Special Projects
Contacts
Department of History faculty are involved in a range of collaborative projects that seek to explore the world from the vantage point of multiple historical fields and academic disciplines.
Public History Working Group
Under the direction of Rhae Lynn Barnes, the Public History Working Group provides advanced graduate students with professional development opportunities and training in digital technology, media, quantitative literacy, and editing for online publishing. The goal of this working group is to develop skills that could be used to acquire jobs both within and outside the academy.
Defortification of the German City
Yair Mintzker specializes in German-speaking Central Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified places.
Learn more about the book that came out of the project.
Environmental History, Digitization, and GIS
Emmanuel Kreike focuses on the intersection of war / violence / population movements, environment, and society. He is interested in how violence and forced migration destroy human landscapes and how people rebuild lives and livelihoods in often alien environments. Kreike combines models and methodologies from the humanities and social sciences with approaches from environmental science and forestry.
Learn more about Kreike's work.
Political and Social Histories in Latin America
Robert Karl works on modern Latin American history, focusing on relations between states and citizens in the 20th century. His research concentrates on the political history of mid-20th century Colombia, particularly practices of peace and violence. Karl's other interests include U.S.-Latin American relations, international history, and the application of GIS and other approaches in the digital humanities.
The Roaring 'Twenties
Emily Thompson is a historian of sound. By offering a website dedicated to the sounds of New York City circa 1930, her aim is not just to present sonic content, but to evoke the original contexts of those sounds, to help us better understand that context as well as the sounds themselves. The goal is to recover the meaning of sound, to undertake a historicized mode of listening that tunes our modern ears to the pitch of the past.