WSU - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Career Track
Aaron Whelchel's research focuses on the diffusion of educational innovations in and outside of the nineteenth-century British Empire. He received his PhD from Washington State University in 2011 with his dissertation "The Schoolmaster is Abroad": The Diffusion of Educational Innovations in the Nineteenth Century British Empire. His other research interests include the history of public education, the portrayal of world history in popular culture, and new pedagogical techniques for teaching world history. He has taught a variety of world history courses, including Roots of Contemporary Issues, at the WSU Vancouver campus since 2012. He is also an Academic Advisor for History and General Studies students and served as the president of the Northwest World History Association from 2012-15. For more, see Dr. Whelchel's curriculum vitae and most recent Roots of Contemporary Issues syllabus.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Director, Roots of Contemporary Issues Program
- Director, the Roots of Contemporary Issues World History Program
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Career Track
- Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow
Brenna Miller received her Ph.D. in History from the Ohio State University in 2018, and completed her Masters at the University of Toronto and Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on 20th century Southeastern Europe, and her research interests include nationalism, socialism, Islam, cultural history, transnational history, multiculturalism, movement and migration, and the Global Cold War. She is currently working on a book manuscript that studies the emergence of an officially recognized, secular Muslim nation in Tito's Yugoslavia, and the ways this, and alternative understandings of Muslim identity, were shaped and articulated during the socialist period. Her research has been supported with funding from the International Research and Exchanges Board, American Councils, and the Ohio State Mershon Center.
Dr. Miller is currently a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Roots of Contemporary Issues (RCI) Global History Program at Washington State University, and has also taught courses in Modern European, Eastern European, and World Histories.
Education
Professor Farley (1995) received her PhD in History from Indiana University.
Candice Goucher is the author of many journal articles, chapters in books, reviews, and essays. She was the co-lead scholar on Bridging World History (funded by a $2.28M grant from Annenberg and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). Her recent work includes Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food (ME Sharpe/Routledge, 2014) and the two-volume world history, co-authored with Linda Walton, World History: Journeys from Past to Present 2nd edition (Routledge. 2012), translated into Chinese, Korean, and Portuguese. With Graeme Barker, she co-edited Volume 2 of the Cambridge History of the World: A World with Agriculture (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In 2015, the World History Association awarded her the "Pioneer in World History" prize.She was the Trent R. Dames Fellow in the History of Civil Engineering (2014-15) at the Huntington Library, while researching a new book on the history of iron in the Atlantic World.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Career Track
R. Charles Weller, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of History (Career), Washington State University, and Senior Research Fellow, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. Among works in English and Kazakh, Weller most recently edited 21st-Century Narratives of World History: Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives and co-edited with Anver Emon, Reason, Revelation and Law in Islamic and Western Theory and History (both with Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 and 2021). He teaches mainly Roots of Contemporary Issues as well as Middle Eastern & Islamic history courses at WSU. His work focuses on religious-cultural identity and relations in Western-Islamic history, with a special view to Russian & Islamic Central Asia, the Middle East and United States. He was a visiting fellow at Yale University (2010-11) before becoming a full-time faculty member at WSU. He was appointed a (non-residential) visiting researcher at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (2014-19). (See: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rcharles-Weller/research).
Job Titles:
- Graduate Program Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Scholarly Associate Professor / Vice Chancellor for Academic Engagement, WSU - Pullman
EDUCATION
Ph.D., History, Georgia State University, 2010
M.A., History, Auburn University, 2005
B.A., History & Political Science, Presbyterian College, 2003
Curriculum Vitae
David retired from WSU spring 2008 after teaching at the university for 37 years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1972. David's areas of specialization were Early America, the American Revolution, and the history of American agriculture. Spring 2008, he won the College of Liberal Arts William F. Mullen Excellence in Teaching Award. That prize recognizes faculty members who exemplify excellence with an emphasis on involvement with students and student groups outside of the classroom. He won the university-wide Burlington Faculty Achievement Award for Excellence in Instruction in 1988. In addition, he also won and the Academic Advisor of the Year Award from Golden Key National Honor Society in 1987.
Job Titles:
- Instructor in Washington State 's Roots of Contemporary Issues
Dr. Jodie Marshall is a postdoctoral instructor in Washington State's Roots of Contemporary Issues program. She specializes in East Africa's history with and in the wider Western Indian Ocean world.
Dr. Marshall's current book project, (Im)mobility in a Sea of Migration: Race, mobilities, and transnational families in Zanzibar and Oman, ca 1850-2019, takes up this subject through the lens of migration history, examining the history of working-class migration between Oman and Zanzibar over the course of the past two centuries. Drawing on a large corpus of oral history interviews that Dr. Marshall conducted in both Tanzania and Oman over the course of her dissertation research, this project recenters the story of Arab migration in East Africa around the transnational interior lives of otherwise immobile actors among the rural working class of the Zanzibar archipelago.
Her most recent publication, an article called "Mama didn't go: Mobility as a gendered and classed privilege, Zanzibar-Oman 1964-1980s" forthcoming in the Journal of Eastern African Studies, discusses the challenges to gaining access to mobility in the wake of the Zanzibari Revolution and the particular ways that this challenge was amplified for working class women.
is an instructor in the Roots of Contemporary Issues program at Washington State University and specializes in the history of menswear and modern capitalism in Europe and North America. His research interests include fashion history, gender and sexuality studies, economic history, and visual culture. Dr. Finkelberg finished his PhD in History at the University of Michigan in 2022. He also earned a MA in History and Literature from Columbia University in 2014, and a BA in History from Dartmouth College in 2013.
Dr. Finkelberg is currently working on his first book project, Becoming a Man in the Age of Fashion: Gender and Menswear in Nineteenth-Century France, which is based on his dissertation research. This project examines the production, sale, use, and representation of menswear in France from 1830 to 1870. More specifically, Finkelberg examines how the menswear industry transitioned from specializing in bespoke tailoring to mass-produced ready-to-wear. Dr. Finkelberg is also the author of "English Dandies and French Lions," in The Male Body in Representation edited by Silvia Gerlsbeck and Carmen Dexl (Springer 2022), and the co-author of "Fashion in the Life of George Sand" published in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture (2020). His new article, "Dressing the Part: King Louis-Philippe I, Tailoring, and Fashioning the July Monarchy," will appear in the Fall 2022 issue of Dix-Neuf.
Dr. John Finkelberg is an instructor in the Roots of Contemporary Issues program at Washington State University and specializes in the history of menswear and modern capitalism in Europe and North America. His research interests include fashion history, gender and sexuality studies, economic history, and visual culture. Dr. Finkelberg finished his PhD in History at the University of Michigan in 2022. He also earned a MA in History and Literature from Columbia University in 2014, and a BA in History from Dartmouth College in 2013.
Dr. Marlene Gaynair is currently a social and cultural historian of the modern Black Atlantic at Washington State University. She specializes in the histories of the United States, Canada, and British Caribbean during the long twentieth century. Her research interests cover popular culture, identity, citizenship, diasporas, public memory, immigration, transnational studies, and urban histories and spaces.
She is also the architect of "Islands in the North," an ongoing digital exhibit which (re) creates Black cultural and spatial identities in Toronto. She continues to engage in digital histories and humanities to explore other dimensions of historical scholarship and public engagement.
She is currently working on her book manuscript, which is a transnational study of Jamaicans in Canada, the United States, and the Black Atlantic after Emancipation.
Robert Franklin is a public and academic historian of the Hanford Nuclear Site near Richland, WA, and his research focuses on 20 th century US with a particular focus on the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. He holds a dual appointment as Assistant Director of the Hanford History Project at WSU Tri-Cities where he manages the Department of Energy's Hanford Collection, an archive, archaeological, and artifact collection that documents the history of the Hanford Site from 1945-1990. He also directs the Hanford Oral History Project and related projects focused on the Black and Latinx communities of the Mid-Columbia. He is a frequent collaborator with the National Park Service Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MAPR) as a docent and subject matter expert, and president of the B Reactor Museum Association, a non-profit group that supports interpretative efforts at MAPR. For Washington State University he serves as the Tri-Cities representative for the Roots of Contemporary Issues Program and represents the College of Arts and Sciences on the Resident Faculty Organization at WSU Tri-Cities.
He, along with Dr. Robert Bauman, is a co-editor and co-author of two books in the Hanford Histories series, Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland to 1943 and Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region. His current research projects focus on early waste management decisions at Hanford and the history of the early Cold War.
Robert earned his Master's in Public History (2014) from Washington State University and a B.A. in History from the University of Hawaii Hilo (2011).
Robert Bauman is a Professor of History and Academic Director of Arts and Sciences at Washington State University Tri-Cities. Bauman is an award-winning scholar whose research and teaching interests are in 20th Century U.S. social policy, religion, and race in the American West.
Job Titles:
- Academic Coordinator / Instructor
Blackwell taught courses on South Asia and world history and was the former director of the Asia Program at Washington State University.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Chair, 2012 - 2013
Jackie received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1981. Peterson taught Native American, North American, and public history at WSU Vancouver. She curated and directed a 7,000-square-foot traveling museum exhibition funded by NEH titled Sacred Encounters: The Society of Jesus and the Indians of the Northwest and her publications include Sacred Encounters: Father De Smet and the Indians of the Rocky Mountain West (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993) and The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Metis in North America, ed., with Jennifer S.H. Brown (University of Manitoba Press, 1991).
Jerry received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1971 and began teaching at WSU that year. During his tenure, he taught the history of science and technology and early Britain. Jerry ‘s articles have appeared in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Isis, Osiris, the British Journal for the History of Science, Technology and Culture, and Ambix. He has served as the editor of The Plutonium Story: The Journals of Professor Glenn T. Seaborg, 1939-1946 (Battelle Press, 1994) and recently co-authored a book with departmental colleague Richard Hume, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor, Career Track
JoAnn is a cultural historian of the transnational twentieth century. She received her PhD in History from Northern Illinois University in 2020. She earned a B.A. degree (Summa Cum Laude) at NIU in 2012 in History and Anthropology, with a minor in Southeast Asian Studies, and an M.A degree in Anthropology at Emory University in 2014.
JoAnn joined the Department of History at Washington State University, Vancouver as an Assistant Professor in fall 2020 and will be teaching in the RCI (Roots of Contemporary Issues) program. A cultural historian of transnational exchange and migration, sports, youth, women's history, and processes of decolonization, JoAnn has a particular interests in oral history, and visual and material culture. Her dissertation, "Modern Mandala: A Transnational History of Southeast Asian Youth from Burma, Malaya and Thailand, 1950-1970," focuses on 20th century processes of decolonization, higher education, sports, and the transnational migrations of Southeast Asians in the United States and Britain.
Cultural history of transnational exchange and migration, sports, youth, women's history, and processes of decolonization
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Career Track
Dr. Dodson earned his Ph.D in history from the University of New Mexico in 2015. He earned his MA in history from The University of North Carolina, Charlotte and he holds a BA in history from North Carolina A&T State University. He is an instructor the Roots of Contemporary Issues (RCI) Global History Program at Washington State University. He is the author of Fanáticos, Exiles, and Spies: Revolutionary Failures on the US-Mexico Border, 1923-1930, (Texas A&M University Press, 2019).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director
- Assistant Director, Roots of Contemporary Issues Program Associate Professor
- Associate Professor, Career Track
Katy Whalen began teaching in the Roots of Contemporary Issues program in 2012. She has most recently developed and teaches an innovative approach to the RCI course entitled "The U.S. West in the World." The course retains the philosophy and pedagogical approach of RCI, but adds the dimension of studying the U.S. West through a global history approach. This challenges students to consider how the local is interconnected to the global, and how their personal connection to place have been informed by history that might seem far removed from them, but is actually an integral part of their present realities.
In the Spring of 2017, Dr. Whalen won the first ever Global Campus Excellence in Teaching Award for her efforts in providing quality education to online WSU students. In the same year she became the Curriculum Coordinator for the RCI program, where she has overseen the training of the teaching assistants that work with RCI undergraduate students and has mentored in-coming postdoctoral fellows. During the 2017-2018 academic year she served as a Provost's Distinguished Teaching Fellow, working toward improving student engagement through innovative digital platforms. In Fall 2019, Whalen will become Assistant Director of the RCI program.
Dr. Whalen's scholarly interests explore the intersections of race, labor, and immigration in the American. West. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Immigrant Oyster: Japanese on Washington's Tidelands and the Creation of a Trans-Pacific Industry. This work examines the central role that Japanese immigrant and Japanese American oyster laborers in Washington State played in creating and facilitating transnational networks in the mid-20th century that moved the Pacific Northwest more fully into the economic and geo-political world of the larger Pacific.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Career Track
Ken Faunce joined the faculty at Washington State University in 2001 as part of the World Civilizations program. In 2012, he was part of the design team for the innovative Roots of Contemporary Issues program and piloted several issues in the new program. Faunce has received several teaching awards at WSU including, the President's Distinguished Teaching Award for Career-Track Faculty (2022), the Richard Law Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (2016), Common Reading Excellence Award (2014), Martin Luther King Distinguished Service Award for Faculty (2014), First Year Focus/Living Communities Excellence Award (2013).
Faunce earned his Ph.D. in History & Historical Archeology from the University of Idaho in 2000. He received a Master's in History (1992) and a Master's in Anthropology (1992) from New Mexico State University. He worked for seven years as a historian and archeologist at Fort Bliss, Texas. Along with four other current and former members of the RCI faculty, Faunce authored Heavy Traffic: The Global Drug Trade in Historical Perspective in 2020 for Oxford University Press. His main areas of research are nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. history with an emphasis on globalization. His current primary areas of research are gender studies, race/ethnicity, and the history of drugs.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Graduate Studies Director
LeRoy Ashby's book, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830, was released in paperback, with a new introduction, in 2012. He was the guest editor of a special edition on Popular Culture in the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History (April 2010). His essay, "The Church Committee's History and Relevance," was published in Russell Miller (ed.), U. S. National Security, Intelligence and Democracy: From the Church Committee to the War on Terror (Routledge, 2008).
Margaret lives in Vancouver, British Columbia and is busy with a range of volunteer work at home and abroad. In Vancouver she guides school tours as a docent at the Vancouver Art Gallery and works with elementary school students at a nearby public school, giving one-on-one reading practice to grade 1 students and doing whatever is helpful for a grade 4/5 teacher, most recently arithmetic remedial work. Once or twice a year she volunteers at schools in the Indian sub-continent, commonly in the Himalayas. Recent assignments have been in Sikkim, Assam, and Himachal Pradesh. In November 2013 she will be in a remote Nepalese village. Occasionally she is simply a tourist, for example in the Utah canyon country and in tribal northeast India.
Roger and Mary retired at the end of the 2006 spring semester. They are enjoying their new life and homes on the Hawaiian island of Molokaíi and at Port Angeles, Washington, with plans to visit various destinations around the world.
Roger joined the department in 1968. During his 39 years of service, he taught Renaissance and Reformation, published 4 books, received several teaching awards, and served as chair of the department from 1993 to 2005.
Mary came to WSU in 1984 to pursue a doctorate in Latin American history. After her career as a graduate student, she remained in the department as a senior instructor. She developed popular courses on the history of world trade and food, co-edited one book, and also received a number of teaching awards.
Job Titles:
- Instructor
- Assistant Professor, Career Track
- Post Doctoral Fellow in the Roots of Contemporary Issues Program
Dr. Ellis is an instructor in the Roots of Contemporary Issues program at Washington State University. She graduated in May 2016 from the University of New Mexico with a doctorate in Latin American History specializing in the histories of labor, gender, and disability in Argentina. Her manuscript, "Dignified Labors: Work, Gender, and Blindness in Buenos Aires, 1890-1942" dissects the ways in which gender became an integral mechanism by which blind and sighted activists came to separate dignified labor for the blind from charity. The manuscript draws from Dr. Ellis's dissertation, "‘Basically Intelligent:' The Blind, Intelligence, and Gender in Argentina, 1880-1939." Her dissertation examined the ways that blind leaders and sighted advocates for the blind attempted to differentiate the blind as "safe" in an era of eugenic claims about the dangers of inherited disability.
Richard received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1969. His areas of specialty are the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. Richard also taught American surveys and courses on the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras. Richard ‘s articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. Hume co-edited, with F.N. Boney (University of Georgia) and Rafia Zafar (University of Michigan), God Made Man, Man Made Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh (Mercer University Press, 1990). He has recently co-authored a book with departmental colleague Professor Jerry B. Gough, Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. in Ancient History from Michigan State University in 1973 and started teaching at WSU the following year. During his tenure, Williams taught courses on the history of ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe. He is interested in the use of electronic presentations in the classroom and has remodeled his lecture classes into PowerPoint presentations. Williams is also the Webmaster for the Whitman County Historical Society. Williams received the President's Faculty Excellence Award for Instruction in 1992 and has received two NEH Summer Institute Awards. His most recent article (co-authored with his wife, Burma P. Williams), "Finger Numbers in the Greco-Roman World and Early Middle Ages," was published in Isis (December 1995). The Williamses' current research focuses on Roman mathematics and computing. Dr. Williams now resides with his wife, Burma, in Spokane, WA.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Career Track
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Director
Education
Ph.D., University of California, Riverside, 2002
Dr. Staab taught history courses primarily related to the Middle East and world civilizations until 2009. His interest in the Middle East started in 1965 when he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkey. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1980, with a focus on Middle East studies, Turkish and Islamic history. His recent research interests focused on social and cultural 19th-century Istanbul.
Dr. Booth specializes in the history of the US in the nineteenth century and early twentieth up to World War I. His two primary interests are in Indigenous and military history. He teaches the early US history survey to 1877, Civil War & Reconstruction, US military history survey, and courses for history majors. He is also part of the WSU Native Programs faculty and teaches a special course for the Tribal Nation Building Program, which focuses on the training of future tribal leaders. In 2019-2020, Dr. Booth served as a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow based in Kolkata, India. Dr. Booth (Keahu) is a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe in NW Washington.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Career Track
Professor Kale teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th-century Europe, modern France, and postwar Europe. His research focuses on modern French history, where much of his work addresses the various strains of conservative ideology along with the intellectual, social, and politics life of 19th-century elites.
Professor Kale retired from WSU-Pullman in 2023 after a thirty-two year appointment. His research and teaching focused on 19th-century French and European history. He published two books, numerous articles, and contributed to a number of collections. Kale taught courses across the curriculum, including lower division, upper division, and graduate courses, from the French Revolution to Postwar Europe. He served as Director of Graduate Studies for 10 years and was department chair in 2009 and from 2015-2019.
Sue Armitage lives in Portland, Oregon. In 2010, she and Laurie Mercier published Speaking History (Palgrave Macmillan), a collection of oral history excerpts illuminating U.S. history since 1865. She remains a coauthor of the US history textbook Out of Many now in its eighth edition. Most recently, in October 2015, she published Shaping the Public Good: Women Making History in the Pacific Northwest, which presents a new view of the history of the Pacific Northwest and how women of all races and ethnicities created it.
Job Titles:
- Research Grant, Special Collections Library, University of Southern California, 2014
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Clinical Associate Professor
- Department Chair
- Faculty Advisor for History Club
- Graduate Studies Director
- of Race, Empire, Immigration, Capitalism, and the Environment in US and World
- of Religious Persecution in Medieval Central Europe and History of Urban Culture, Society, and Environment
- Professor
- Secondary Teacher Education, World History, European Medieval History and Roman History
History of religious persecution in medieval Central Europe and history of urban culture, society, and environment
History of race, empire, immigration, capitalism, and the environment in US and world history
Education
· PhD, Michigan State University
· BA and MA, University of Vermont