet how easy it is to make a coherent narrative of my academic career without it! Brown, Oxford, eastern Europe, Yale, scholarships, books, awards -- what need for the detail of a transaction in a New Haven pawn shop to tell the story? That tawdry event makes the official story possible, then the official story returns the favor by excluding the tawdry event.
The recovery of my research was one those turning points, free of intentions and grandeur, easily forgotten later, invisible to everyone but those closest to the events, and visible then only if those present are ready to be surprised. (My mother, the heroine of this story, actually filmed the thief on a video camera, but did not realize this at the time, since in her mind she was filming Phil's graduation day.) It is a great pleasure and necessity, I think, that in our work we get close enough to the sources to see such things, that we learn to catch and release these little contingencies. They are out of the reach of our teachers, our theories, and our hypotheses -- but they are there, in our sources, and in our work, when the work is done well, when the story is told right.
Teaching Position: Professor, Boston University
Area of Research: 20th century U.S. history
Education: Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1996
Major Publications:Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the
State, 1945-1975 (1998) and On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress
and its Consequences, 1948-2000 (2004). Editor of The American Congress:
The Building of Democracy (2004) and co-editor of The Democratic
Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (2003).
Awards: Zelizer's Taxing America was awarded the Organization of
American History's 2000 Ellis Hawley Prize and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation's 1998
D.B. Hardeman Prize.
Additional Info: Zelizer's writing has appeared in The New York Times,
The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and
The Albany Times Union. He is a
co-editor for the Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America series of
Princeton University Press.
Personal Anecdote: The Ford Foundation Fellowship was a terrific experience for me,
intellectually and professionally.James Kloppenberg and I would meet
regularly, including for lunches and dinners, and he worked very closely with
me for two years. I had the opportunity to dig into the archives of
Massachusetts to complete a substantive piece of historical research. The
experience had a major impact on me and helped me decide to pursue this
career. I also learned early on how historical research could be used to
tackle contemporary questions. To this day, I have continued to work closely
with undergraduates interested in conducting their own historical research.
I have always been inspired by interdisciplinary approaches to History, although I remain a historian at heart. I first encountered this way of thinking while I was a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where I regularly dined and met with fellow political scientists, economists, and sociologists who were working on similar issues from radically different perspectives. During those years, I formed several terrific friendships that have continued to this day. My first publication was also in a volume on the history of taxation since WWWII, published by Cambridge University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center. During the seminars leading up to the book, I was required to present my chapter to quite vigorous questioning at this stage in my career, by prominent scholars like Herbert Stein, another contributor who worked as an economist in Richard Nixon's administration.
Sometimes my youth has brought unexpected benefits. Every day, I purchase a salad for lunch at the Boston University food court. One day, I bought my salad right after a colleague and realized that I had been charged about 25 cents less. When I asked the cashier why I had been charged less, she said that was the undergraduate price! It turns out there is a two price system. Since that time, I have lost my discount.