Contact FYS
	300 Steele Building CB# 3504 UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3504 email: fys@unc.edu phone: (919)843-7773

History

E. Willis Brooks is an Associate Professor in the History Department. He obtained his MA and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Christopher Browning has taught at UNC Chapel Hill since 1999.  His major research focus is on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but he has long been interested in World War I as the beginning point of the three decades of incredible turmoil and conflict that nearly destroyed European society and did in fact witness the genocidal destruction of the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire in the First World War and Europe’s Jews in the Second.

Fitz Brundage, who previously taught in Canada and Florida, has written on lynching in the American South and turn-of-the-century utopian socialism. More recently he has been interested in historical memory and its importance for civic culture in the contemporary South. He boasts of his reputation as "Hollywood Brundage," earned for his penchant for films and music in the classroom.

Chad Bryant is an associate professor in the History Department. He first traveled to Europe while on an undergraduate study abroad program and has returned every year since. At home and abroad, few things make him happier than reading a good book on the train. He is currently writing a book that uses an examination of early train travel to better understand the culture and society of Habsburg Central Europe before the revolutions of 1848.

Kathryn Burns first became interested in the colonial Andes while on a junior semester of study abroad. She has been returning to Peru ever since, especially to Lima and Cuzco. Her most recent book is about writing technologies and power in colonial Peru. She has been teaching Latin American history for over fifteen years, first at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and since 2000 in UNC’s History Department.

Peter Coclanis is an economic historian, which means that he likes numbers but lacked the grace, charm, and wit to become an accountant. He's a native of Chicago, but has spent a lot of time writing and teaching about the South. He's currently working on a book on rice and the world rice trade, the research for which has taken him to archives and paddies all over Asia.

John Chasteen is the rare UNC professor originally from Chapel Hill. He was, in fact, born on campus. But Chasteen ranges widely in his research and writing on Latin American History. He has written about dance history and carnival celebrations, as well as charismatic leadership and revolutions, in a number of countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba.

Peter Filene has written books about a wide range of topics in 20th-century American history, notably gender identities and "the right to die." He has also published a novel, Home and Away, and is in the midst of writing another, both of which happen to be about, yes, coming of age in postwar America. He teaches a course about U.S. history since World War II, a senior honors thesis seminar, and (when he's fortunate) a seminar on the history of photography. He enjoys teaching at Carolina, taking photos and eating pastry in Paris, and being home with his wife and dog.

Karen Hagemann teaches Modern German and European history and women's and gender history (18th to 20th centuries). Her research includes studies in the fields of social and labor history, family history and the history of everyday lives, as well as the history of the women's movement. More recently, she has worked on the history of military, war, the nation and gender and on a comparative history of European welfare and education systems. She loves to explore the experiences and memories of women and men from different social backgrounds in the past and therefore greatly enjoys reading autobiographies.

Michael H. Hunt (PhD, Yale University) is the Emerson Professor of History. Born into a military family, he spent a good part of his youth abroad, including several summers in Vietnam in the early 1960s. He moved to Chapel Hill in 1980. Among his books is "Lyndon Johnson’s War."

Lloyd Kramer has been teaching courses in European and global history since coming to UNC in 1986. His historical research focuses espeically on cross-cultural exchanges and experiences, which he thinks are central to modern personal and collective identities. Kramer has written a book on exiles in 19th-century Paris, and is presently working on a new book on French and American travelers who wrote about their experiences in different cities and cultures. He loves to talk about the history of ideas and about people who write imaginatively about their lives.

Christopher J. Lee’s teaching and research interests concern the socio-cultural, political, and intellectual histories of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly southern Africa. He is primarily interested in the question of what it means to be "modern": for nation-states, for social groups, and for individual people. Before coming to UNC, he held postdoctoral teaching appointments at Stanford, Harvard, and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill. McCarthy is a social and cultural historian whose work focuses on the history of American social movements and African-American culture. He has taught in the Department of History and Literature at Harvard University, where he won several awards for excellence in teaching and advising. He is editor of The Radical Reader: A Documentary Anthology of the American Radical Tradition (New Press, 2003) and Democratic Vistas: Reconsiderations of American Abolitionism (New Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book, The Fires this Time, about black church burnings in the South since the 1990s.

Theda Perdue is a southern historian who writes about American Indians. She has published books that deal with Cherokees, Indians of North Carolina, race, and women. Originally from Georgia, she also has taught at Western Carolina, Clemson, the University of Auckland (New Zealand), and the University of Kentucky. Professor Perdue is an avid traveler who is particularly interested in the ways in which European expansion has affected indigenous peoples.

Richard Pfaff's research and teaching interests center on the ecclesiastical, cultural, and political history of medieval England, most often in the 9th through 12th centuries, but for certain topics and approaches stretching back to the early Anglo-Saxon period and occasionally into the later middle ages. He thinks books are a good thing.

Donald Raleigh received his Ph.D. in 1978 from Indiana University-Bloomington, and has taught modern Russian and Soviet history at the University of Hawaii and, since 1988, at UNC. The first American to receive an honorary degree from a Russian university following the collapse of communism, he has visited the USSR/Russia thirty times since 1971. His current book project is entitled "Growing up Russian During the Cold War: Portrait of a Generation."

Sarah Shields is fascinated by the way people define themselves. She is now studying how residents of the Middle East understood their "national" identities during the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to this first year seminar, she teaches a broad survey of Islamic civilization, as well as topical courses on Middle East Women, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the modern Middle East. Last summer she took 10 UNC students to Turkey to study the meaning of "Turkishness." She has lived and studied in Turkey, Syria, Israel and Morocco.

Jay Smith, a native of the Baltimore area, received his B.A. and M.A. in history at Northern Illinois University and his Ph.D. in French history at the University of Michigan. He came to Carolina directly from Michigan in 1990. He teaches courses on early-modern France (that is, covering the period from about 1500 to about 1800), and the theme of the long-term origins of the French Revolution runs through most of his scholarship. He also thinks Louis XVI was just an incredibly bad king.

Within the general field of Early American history, John Sweet's research focuses on the dynamics of colonialism and on the interplay of religious cultures. In Bodies Politic he explores the encounters of Indians, Africans, and Europeans in New England and argues that the racial legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the American North as well as the South. He has also worked with other historians and literary scholars on the Jamestown colony and its broader cultural and international contexts. Now, he is beginning a new project on dreams, visions, apparitions, trances, and other out-of-body experiences--and how various groups of early Americans interpreted them.

Richard Soloway, the Eugen Merzbacher Professor of History, grew up near Boston, attended the University of Iowa as an undergraduate, and received his PhD. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the University of Michigan before coming to UNC in 1968, so has been here slightly longer than the Old Well. He has taught over the years a variety of courses on modern European and British history, with an emphasis upon social and cultural developments. The author of three books and numerous articles, Professor Soloway has written primarily on the history of family planning, eugenics and population change in 19th and 20th century Britain. In his earlier years he spent too much time flying airplanes and racing sailboats but appears to have outgrown (or outlived) both.

Donald J. Raleigh received his Ph.D. in 1978 from Indiana University-Bloomington, and has taught modern Russian and Soviet history at the University of Hawaii and, since 1988, at UNC. The first American to receive an honorary degree from a Russian university following the collapse of communism, he has visited the USSR/Russia thirty times since 1971. His current book project is entitled Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of the Class of '67.