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Faculty & Alumni News

Dickinson history department

The Dickinson history faculty in front of Denny Hall, Sept 2017

Updated January 2024

Associate Professor Jeremy Ball co-edited, with Claudia Gastrow (University of Johannesburg), a special edition of Kronos: Southern African Histories, Vol 45, no. 1 (2019), pp 10-16, on the theme “Angola Nationalist Narratives and Alternative Histories.” http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_issuetoc&pid=0259-019020190001&lng=en&nrm=iso

Professor Marcelo Borges' co-edited volume, the Cambridge History of Global Migrations, came out in May 2023.  

Assistant Professor Say Burgin's article, "'The Trickbag [of] the Press':  SNCC, Print Media, and the Myth of an Antiwhite Black Power Movement," has been selected as the 2023 winner of the Ronald T. and Gayla D. Farrar Award in Media & Civil Rights History.    Her book, Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit will be published by New York University Press in April 2024.   She is also working as a consultant on a curriculum package to be used for educators alongside the forthcoming documentary The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks, in production with Peacock.

Professor David Commins' book, The Mecca Uprising:  An Insider's Account of Salafism and Insurrection in Saudi Arabia by Nasir al-Huzaimi, about the 1979 uprising in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, was published in December 2020.  The book has two parts:  translation of a memoir by a man who belonged to the group that launched the uprising, and an introduction to the historical, political and religious contexts surrounding the uprising. 

Associate Professor Emily Pawley's book, The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism, (University of Chicago Press, 2020) was awarded the  Philip J. Pauly Prize for the best first book on the history of science in the Americas for 2021.  In May 2023, the Dickinson faculty named her the 2023 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.  

Professor Matthew Pinsker recently edited a collection of essays for the National Park Service (NPS) entitled, The Underground Railroad: Essays on the Network to Freedom (2023) that is now available full text online with a variety of supporting classroom resources from the House Divided Project.  The NPS and Dickinson's House Divided have also recently expanded their Slave Stampedes on the Southern Borderlands initiative to include the study of group escapes from Kentucky and Missouri.  The research effort has so far detailed nearly 200 attempted group escapes from slavery between 1847 and 1865.  Pinsker continues to direct the Knowledge for Freedom seminar each summer at Dickinson, a special free program launched in 2021 and designed to help rising high school seniors, especially those from low income or first-generation college backgrounds, get better prepared for the college admissions process.  Finally, Pinsker has published online his Student Hall of Fame, a collection of more than 150 of the best student projects submitted in his classes over the previous decade.

Professor Karl Qualls' recent book Stalin's Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-51 (2020) has been selected as the Featured Book for the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. His interview with SHCY will appear in March 2022. He recently published “Politicizing War Memorialization in Soviet and Post-Soviet Sevastopol” in The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (2021) in which he brings up to date his first book From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II. 

Associate Professor Regina Sweeney will be taking a group of students to Italy in spring 2024 as part of the Mosaic "Fashioning the Body, Shaping the Nation."  

Assistant Professor W. Evan Young spent the 2022-23 academic year on sabbatical as a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona and the University of Tokyo, primarily working on his book manuscript, Family at the Bedside: Illness, Therapy, and Knowledge in Early Modern Japan. He also received a grant from the Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council to conduct research in Japan as part of his new project, "Health and Home in Modern Japan: A Cultural History of Domestic Medicine, 1850-1960."

Alumni Events & News

Alumni Spotlight:  Matt Guariglia '12

Congratulations to Dickinson history alum Matt Guariglia '12, whose first book, "Police and the Empire City:  Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York" is forthcoming from Duke University Press in November 2023.  Great news, Matt!  

How Alumni Can Stay in Touch

The history department enjoys hearing from our alumni. Please let us know what you are doing by sending an email to brownmad@dickinson.edu  and including "Alumni News" in the subject line. You can also connect with us via the department Facebook page. 

History Alumni Profiles and News