NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Alison Witt-Janssen is the CCHS part-time program assistant. The LEOPOLD FELLOWS are formally CCHS temporary employees.
Amy Stanley, a notable historian of Japan, is now the fifth CCHS Director (after founder T.H. Breen, directors Sarah Maza and Jonathon Glassman, plus 2015-16 interim director Deborah Cohen). Her most recent book, Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020), won numerous awards and garnered international attention. She is also the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (UC Press 2012). Professor Stanley takes over the Center as the university is moving away from pandemic restrictions and plans to return to a robust culture of in-person events.
Andrea Rosengarten is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Department and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. She completed her PhD in History at Northwestern in 2022 as a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. Her dissertation focused on the Orange/!Garib River border region of Namibia and South Africa as a rich case study for tracing the entanglement of African and Atlantic world ideas about land access, private land ownership, and wealth in the long 19th century. As a CCHS affiliate she will engage comparatively with work on land management transformation under capitalism across world regions while paying particular attention to dryland areas.In 2020-21 Andrea was the Chabraja Center's Teaching Initiative Fellow and worked with Prof. Paul Gillingham to develop and teach a new undergraduate global history course called "The End of Citizenship," which explored citizenship as a category of exclusion across place and time.
Anna RUBIN (junior, WCAS), working with Prof. Joanna GRISINGER on "Airline Regulation, Administrative Politics, and Congress" (summer, F/W/S)
Job Titles:
- Fellow at the Chabraja Center
Dr. Guangshuo Yang (he/him) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University. In his dissertation, Between the Animal Kingdom and Human States, he probes how ideas about nonhuman animals undergirded identity-making and state evolution by analyzing a Buddhist-led animal protection movement active in early 20th century East Asia. He has also written on post-Mao knowledge production, pest control, slaughter reform, and Chinese sci-fi movies. A previous Newcombe Fellow and Freeman Asian Scholar, Dr. Yang has received grants from the SSRC, the ACLS, the Henry Luce Foundation, and other funding agencies. As the Chabraja Fellow in Public Service, Dr Yang is curating a public history project showcasing how gender and sexual minorities have utilized animal tropes in self-fashioning and community building.
Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch is a literary historian whose current research focuses on the reception of classical mythology and the classical tradition in American culture, a topic that stems from her work during an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship at Harvard University. Active in the Classical Receptions Workshop at NU and its Classicizing Chicago Project, she has written on Athena as a cultural icon in the United States (in American Women and Classical Myths, ed. Gregory Staley, Baylor UP, 2009) and on the role of Rome in Henry James's early fiction. Her most recent published work is an introduction to the great Polish speculative writer Stanislaw Lem in Being Poland: A History of Polish Literature and Culture, ed. by Tamara Trojanowska et al. (University of Toronto Press, 2018). In addition to her administrative work, she teaches literature classes in the MALit program of Northwestern's School of Professional Studies and seminars at the Newberry Library.
Elzbieta is proud to have helped establish two scholarly centers at Northwestern University-the Center for the Humanities (now the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities) and the Center for Historical Studies (now the Chabraja Center). She is the recipient of the 2011-2012 Clarence Ver Steeg Award for supporting and mentoring graduate students and the 2018 Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Community Excellence Award.
Job Titles:
- Historian
- Breen Digital Media Fellow
Emily Lyon is a historian of the late-19th and early-20th century United States. Her dissertation focuses on empire, visual culture, and race & gender, analyzing how white women photographers, mapmakers, travel writers, filmmakers, and artists sustained US colonial power between 1870 and 1930 across different geographical sites of empire in the Pacific, Caribbean, and North American continent. She is also interested in the digital humanities and public history. As the T.H. Breen Digital Media Fellow, she worked on a project to curate collections of digitized primary sources to be used in classrooms at Northwestern and beyond.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director
- People / Director
Marcos Leitão De Almeida received his Ph.D. in African History from Northwestern University in 2020. His book project, "Breaking the Silence: The Deep History of Slavery in Central Africa," provides a detailed study of the construction and reconfiguration of slavery practices over three thousand years in the Lower Congo, a specific region of Central Africa. It is based on his Ph.D. dissertation, which won the Harold Perkin Prize for the best dissertation in the History department in 2021.
Almeida's work uses linguistic methods in conjunction with archaeology and documentary sources to trace the distinct historical moments in which Lower Congo peoples innovated concepts of "slaves" and "pawns," as well as the objects of restraint and techniques of plundering and seizing outsiders. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Society of Presidential Fellows at Northwestern University, among others. His work has appeared in the Journal of African History, Azania, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History.
During his year with CCHS, Almeida will be teaching two courses. In the Fall, Almeida will offer a seminar called "Black Atlantic: Slavery and Diaspora in the Modern World" that discusses the entanglements between racism and slavery in the making of the modern world and how Africans interacted with and reacted against Atlantic slavery. In the Spring, Almeida will teach a course called "The Global History of Slavery," exploring how different historical actors from the earliest times to the 21 st century (such as kings, dictators, merchants, and even peasants) have invented so many forms of enslavement throughout history and why such practices still exist today.
Matthew Wong Foreman-dissertation, "Science and Security: Constructing the Modern Chinese Citizen, 1900-1966" examines the historical conditions through which the concept "mixed-blood" emerged in the Chinese imagination alongside the political-intellectual construction of Chinese citizenship.
The Center supports an undergraduate program honoring Professor Richard Leopold, a long-time member of the NU Department of History. The Leopold Fellowship program is open to all NU undergraduates, no matter their major or school. It provides a small group of able Northwestern undergraduate students with an opportunity to engage in genuine historical research. The fellowship entails an hourly wage and possible travel expenses, but no academic credit. Leopold Fellows work on current faculty research projects, learning how to interpret complex archival and documentary materials.
Robin Pokorski is a historian of late medieval Europe and a 2022-23 Chabraja CCHS Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. During her year with CCHS, she will be teaching two courses: a "lecture-ish" course (with plenty of room for student discussion and participation) in Winter on the "High and Late Middle Ages, c. 1000-1500," and a writing seminar in the Spring on "Medieval Women." Her own research examines the intersections of gender, religion, and urban life in fifteenth-century Germany, looking at how Dominican nuns leveraged their communities and networks in support of or opposition to monastic reform. One of her many goals for this year is to think about how to purposefully integrate her research and teaching agendas, and particularly to continue figuring out how to engage students with the distant, foreign past through engaging classroom activities and interesting assignments.