Faculty
Juneteenth and collective progress
Douglas Flowe discusses the history of Juneteenth and its continued resonance for all Americans.
The Shadow King
Friends of History
a newsletter for alumni and friends of WashU History
Graduate
Global Airport Infrastructure and Yellow Fever in Transition-Era Nairobi
Undergraduate
What is Public Health Education and Why is it Important? What History Can Tell Us
Major global events like the COVID-19 pandemic make failures in our health education system startlingly apparent. Last summer, Kiegan Baranski, Class of 2020 and a graduate of the minor in medical humanities, wrote about the 1939-40 World’s Fair exhibit “The Hall of Man” and its successor, the Cleveland Health Museum. By inviting questions and hands-on interaction, these museum models encouraged the public to become “captains of their own learning.”
History Department statement on racial justice
As members of the Department of History at Washington University, we commit ourselves to identifying and interrupting the mechanisms of power that have enabled this injustice to continue for so long.
New Members of the Department
Associate Professor
Flora Cassen, PhD
Most recently, Cassen served on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her 2017 book, Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols, published by Cambridge University Press, offers an analysis of the discriminatory marks that the Jews were compelled to wear in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Her second book project studies how Italian Jews became subjects of the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century, and how they understood the empire’s colonial endeavors in the Americas.
Visiting Lecturer
Kristoffer Smemo, PhD
Smemo is a historian of the United States specializing in social movements, political parties, public policy, and urban spaces in the long twentieth century. He teaches introductory survey courses and specialized classes on the social and political histories of the United States and the world.
Assistant Professor
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu
Kuzuoğlu’s research interests lie in modern China, Central Asia, and Ottoman Empire. His current book project, Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age, explores the history of script reforms in China and the world during the 19th and 20th centuries. While earning his doctorate from Columbia University, Kuzuoğlu conducted research in the PRC, Taiwan, Russia, and Turkey. This semester, he is teaching “Science and Technology in East Asia” and “Topics in History and Technology: A History of Information.”
Elizabeth Reynolds
Postdoctoral Fellow
Reynolds studies Tibetan and Chinese History. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “Economies of the High Plateau: Monasteries, Merchants, and Ulak Transportation in Tibet, 1904-1959”, delves into the world of Kham, a Tibetan region at the epicenter of Chinese and Tibetan political struggles of the 20th century. She is a doctoral candidate in the History-East Asia Program focusing on Tibetan and Chinese History. Her research interests include economic and social history of Tibet from the 19th to 20th centuries with a particular focus on monastic economies, currency, taxation, labor systems, and trade networks in Tibet and East Asia.
Kevin Butterfield (PhD, '10)
"It's really an honor to be here every day and to know that I’m just steps away from the mansion itself, from Mount Vernon, which was the first White House of the United States."
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Yael Fuchs (AB, '98)
Big picture, my time at WashU helped teach me how to think. It may be a cliché but it's a true one. My time as a history major taught me to think about the forces that shape our society, and to think critically and skeptically about any fixed self-perception we may have as a society.
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Dennis Openlander (AB, '06)
Ultimately my college education and life experiences taught me to genuinely question everything. I think it helped me to go deeper for the real source of information and ideas, and then challenge those sources of information.
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Georgina Glogovac (AB, '14)
By participating in discussions with people that had differing opinions, I learned how to listen to others, see multiple sides to an argument, and articulate my own position on a subject. These skills have come in handy both when trying to understand medical decisions from a patient's perspective and when making decisions with medical colleagues.
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Faculty Bookshelf
new books and book recommendations from our faculty
Uncontrollable Blackness
Juneteenth: America remembers the abolition of slavery
Sowande' Mustakeem St. Louis Public Radio
Read the StoryThese Washington University faculty had rejected online classes — until coronavirus. Here’s how they made the switch.
Peter Kastor The Washington Post
Read the Story
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