Greetings from the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis! This newsletter offers an update about our faculty and students, followed by links to recent news items about our various activities and achievements.
We have welcomed seven new faculty members to our ranks in recent years. Our most recent hire is Nataliia Laas, a Soviet historian with interests in environmental history. She joins three other recent hires at the assistant level: Anne Schult, a modern Europeanist investigating refugees in the 20th century; Marjan Wardaki, a South Asianist interested in the global history of science; and Dalen Wakeley-Smith, an Americanist writing about Roma and race-making. We have also added three full professors. Steve Hindle, a historian of early modern Britain, took up his position as the inaugural Derek Hirst Chair in 2022. Jonathan Judaken, hired in 2023, is our new Goldstein Chair in Jewish History and Thought. And Steve Miles, a historian of early modern China, is now back with us after spending a few years at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.
Faculty have been publishing books and articles at a fast clip. Our most recent book comes from Jonathan Judaken, whose Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism came out to great acclaim with Columbia University Press in 2024. Over the past four years, History Department faculty have collectively won eight book prizes, as well as produced edited collections, journal articles, digital humanities projects, and other important pieces of scholarship.
Our graduate students, too, are an impressive group doing innovative scholarship, winning prizes, publishing books, and getting jobs. We have 17 current graduate students, studying everything from welfare provision in early modern Germany to maritime expansion in early modern global history and policing racial protest in the early 20th-century United States. Several students defended dissertations and have secured tenure-track positions, including at Davidson College and Rice University. Alums are a successful bunch overall, doing everything from publishing books and running research centers to working as chairs, directors, school principals, and editors.
Our undergraduate students continue to be a joy to teach. This year we have six seniors working on honors theses, with topics spanning everything from Holocaust memory to the Second World War in West Africa. We have also expanded the range of opportunities for undergraduate research with our Living History initiative. The program provides small grants to individuals or teams or students to undertake innovative historical projects outside the formal confines of a classroom. Last year, Living History scholars explored topics as varied as Native American basketball teams at the St. Louis World’s Fair, oralism and the early history of the Missouri School for the Deaf, and family histories of Vietnamese refugees who settled in our city.
In short, the Department of History is thriving as it heads into the 2025-6 school year!
Corinna Treitel, Chair and Professor of History
