Faculty
At Stetson, the history faculty helps students learn how to find, evaluate, and interpret information about what people have done in the past and why. They work closely with students to enhance their skills in research, evaluation of data, critical thinking, and written and oral communication.
Classroom instruction is the most important activity for teachers in the Department of History. Two members of the history faculty have received Stetson's highest faculty honor, the McEniry Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Research, which keeps a teacher up-to-date in the field, is essential for history professors. Department members are active in research and publishing in their specialties. All professors in the department have the doctor of philosophy degree, and they regularly participate in the national meetings of their respective professional associations.
Dr. Eric Kurlander
Associate Professor of History and Chair
Dr. Eric Kurlander (Ph.D., Harvard University) teaches classes on many aspects of Modern German, European, and World History, including Nazi Germany, The Holocaust, The Second World War: A Global History, The French Revolution, and A History of Baseball. His recent book, Living With Hitler (Yale, 2009), examines the ways in which German liberals negotiated, resisted and in some ways accommodated the Third Reich. His first book, The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933 (Berghahn, 2006), describes how ethnic nationalist ideology gradually undermined the liberal parties in late-Imperial and Weimar Germany. His articles have appeared in Central European History, The Journal of Contemporary History, The Historian, The Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Ethnopolitics, and European Review of History, as well as a number of edited collections. Kurlander has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University's Program for the Study of Germany and Europe. His current projects include a textbook, with Dr. Kimberly Reiter, titled The West in Question: Continuity and Change (forthcoming, Pearson-Longman), and Nazi Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. In his free time, Kurlander enjoys parenting, reading, travel, sports, Asian food, and American popular culture.
Dr. Paul Steeves
Professor of History
Dr. Paul Steeves (Ph.D., University of Kansas) is a specialist in Russian history, religion, art and architecture. He has taught at Stetson University since 1972. He was awarded the McEniry Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1979 and the first Hand Research Award in 1992. He has published many items dealing with religion in Russia, including religions of Russian and the former Soviet Union and Russian pacifism. He maintains a current web page reporting news about religion in present-day Russia and other post-soviet countries.
Dr. Paul Croce
Professor of History and American Studies
(Ph.D., Brown University) Ever since I was a child, I have been attracted to history because I wanted to understand the future. Learning about the past not only provides stories more exciting than fiction, but also insights into cultural patterns and commitments that give clues about where we might be going. I took these interests with me as an undergraduate at Georgetown where I wrongly believed that a history major would not be practical; so I majored in government with a concentration in political theory and a minor in history. Then I earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University and then went back to Georgetown's History Department to teach history for two years before moving to Florida to teach History and American Studies, first at Rollins and then at Stetson, where I have been teaching since 1988. Most of my courses deal with topics that your grandparents said you should not talk about at the dinner table: courses that deal with deep values issues including War and Peace, History of Health Care, Darwinism and the Divine, Environmental Debates, Nature and the American Marketplace, Campaign Watching, and the 1950s and 1960s. I also direct the Stetson Student Research in Science and Religion (2SR) Program and Stetson American Studies International (SASI).
Dr. Kimberly Reiter
Associate Professor of History
Dr. Kimberly D. S. Reiter (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Associate Professor of Ancient and Medieval History at Stetson University, and President of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Association (IEA). Dr. Reiter has had extensive experience designing and teaching courses in environmental history and environmental issues and has presented and published papers on the teaching of environmental issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. She currently serves as a member of the IEA Roundtable on Curriculum Change, and consults on green curriculum design. She directs the Stetson Field Course in Early English History, an on-site interdisciplinary study of the historic English landscape. She advises the Stetson chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the History honors society, is chair of the Stetson Undergraduate Research Committee, and organizes the annual Stetson Undergraduate Research and Creative Arts Symposium (SURCAS), the campus-wide honors day. She also serves as a National Councilor for Undergraduate Research Directors Committee for the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR) and on the Florida Undergraduate Research Council. Her scholarship focuses on imperialism in the Western Roman Empire, specifically the Aquitaine Basin, and in the differing perceptions of "Romanization", especially its application as a theoretical construct in explaining imperialism, change and continuity in Roman provincial society and art, and has contributed a recent festschrift article on the application of Romanization theories to the teaching of Iron Age European religious thought. She is co-author of the forthcoming textbook in Western Civilization, The West in Question with Dr. Eric Kurlander.
Dr. Margaret Venzke
Associate Professor of History
Dr. Margaret Venzke (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a specialist in Middle Eastern history and an internationally recognized expert on the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Her research centers on the Syrian lands following the Ottoman conquest in 1516. She has published extensively on Ottoman Syria. Noteworthy among these publications are major articles in the internationally renowned Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient—"Special Use of the Tithe As a Revenue-Raising Measure in the Sixteenth-Century Sanjaq of Aleppo" (95 pp.) and "The Case of a Dulgadir-Mamluk Iqta": A Re-Assessment of the Dulgadir Principality and Its Position Within the Ottoman-Mamluk Rivalry" (75 pp.), and "Rice Cultivation in the Plain of Antioch in the 16th Century: The Ottoman Fiscal Practice" (101 pp.), published in Archivum Ottomanicum. Soon to be published is "Syria's Population in the 16th Century: Population Decline and the Use of the Ottoman Tax Registers in Determining Longue Durée Decline." She expects to finish this year a circa 800-page manuscript, "The Syrian Lands: Settlements, Cultivators and Tribesmen in Northern Syria in the 16th Century," on which she has been working for quite a few years. Recently she has presented papers at international conferences held in Athens, Greece and Zagreb, Croatia. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Award, and its renewal in Istanbul, Turkey, and a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship, Washington University, in St. Louis. Professor Venzke teaches courses on the Modern and Contemporary Middle East, Medieval Islamic Civilization, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as teaching the Ancient and Medieval Western Civilization survey courses.
Dr. Emily Mieras
Associate Professor of History
Dr. Emily Mieras (Ph. D., The College of William and Mary), Associate Professor of History and American Studies, is an Americanist with specialties in Progressive Era history (c. 1880-1920) and women's and gender history. Dr. Mieras is particularly interested in cultural and social history. As an American Studies scholar, she employs interdisciplinary approaches to understand particular historical moments. In addition to the U. S. survey, courses on women's and gender history, and on the 1900-1940 time period, her courses cover such topics as consumerism in American history and culture, immigration and conceptions of racial identity, and popular culture in the United States. Her research topics in History and American Studies include Progressive Era college students and social service work, historical and contemporary conceptions of community in the United States, and the connections between family, gender, and consumerism in contemporary television. Dr. Mieras directs both the Gender Studies Program and the American Studies Program.
Dr. Leander Seah
Assistant Professor of History
Dr. Leander Seah (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an Assistant Professor of Asian History. He teaches East Asian history, Southeast Asian history, and modern world history at Stetson. In terms of research, as an ethnic Chinese citizen of Singapore who lives in the United States, he is particularly interested in migration and diasporas, maritime China and maritime Southeast Asia, modern China, modern Japan, and transnational and world history. He has published journal articles, has presented his work at conferences in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland China, and is currently revising a book manuscript based on his doctoral dissertation, "Conceptualizing the Chinese World: Jinan University, Nanyang Migrants, and Trans-Regionalism, 1900-1941." His accolades include seventeen fellowships, research grants and awards from the Association for Asian Studies, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan, the National Library Board of Singapore, the National University of Singapore, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stetson University. Funding from many of these sources has enabled him to carry out research in Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States.
Dr. Mayhill Fowler
Assistant Professor of History
Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler received her Ph.D. in the Department of History at Princeton University in 2011 with a dissertation entitled, "Beau Monde: State and Stage on Empire's Edge, Russia and Soviet Ukraine, 1916-1941." Her teaching and research focus on the cultural history of Russia and Eastern Europe, but, more broadly, on how governance, inter-ethnic encounters, and space shape creativity. Fowler has presented at many conferences, from the US to Russia, and has several publications: a chapter in Tkacz and Makaryk's Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, articles in Ab Imperio and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, as well as journalistic pieces for New Eastern Europe. She has taught at Princeton, the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, and the University of Toronto. Fowler is also a former professional actress, and even performed once in Florida in 2003. She received her MFA in acting from the National Theater Conservatory, and her BA in Russian from Yale University.
Ricardo Salazar Rey
Assistant Professor of History
Ricardo R. Salazar Rey grew up in rural Guatemala attending public schools. Since an early age he discovered an interest and passion for history fueled by questions of comparative wealth and education. At the age of 18 he immigrated to United States and began attending West LA Community College part-time. With the support of many dedicated faculty and advisers he was eventually able to transfer to UCLA in order to study history full-time. After graduating summa cum laude from UCLA he was accepted into Harvard in order to undertake a PhD in Latin American History. During his time at Harvard he became interested in questions of institutional history and comparative slavery. His dissertation focuses on the transmission of medieval Iberian slavery into the New World. He is also the proud parent of two boys who regularly beat him at video games, basketball and tennis.
Visiting Faculty
Dr. James Williams, Visiting Research Professor, techjunc@gmail.com
Dr. James Williams (http://stetson.academia.edu/JamesWilliams) received his Ph.D. in the history of technology and public history from U.C. Santa Barbara. He taught at colleges and worked as a historical consultant and historical society director in California for over 30 years before moving to Florida. His primary field of interest is the historical relationship between technology and the environment. His recent publications include "Understanding the Place of Humans in Nature" in Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History edited by Steven Cutcliffe and Martin Reuss (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2010); "Resource Conservation and Electrification in California," ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology, 15 (2009), 138-145; "The American Industrial Revolution" in Companion to American Technology edited by Carroll Pursell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), pp. 31-51. He is also author of Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1997), and has published numerous articles, book reviews as well as some popular articles. Dr. Williams is President of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) and editor of ICOHTEC's journal, ICON. Previously, he was co-founder and co-chair of Envirotech (a professional history organization bridging the history of technology and environmental history), treasurer of the Society for the History of Technology, on the Board of Directors of the National Council on Public History, president and later executive secretary of the California Council for the Promotion of History. He's an avid sailor and jazz pianist.
Dr. Bernd Grewe, Visiting Professor of History
Dr. Brendan Lindsay, Adjunct Professor of History, blindsa1@stetson.edu
Dr. Margaret MacDonald, Adjunct Professor of History, mmacdona@stetson.edu