The extent and quality of the activities sponsored by the Department of History depends in large measure on our available funds and the generous support of donors. Endowments or significant targeted donations will enable us to increase our national visibility, expand our production of nationally-recognized scholarship, and to grow History programming and events. Naming opportunities are possible in conjunction with such gifts. For more information about any of the opportunities to support The University of Alabama Department of History, please […]
Category: Newsletter
Promotions
Julia BrockPromoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor John GiggiePromoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor Erik L. PetersonPromoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor Jenny ShawPromoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor Return to the Fall 2025 edition of Historically Speaking.
Faculty Publications
In Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South (UNC, 2025), Julia Brock examines game and fish laws in three Deep South states from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, finding that though conservation laws protected wildlife, they also disrupted residents’ traditional hunting practices and livelihoods, especially for Blacks and poor Whites. Brock traces the early 1900s rise of a regional “sportsman” identity that eventually led to the adoption state game laws that faced numerous enforcement obstacles, as […]
Alumni Publications
Mark A. Johnson (PhD, 2016), American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (UGA Press, 2025) . In American Bacon, Johnson considers how bacon overcame centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse. His story starts in early modern Britain and traces the history of bacon from the U.S. colonial era to today. Johnson connects bacon to the racial, demographic, and economic changes of the time periods. For Johnson, bacon’s story […]
Rothman Appointed Faculty Fellow
Last month, the Office for Academic Affairs at The University of Alabama announced that the department’s own, Dr. Joshua Rothman, has been selected as the Provost’s Faculty Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year. Dr. Rothman brings to this role a wealth of leadership and administrative experience. His steady hand led the Department for nearly a decade (August 2016-August 2025). Under his leadership, the Department bucked national trends in declining student numbers and support for the humanities, all the while managing […]
Summersell Center Activities
Last summer, a team of ten undergraduate and graduate students researched how the Black press reported on lynching in Alabama. Last July, Dr. John Giggie and Doctoral Student Isabella Garrison presented the team’s findings at a national conference on racial justice hosted by Northeastern University. During the 2025 academic year, the Summersell Center has continued to focus its efforts on supporting student-led research in both Black history and Queer history. In September the Summersell Center hosted a tent at Druid […]
Public History Concentration Offers Experiential Learning
Students enrolled in the Department’s Public History Concentration brought their training to new audiences this year – curating, researching, and collaborating with archivists and public historians at a number of historic and historical sites across the region, including those in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and even Wisconsin. Students interned with our partners at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, The University of Alabama Museums, the Historic Pickensville Rosenwald Museum, and the Lillian E. Smith Center at Piedmont University, […]
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Legal History Concentration Continues to Grow & Impress
In 2021, the Department launched an advanced concentration in Legal History with the aim of establishing a pre-professional track inside the major and giving UA students a competitive advantage when applying to top law schools and policy programs. Founded by Dr. Lawrence Cappello, the concentration offers a dedicated space for students interested in exploring the relationship between law and society. Four years later, the concentration now comprises roughly 20% of all History majors. Participating students have achieved some of the […]
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History Major Wins Voyager Scholarship
Camila Lopez, a University of Alabama junior majoring in History and Political Science, has been awarded the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service, which recognizes college students with a passion for public service. Lopez is one of 100 students from around the nation to receive the award also known as the Voyager Scholarship. According to the Obama Foundation, recipients exude a passion for helping others, experience serving in or building community, and possesses an expansive view of what’s possible through public […]
Student and Alumni News
Melissa Reynolds (MA, 2011), PhD, an assistant professor of History at Texas Christian University, won the North American Conference on British Studies’ John Ben Snow Prize for her book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (University of Chicago Press, 2024). The John Ben Snow Prize is awarded for the best book by a North American scholar in any field of British Studies dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Doctoral […]
Faculty Activity
Instructor Joseph Angelillo spent this summer conducting research for his first book, a history of Black jury service during Reconstruction. His research took him to NARA Atlanta, where he spent ten-days researching. He’s looking forward to proposing his manuscript to an academic press, and to continuing his teaching in the Department’s Legal History Concentration! Professor John Beeler is now in his thirty-third year of teaching at ‘Bama. In addition to the courses he taught in Tuscaloosa this past year, he […]
Department Welcomes Jasmine Stansberry
This fall, The University of Alabama and the Department of History added Dr. Jasmine Stansberry to its ranks as an assistant professor in U.S. and Southern History. Dr. Stansberry is not a completely new face, however. She joined the department as a postdoctoral scholar in 2022, serving on the university’s Taskforce on Race, Slavery, and Civil Rights, investigating the history and legacies of slavery at The University of Alabama, before attaining her current position. Dr. Stansberry hails from Memphis, Tennessee […]
Summersell Chair Spends Year at West Point
During the academic year, 2024-2025, Dr. Lesley J. Gordon served as the Charles Boal Ewing Chair of Military History at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. This prestigious visiting professorship allows civilian historians to live and work on the garrison for the entire year. In the fall, she taught two sections of “The Army of the Republic: Leading Citizen Soldiers,” a required course for all incoming “plebes” (freshmen); and co-taught a senior capstone class on Civil […]
Juan J. Ponce Vázquez Named Graduate Director
Dr. Juan J. “Juanjo” Ponce Vázquez assumed the reigns of the department’s graduate studies program last August, taking over for Dr. Dan Riches, who, after serving nearly a decade as director of graduate studies himself, transitioned to department chair at the same time. Ponce, a specialist in Colonial Latin American and Caribbean History who focuses on the Spanish Caribbean world during the seventeenth century, came to The University of Alabama in 2015, following brief stops at both St. Lawrence University […]
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Department Welcomes New Chair
In August 2025, the Department of History welcomed a new chair, Associate Professor Daniel Riches. Professor Riches was born in Wisconsin and did his graduate work at the University of Chicago, receiving his PhD in 2007, and thereafter joined our department as an historian of early modern Europe. He published a distinguished work of scholarship in 2013, Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: Brandenburg-Swedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Brill), and was promoted to associate professor. In 2015, he became the […]