Search | Department of History

Jingya Guo

My dissertation, tentatively entitled Medical, Monstrous, and Myriad:Controversial Female Bodies and Gender Politics in China, 1500-1890is a cultural history of women’s unruly bodies.This project asks how medical practitioners, literary writers, and women themselves understood and rationalize women’ myriad bodily experiences—monstrous birthing, varied menstrual patterns, exceptional reproductive capacities, and unpredictable impregnation processes.Against dominant historiographies that emphasize a medical history of women’s bodies from male physicians’ perspectives, this project integrates a variety of sources, ranging from medical manuscripts, recipe collections, illustrated newspapers to miscellaneous notes, in order to examine contingent and unstable categories of women's health and illnesses, and therefore gives voice to multiple historical actors.

/jingya-guo

Juan Fernandez

My work focuses on the histories of masculinity in the highlands of the northern Philippines in the early twentieth century. My dissertation, "Manly Encounters," examines how ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the earliest generation of professional American anthropologists was intertwined with their attempts to perform (to varying degrees of success) their approximation of Indigenous Philippine masculinity. It is through an examination of these anthropologists' fieldnotes, diaries, and…

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Emi Donald

I study queer thought in twentieth-century Thailand, with a particular focus on tomboy (thom) histories. I am interested in how thom, as a category that combines notions of sexuality and gender, travels and transforms over time and across local, national, and transnational spaces. I analyze how thom-ness was depicted in popular discourses from the mid-twentieth century and how the category took on new meanings in the context of late-twentieth-century lesbian activism. I combine popular and…

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Kwelina Thompson

Advisor: Larry Glickman

/kwelina-thompson

Kelsey Jennings Roggensack

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Cornell University. I study African American families and communities relocating to the American West in the 19th century and early 20th century. My dissertation examines the American West through a historical analysis of African American folklore and other documented ephemera. I consider both the migration to and subsequent settlement in the West as imperative to Black history. My research explores how recorded memories and traditions…

/kelsey-jennings-roggensack

Manuel Berduc

I work on the development of revolutionary epistemology in late 19th and early 20th century socialism(s). I ask how different notions/roots of “scientific” socialism emerged in the 19th century and how these were later forgotten, excluded, and/or incorporated into 20th century knowledge bodies such as dialectical and historical materialism. My work looks at the role of socialists in organizing experience(s) (in the streets, the laboratory, the novel) to orient praxis in different strategic…

/manuel-berduc

Austin Raetz

I am a PhD student in the Department of History, working on gender and sexuality in early modern England, c.1500-1800. My research focuses on the male body and men’s sexuality, especially as it relates to homoerotic desire and behavior. My tentative dissertation focuses on violation of the male body, and representations of that violated male body, in England. For example, it will consider the role of coercion and sexual violence in homoerotic relationships, and how individuals and institutions…

/austin-raetz

Daniel Dawson

I am a historian of early modern Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world. My research focuses on the seventeenth-century New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) in a wide Atlantic context. I focus on the interactions between European settlers, Indigenous peoples, and people of African descent (free and enslaved) in seventeenth-century mainland Spanish America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic more broadly. I am particularly interested in knowledge production, religious…

/daniel-dawson

Sebastian Diaz Angel

My research combines the history of cartography, science and technology studies, geopolitics, environmental history and digital humanities.

Advisor: Ray Craib

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Nicholas Myers

My focus is on northern Mexico and, more broadly, the North American West in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This work reflects interests in geography, state formation, political ecology, and spatial theory.
Advisor: Ray Craib, Ernesto Bassi

/nicholas-myers

Nathan Carlos Norris Cruz

I am a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin America and the Pacific. My research interests include labor, indigenous peoples, oceans, islands, colonialism, decolonization, cities, architecture, planning, geography, and world history.
My advisor is Ray Craib. I also work with Ernesto Bassi and Eric Tagliacozzo.

/nathan-carlos-norris-cruz

Marcos Pérez Cañizares

I am a historian of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. My research interests rest on exploring the relationship between movements of people and goods, institutional logics, and spatial politics. Specifically, my current research focuses on how economic practices, competing ideas of sovereignty, and conceptions of aqueous and terrestrial space shaped historical actors actions, the creation of regions, and their imagined futures.

/marcos-perez-canizares

Jennifer A. Begakis

Historian of American Capitalism. I research the Walt Disney Company and Disney Parks and Resorts from the 1930s to the present.

Advisor: Lawrence Glickman

My dissertation highlights the critical limits of Disney investments that "all started with a mouse." October 27, 1954, Walt Disney.

I focus on the tension between design innovation and corporate business objectives, including company financing and strategic planning. I contend that the Walt Disney Company's limitations and past…

/jennifer-begakis

Spencer Beswick

Spencer is a historian of anarchism and the left in the Americas. His dissertation, titled “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century,” explores the revitalization of anarchism in the 1980s-90s. The dissertation draws from the Anarchist Oral History Project that he helps run. His writing can be found at emptyhandshistory.com. He is on Twitter @spencerbeswick and Mastodon @spencerbeswick@kolektiva.social

Advisors: Russell Rickford, Ray Craib, and Claudia Verhoeven

/spencer-beswick

Lewis d Avigdor

Advisor: Penny Von Eschen

/lewis-d-avigdor

Lyrianne González

I am a mid-20th-century historian focusing on U.S. labor, immigration, and ethnic history and their present-day legacies.

/lyrianne-gonzalez

Megan Jeffreys

I am a PhD candidate in history, and I have spent my entire graduate journey researching various aspects of American slavery. My current research focuses on the numerous groups and individuals involved, either directly or indirectly, in the escape of enslaved individuals. This research works to understand the ripple effects surrounding the decision to escape, focusing on individual, familial, community, and national reactions. My dissertation works to understand these complex notions of…

/megan-jeffreys

Sarah R. Meiners

I am a political historian of the 20th century United States researching immigration and refugee history. I focus on the development and implementation of refugee and asylum policy in United States’ territories. My work engages with histories of migration, foreign policy, empire and settler colonialism, and borders and borderlands.

Advisor: María Cristina García

/sarah-r-meiners

Jeremy Peschard Pórtela

I study the history of race, immigration, and mental health in the United States. In my research, I examine the exclusion, deportation, and institutionalization of immigrants and other racialized peoples in California and Texas from the 1880s to the 1930s.

/jeremy-peschard-portela

Molly Reed

I study environmental and cultural history in the nineteenth-century United States. In addition to teaching first-year writing seminars at Cornell, I have taught through the Cornell Prison Education Program since 2014. Recent classes designed and taught include “From Graham Crackers to Anti Vaxxers: Alternative Health Movements in United States History,” “Nineteenth-Century Communal Utopias,” “Incarceration, Policy Response, & Self-Reflection,” “Nineteenth-Century United States History,”…

/molly-reed

Craig Lyons

I am a PhD candidate in History, concentrating on the Viking Age North Atlantic. My research centers around the development of the Norse town and kingdom of Dublin and its role as a mercantile, political, and cultural hub in the Irish Sea region and the wider North Atlantic. I engage with both written and material evidence relating to Norse Dublin in order to shed further light on processes of state formation, institutional development, and cross-cultural trade in the settlement and along its…

/craig-lyons

Michael Kirkpatrick Miller

I am a PhD Student in History at Cornell University. My work regards colonialism in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and I am interested (thematically) in the history of empire, religion, and masculinity. My dissertation project, Modifying Men: Religion and Masculinity in Eastern Indonesia, 1870-1942, focuses on Dutch colonial categorization of religion and sexuality in Eastern Indonesia, specifically within the religiously diverse and multiethnic port cities of Ambon, Manado, and Ternate. My…

/michael-kirkpatrick-miller

Sara B. Pritchard

Professor Sara Pritchard is an environmental STS scholar specializing in the history of technology and environmental history. Her current research program critically examines the history, science, and ethics of excessive artificial light at night. Sara’s book, Night as Environment: Light Pollution and the Anthropocene, explores how different scientific disciplines have studied light pollution since the 1970s. Her research has been supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation (Scholars’ Award #1555767, Program in Science, Technology, and Society), as well as Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, Center for the Social Sciences, and Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.

/sara-b-pritchard

David Stephan Powers

David S. Powers (Ph.D., Princeton, 1979) is a native of Cleveland, Ohio and long-suffering fan of the Cleveland Guardians . He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1979 and began teaching at Cornell in the same year. He currently holds positions as an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Near Eastern, an Adjunct Professor at the Cornell Law School. His courses deal with Islamic civilization, Islamic history and law, and classical Arabic texts, and his research focuses on the emergence of Islam and Islamic legal history. He is founding editor of the journal Islamic Law and Society.

/david-stephan-powers

Jon W. Parmenter

I am a historian of colonial North America, specializing in the history of indigenous peoples in the Northeast, particularly that of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). I took advantage of my status as a dual citizen of the Canada and the United States to train at what is nowWestern Universityin my hometown of London, Ontario, Canada, and completed my doctorate atUniversity of Michigan. My first book, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701 (2010, reissued inpaperbackin Canada and the USA in 2014) was published with the support of aNational Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. I argue that the extensive spatial mobility engaged in by Haudenosaunee people after their first contact with Europeans represented a geographical expression of Haudenosaunee social, political, and economic priorities. I drew on archival and published documents in several languages, archaeological data, published Haudenosaunee oral traditions, and GIS technology to reconstruct the Haudenosaunee settlement landscape and the paths of human mobility that built and sustained it. Many of my article-length publications in journals such as Journal of Early American History, Diplomatic History, William and Mary Quarterly, and Recherches Amerindiennes au Quebec are available for consultation at my Academia.eduwebpage. My current research interests include the historical experience of allied Indian nations in the Seven Years' War and American Revolution, the impact of the U.S./Canada border on Native American nations, and contemporary Haudenosaunee nation-building initiatives.

/jon-w-parmenter