SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
History Faculty
Richard Aquila, Ph.D., Ohio State University
Director, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
and Professor of History
Teaching and Research Interests: U.S. social and cultural history (especially recent U.S. history, the American West, American Indians, and popular culture/mass media)
Books:
Sh’Boom; Or, How Early Rock & Roll Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love America’s Cold War Culture (In Progress)
Home Front Soldier: The Story of an Italian-American and His Family During World War II
Wanted Dead of Alive: The American West and Popular Culture
That Old Time Rock & Roll: A Chronicle of an Era
The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier
Articles: Dr. Aquila’s articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the West, Journal of Popular Culture, Indiana Magazine of History, NPR Quarterly, Popular Music and Society, The History Teacher, and American Indian Quarterly.
Public History Projects: Dr. Aquila has written, hosted, and produced numerous public history documentaries for National Public Radio. His weekly radio series, Rock & Roll America, was syndicated on NPR and NPR Worldwide, and was nominated for a Peabody Award. As a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians, Aquila gives public lectures at universities and school systems across the country.
Catherine Bae, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor. Ph.D., Stanford University, 2008
Dr. Bae teaches East Asian history, with an emphasis on Modern Japan (1600 to the present), gender theory, and popular culture. Her courses encourage the development of critical thinking through close readings of primary and secondary sources. She is currently working on a manuscript based on her dissertation, a study of Japanese girls' magazines and changing ideas regarding adolescent femininity vis-à-vis the maternalist ideology of "good wife, wise mother."
Major Publications:
"Girl Meets Boy Meets Girl: Heterosocial Relations, Wholesome Youth, and Democracy in Postwar Japan" in the "Girl, Body, Nation" special issue of The Asian Studies Review (Fall/Winter 2008).
Leigh-Ann Bedal, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2000
Teaching interests include archaeology, Old World civilizations, human prehistory (cultural and biological evolution), and cultural anthropology. Research interests include the archaeology of the Near East and Mediterranean, urbanization, and garden archaeology.
Dr. Bedal directs the archaeological excavations of the Petra Garden & Pool Complex located in the royal complex of the Nabataean capital at Petra, Jordan. http://www.homestead.com/petragarden/poolcomplex.html http://www.doaks.org/research/garden_landscape/projects/petra_garden_feasibility_study/
Major Publications:
Bedal, L.-A., K. L. Gleason, and J. G. Schryver (with archaeobotanical report by J. H. Ramsay and coinage report by J. Bowsher) 2007 The Petra Garden and Pool Complex, 2003-2005. Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 51: 151-76.
Bedal, L.-A. (with J. Schryver) “Nabataean Landscape and Power: Evidence from the Petra Garden and Pool Complex.” In Crossing Jordan: North American Contributions to the Archaeology of Jordan. Edited by T. E. Levy, et al. Pp. 375-83. London: Equinox (2007).
The Petra Pool-Complex: A Hellenistic Paradeisos in the Nabataean Capital (results from the Petra Lower Market survey and excavation, 1998). Gorgias Dissertations: Near Eastern Studies 4. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press (2003).
“Desert Oasis: Water Consumption and Display in the Nabataean Capital.” Near Eastern Archaeology 65/4: 225-34 (2002).
Michael Christofferson, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Associate Professor. Ph.D., Columbia University, 1998
Dr. Christofferson teaches French and European history after 1648 and world history after 1492. His courses emphasize the reading of original historical documents, the evaluation of historical scholarship, and writing. His research focus on French intellectual and political history since 1945. He is currently writing a book about the historian François Furet.
Books:
François Furet: A Revolutionary Historian (In Progress)
Les Intellectuels contre la gauche: L’idéologie antitotalitaire en France (1973-1981) (Agone, 2009). [Translation of French Intellectuals Against the Left.]
Thomas R. Christofferson with Michael S. Christofferson, France During World War II: From Defeat to Liberation (Fordham University Press, 2006).
French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s. (Berghahn Books, 2004).
Articles in French Historical Studies, French History, French Politics, Culture & Society, Contretemps, Revue Agone, and After the Deluge: New Perspectives on French Intellectual and Cultural History.
Elena Dodge Corbett, B.A., A.M., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor. Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2009
Dr. Corbett teaches the history of the Middle East from the coming of Islam until the present, with a focus on the late 18th century until today. She is particularly interested in questions of nationalism and communal identity in the Arab world after the end of the Ottoman Empire. Dr. Corbett’s research to date has focused on the history of Jordan, understanding what role archaeology, antiquities and cultural heritage have played in building national and other communal identities in the face of challenges at home and abroad to official narratives of the legitimacy of the nation-state and its rulers. She is now working to publish the results of her research. Dr. Corbett ‘s interests also include Islamic intellectual history and Arabic language pedagogy. She is a passionate proponent of undergraduate study abroad initiatives.
Recent publication:
“Great Britain, the U.S. and Paradigms of Modern Jordan’s Ancient Identity,” in Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan, Vol. 10. Amman: The Department of Antiquities of Jordan, 2009. Pp. 279-283.
Ralph L. Eckert, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Associate Professor. Ph.D., Louisiana State University, 1983
American Revolution, Civil War and Reconstruction, and Military History
Books:
John Brown Gordon: Soldier, Southerner, American (1993)
Articles In: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South, Dictionary of American Military Biography, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, History of Pennsylvania Legislature, Reference Guide to the United States Military, The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress.
A. Daniel Frankforter, A.B., M.Div, M.A., Ph.D.
Professor of Medieval History. Ph.D., Penn State University, 1971
We Americans love technology. We eagerly adopt each new development as it becomes available, and we harbor exaggerated expectations for the changes it will make in our lives. This has been especially true in recent years for technologies that have applications in the classroom. As an author of textbooks, I have seen (and helped to make) my books become the tips of vast pedagogical icebergs composed of CD-ROMs and websites with numerous kinds of interactive features. These are intended to make study easier and learning more productive. That, however, was what television was supposed to do when TV sets were first mounted on classroom walls in the1970s. They proved far less revolutionary than originally anticipated, and it is not likely that new web-based techniques will offer any better weapons in the war against ignorance than they did.
Current technology makes an extraordinary wealth of resources available to students, but these treasures are useless if students do not hone the skills needed to work with them: reading, analysis, memorization, and interpretation. Electronic media only present material that is available in books in a more flexible and convenient form. They do not substitute for competent literacy. Students must, therefore, begin--at least in introductory survey courses--by practicing the disciplines needed to extract information from oral presentations and written documents. Lecture courses that use written assignments as evaluation techniques offer a form of instruction that has proved itself over many years and that today still provides the best preparation for processing information delivered by electronic and other media. There is, alas, still no substitute for the work of struggling with difficult texts, identifying and retaining significant bits of data, and discovering significant patterns of meaning in streams of information.
Books:
A History of the Christian Movement (1978)
Civilization and Survival (1988)
Poullain de la Barre's The Equality of the Two Sexes(1988)
The Shakespeare Name Dictionary, with James Madison Davis (1995)
The Western Heritage (Kagan, Ozment, Turner). Brief Edition (1996); 2nd edition (1999); 3rd edition (2001); 4th edition (2003)
The Medieval Millennium: An Introduction (1999); 2nd edition (2002)
Stones for Bread: A Critique of Contemporary Worship (1999)
The West: Culture and Ideas with William Spellman, (2003).
The West: A Narrative History, with William Spellman, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (2008)
The Heritage of World Civilizations Craig, et al., brief third edition (2007)
Articles In: The British Studies Monitor, The American Benedictine Review, The Catholic Historical Review, The Historian, The International Journal of Women's Studies, Teaching History, Manuscripta, The Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, Church History, Perspectives, Journal of Women's History.
Carolyn Halladay, B.A., M.A., J.D., Ph.D.
Lecturer in History. Ph.D. University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997
Historian of modern Germany and modern central Europe, with a particular interest in the everyday interactions of society, culture, and politics. Academic emphases include contemporary German society; Europe since 1789; European Jewry; nationalism; trans-Atlantic relations; European diplomacy; and war, ethics and strategy. Teaching interests include European culture and politics; world history; late-modern intellectual history; women in Europe; and the world wars.
Major Publications:
“Engineered Like No Other: German Society and the Automobile,” in Carl Lankowski, ed., Breakdown, Breakup, Breakthrough: Germany’s Difficult Passage to Modernity (New York: Berghahn, 1999).
“Jews in German Society,” in Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will, eds., Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (with Andrei S. Markovits and Beth Simone Noveck).
“Foreign Cultural Policy” in Andrei S. Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Editor of Donald Abenheim, Soldier and Politics Transformed: German-American Reflections on Civil-Military Relations in a New Strategic Environment (Berlin: Miles Verlag, 2006).
Co-editor of Gordon A. Craig, Tact and Intelligence: Essays on Diplomatic History and International Relations (Palo Alto: SPOSS, 2008).
John Rossi, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
Associate Professor. Ph.D. Rutgers University, 1988
Teaching and research interests include the history of the United States since 1877, American foreign relations, business and economic history, East Asian and Vietnamese history, and historiography. All courses emphasize reading, writing, and critical analysis. Upper-level writing intensive courses also include research into original historical sources. This approach to teaching helps students develop and hone important research, writing, and thinking skills. A number of students have been able to turn research papers written for these courses into published articles.
Books:
Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Automobile Insurance: Samuel P. Black, Jr. and the Rise of Erie Insurance, 1923-1961 (Routledge, 2001), with Samuel P. Black, Jr.
History on the Internet: A Student Guide, 1999-2000 (Prentice Hall, 1999), with Andrew T. Stull.
Articles In: Business History Review, Essays in Economic and Business History, The Historian, EH.Net, Proceedings of the Woodrow Wilson National Symposium, Forging the American Century, The American Experience in World War II, The Erie Times-News, and The Journal of Erie Studies.
Participation in Scholarly Organizations: Trustee and Secretary-Treasurer of the Economic and Business Historical Society, Program Chair for the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Economic and Business Historical Society.