Faculty Research
Department of History and Geography

Asia

Dr. Honglin Xiao, Associate Professor of Geography and Coordinator of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) minor

I have two main research interests. One entails the analysis of land use change and human impact on the environment using quantitative methods from remote sensing, GIS, and physical geography. The other involves the construction of high-resolution records of the environment and human activities over the past several thousand years from geomorphic sediments, gazetteers, satellite images, and aerial photos. This research mainly attempts to verify whether proxy records of climate obtained from Quaternary sediments, especially cave speleothems, are a reliable source of paleoclimatic data. A secondary objective is to determine what information cave stalagmites retain about human activities above the cave. My regional interest is Asia, especially China.

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Africa

Dr. Brian Digre, Professor of History and Coordinator of the International Studies Major

The recent focus of my historical research has been on West African independence. Studying political developments in Ghana, Togo, Cameroon and Nigeria during the 1950s and early 1960s, I have sought to explain the interplay of ethnic loyalties and national interests in creating new African states and resolving border disputes. My primary sources include African newspapers, United Nations documents and records in British and French archives. My 2004 article “The United Nations, France and African Independence: A Case Study of Togo” illustrates the valuable role of the United Nations in providing oversight for pre-independence elections. During 2007, I expanded my geographic focus, examining the politics of independence in the Southern Sudan for a paper presented at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association.

Dr. Heidi G. Frontani, Associate Professor of Geography and 2010 Periclean Scholars Faculty Mentor

I am a geographer in the nature-society tradition, whose research has examined the relationship between park management approach and conservation effect, particularly the extent to which participatory, ‘bottom-up’ co-management can not only protect biodiversity, but also local people’s livelihoods. Most of my publications have been based on ethnographic field research in communities living near marine protected areas in Kenya (for which I learned Swahili), the United States and Canada. Most recently I have used memoirs and newspapers for non-field based people-environment studies and sought out exceptional students with shared research interests for mentoring; their research has appeared in Jewish Quarterly, Geographical Bulletin, and South African Geographical Journal.

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Europe

Dr. Jim Brown, Associate Professor of History

My research is in social and family history in Europe, specifically in Austria, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In particular I look at household structure—who lived with whom—and the factors that contributed to different types of households based on membership. The wider context that my research fits into is the effects of the industrial revolution on the family. In order to determine the effects, it is necessary to know what the family looked like before the industrial revolution, and that’s where my research fits in. More broadly I work on comparisons of families throughout Europe over the entire course of modern history. I also work with colleagues in Japan and China to compare Asian and European family structures.

Dr. Mike Carignan, Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Honors Program

As a modern cultural and intellectual historian, I am interested in the emergence of new ideas in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I like to write about the ways in which Europeans began to see themselves, their values, and their beliefs as historical phenomena, i.e., as potentially temporary. I am also intensely interested in the ways they represented the experience of this new, historical consciousness. Much of my scholarship has been about the Victorian novelist, George Eliot, and her attempts to craft historical fiction in a vein that contributed to broad philosophical developments about the nature of historical knowledge and what some have called the “crisis of historicism.”

Dr. David M. Crowe, Professor of History

I am currently working on two books. The first, which will be published in 2012, is War Crimes, Genocide, and the Quest for Justice since World War I. The second, a more long range project, is A Crime of Silence: The Roma and the Holocaust. My article “The Roma in Post -Communist Eastern Europe: Questions of Ethnic Conflict and Ethnic Peace” is forthcoming in Nationalities Papers. Another manuscript, The Roma and the Holocaust, is currently being considered for publication by the Carl Beck Papers at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also under contract to write four articles on various aspects of the Holocaust for Cambridge University Press The Cambridge Dictionary of Jewish History, Religion, and Culture.

Dr. Hui-hua Chang, Assistant Professor of History

My research interest is in the social and cultural history of the Classical world. I have been studying the social status of medical practitioners in Ancient Greece, and their adoption of rational medical theories for the purpose of social advancement. I have found the connection between their scientific theories and contemporary natural philosophy (a popular elite pursuit) particularly interesting. In my future projects, I would like to explore the rise of preventive medicine and health practices in response to the formation of new elites in a world of political and social changes, by taking a comparative approach, comparing the Greco-Roman world with China in transition from the Warring States to the Chin Empire.

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Latin America

Dr. Michael Matthews, Assistant Professor of History

While my research and teaching interests lie in the broader field of Latin American history, my main focus is on Mexico, especially the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I am particularly interested in how the utopian promises offered by new technologies such as railways shaped the symbolic, ceremonial, rhetorical, and artistic expressions of various social groups in their attempts to bolster or challenge the rule of Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911). In this way my research tackles wide-ranging issues regarding the diverse ways that different social groups understood and interpreted the often elusive concepts of civilization, progress, and modernity.

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North America

Dr. Jim Bissett, Professor of History

As a social historian, I am especially interested in studying American history from the bottom up. In my research, I concentrate on social movements, particularly those associated with late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American radicalism (especially Populism, American socialism, and the labor movement). My work in that field resulted in a book, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920. I am also interested in the civil rights movement and oral history, and I'm now working on the topic of race relations in Alamance County, North Carolina during the Civil Rights era. 

Dr. Rod Clare, Assistant Professor of History

My interests lie in studying post Civil-War North American history. Within this, my focus is in researching and understanding the dynamics between groups struggling for equality or power and those groups or organizations with authority. I have various sub-fields within this context. They include African American history, US foreign policy, American social history, US women's history, as well as Canadian-US relations. So far, my scholarly work has concentrated on two fields. One is the history of African Americans in the South during segregation. The other is studying women's voluntary organizations their internal dynamics, their stated purposes, and their effectiveness over time.

Dr. Charles Irons, Assistant Professor of History

I have a particular interest in the relationship between the religious decisions of enslaved and free blacks and the pronouncements of white divines on slavery. I have focused most of my research on Virginia and how the interactions between blacks and whites in ecclesiastical settings shaped white actions in more public venues. In the course of this work, I have become interested in those black Southerners who decided to affiliate with white Southerners despite the censure of their peers. This group includes slaves who did not flee during the Civil War despite proximity to Union lines and black evangelicals who remained members of biracial churches for many years after emancipation.

Dr. Clyde Ellis, Professor of History and University Distinguished Scholar

My research focuses on understanding how and with what consequences Southern Plains American Indian communities have negotiated the changing contours of ethnic and cultural identity in the 19th and 20th centuries. I've published extensively on boarding schools, Christianity, and powwow culture in an effort to examine how traditional practices and values have been maintained even in the face of far-reaching change and accommodation. I'm currently writing a book on the history of Americans' fascination with Indian lore and culture, and have begun preliminary work on a comprehensive history of North Carolina's Indian people.

Dr. Peter Felten, Associate Professor of History and director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.

I am trained as a political and social historian, focusing on the twentieth century United States and Caribbean. I am particularly interested in questions about race, religion, and social change in the 1950s and 1960s. Over the past few years, my research has concentrated on inquiries into how people learn history. My most recent research considers both how people learn from visual primary sources, such as photographs, and also how certain social pedagogies affect student

Dr. Mary Jo Festle, Professor of History

I have been very interested in studying the history of social change in the United States, especially in the twentieth century. As an undergraduate, I researched working women in Chicago and their struggles for equality. For my master's thesis, I studied SNCC and the black movement for justice in the 1960s. Then for my doctoral research I combined my interests in race, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture, resulting in a book on women's sports since 1950. More recently, I've become very interested in oral history and have begun a project on the history of lung transplantation.

Dr. Ryan Kirk, Assistant Professor of Geography

I am an Environmental Geographer interested in applying modern technologies and spatial analysis tools to the study of human-environment interactions at local to regional scales. Recent research projects have included land use change analysis in the Southern Appalachian Mountains since the Antebellum period, Carbon cycle modeling of Minnesota and Western North Carolina forest ecosystems, and development of geospatial databases for National Wildlife Refuge conservation planning. The primary technologies I use are GIS, GPS, Remote Sensing, and integrated programming of spatial and statistical models. I greatly enjoy collaborative research, and am always interested in exploring new applications for applying these tools.