M.A. Faculty

Faculty & Areas of Specialization

Ibrahim Al-Marashi  

Associate Professor of History
Middle Eastern History

Degrees: B.A. University of California, Los Angeles; M.A. Georgetown University; Ph.D. University of Oxford

Selected Research: Iraq's Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008); With Alexander Gray, Peace and Conflict: Europe and Beyond (University of Deusto Press, 2006); "Sadrabilia: The Visual Narrative of Muqtada Al-Sadr's Islamist Politics and Insurgency in Iraq", in Rhetoric of the Image: Visual Culture in Modern Muslim Contexts (Indiana Univ. Press, forthcoming).

Fernando Amador II   

Assistant Professor of History
Modern Latin America, Environmental, Cultural, Migration, and Digital History.

Bio: I am a historian of Greater Mexico, writing histories of migration and the environment in the post-1940s era, and I have a strong foundation in the digital humanities and archival studies. My research centers on rural Mexico—especially Los Altos de Jalisco—where I examine how emigrants maintain social, cultural, and economic ties to their hometowns while reshaping communities in Mexico and the United States. By situating local histories within transnational frameworks, my work highlights how mobility, place-making, and environmental change have shaped Mexican lives across regions. A central component of my scholarship is the use of digital historical methods, particularly Historical GIS, to track spatial change over time and visualize patterns of migration and environmental transformation. This work has been supported by a grant from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

My fieldwork led me to become an “accidental archivist” after organizing the archive of a small town in Los Altos de Jalisco, an experience that sparked a broader commitment to community archives. This engagement later expanded through a grant from the British Library to support archival initiatives in the region. I am enthusiastic about teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students interested in the history of Greater Mexico and Latin America, the Mexican experience in the United States, migration and environment, oral history, the digital humanities, commodities, and the intersection of archival practice and historical scholarship.

Degrees: PhD, Stony Brook University

Selected Research: “Mexican Food History in the Big Apple: Snapshot from the Field on The Mexican Restaurants of New York City StoryMap,” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts & Cultures (co-author, forthcoming) “Challenges and Esri’s Field Maps in Rural Historical GIS,” IEHS Online, Not From Here (June 10, 2024). “The Equestrian Suburb of Latine Los Angeles.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2023), no. 3. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. “Archival Structures” AHA’s Perspectives Daily, (Summer 2022).

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Darel Engen

Professor of History and Department chair
Ancient World, Ancient Greece and Rome, Film, Social and Economic

Degrees: B.A. UCLA; M.A. UCLA; Ph.D. UCLA

Selected Research: Honor and Profit: Athenian Trade Policy and the Economy and Society of Greece, 415-307 B.C.E. (U of Michigan, forthcoming); "Ancient Greenbacks: Athenians Owls, the Law of Nikophon, and the Greek Economy" Historia 54, (2005) 4: 359-381; "Trade, Traders, and the Economy of Athens in the Fourth Century B.C.E." in Prehistory and History: Ethnicity, Class, and Political Economy (Black Rose, 2001).

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Suzanna Krivulskaya

Degrees: B.A. LCC International University; M.A. Yale Divinity School; Ph.D. University of Notre Dame

Selected Publications: “Queer Rumors: Protestant Ministers, Unnatural Deeds, and Church Censure in the Twentieth-Century United States,” Religion and American Culture (2021); "The Itinerant Passions of Protestant Pastors: Ministerial Elopement Scandals in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Press," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2020); "Networks of Piety and Slavery among Late Eighteenth-Century Rural Maryland Catholics," Current Research in Digital History (2019); "Paths of Duty: Religion, Marriage, and the Press in a Transatlantic Scandal, 1835-1858," Journal of American Studies (2019).

Graduate Courses Offered: HIST 502: History and Applied Media Technology; HIST 512: History Teaching Practicum

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Alan Malfavon

Assistant Professor of History
Afro-Mexican, Greater Caribbean, Atlantic World, Veracruz, Mexican and African Diaspora Histories

Degrees: B.A CSU Northridge; M.A & Ph.D. University of California, Riverside

Research: My first book, Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Making of Mexico (under contract with the University of Alabama Press), examines the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its Sotavento hinterland to rethink the transition from the late colonial to the early national period. Drawing on correspondence, military reports, notarial, ecclesiastical, and judicial archives, my research argues that Afro-Mexicans were central actors in the socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its borderlands, challenging narratives that marginalize Black participation in Mexican state formation.

More broadly, my research situates Mexico within the Atlantic World and Greater Caribbean through the lens of the African diaspora, combining social history and critical archival methodologies to interrogate the silences that have obscured Afro-Mexican agency. By foregrounding the voices and practices of Afro-descendants, I seek to revise dominant narratives of mestizaje and national identity and to highlight the continuities linking colonial and national histories. My current and future projects extend this work by exploring Veracruz’s connections to the Greater Caribbean culturally, the connections between Veracruz and New Orleans during and after the Spanish colonial period, and the preservation of late-colonial archival sources from Veracruz.  

Articles Malfavon, Alan. “Loyalty, Subjecthood, and Violence: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Early Mexican War of Independence, 1812–1813.” The Latin Americanist 67, no. 4 (2023): 357–98

Chapters in Edited Volumes “Power and Belonging: The Rise, Fall, and Erasure of José Antonio Martínez in Veracruz’s Early War for Independence.”  In Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century: Slavery, Freedom, and the Writing of History., edited by Theodore W. Cohen and Nicole von Germeten, 88-113. Cambridge University Press, 2025.  

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Kimber Quinney

Associate Professor of History
U.S. foreign relations; U.S.-Italian relations; Italian fascism; ideology and foreign policy; immigration and foreign policy

Degrees: B.A. History Lewis and Clark College; M.A. International Relations School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins; M.A. and Ph.D. History UC Santa Barbara

Selected Research: “Teaching the History of the Cold War through the Lens of Immigration” The History Teacher Vol. 51, No. 4 (August 2018): 661-696; “’Thank God He’s on Our Side’: A Roundtable in Celebration of the Scholarship of David F. Schmitz” (forthcoming, Pacific Historical Review, November 2019); Co-editor and contributor, Understanding and Teaching Recent American History from Reagan to Trump (forthcoming, The Harvey Goldberg Series for Understanding and Teaching History, University of Wisconsin Press)

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Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Professor of History
Haiti/France, Colonialism, Film and Historical Video Games, Atlantic World, Jewish, Gender

Degrees: B.A. University of Pennsylvania; M.A. Stanford; Ph.D. Stanford

Selected Research: Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi, 2021); The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (University of California Press, 2005); Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012).

Description: Prof. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall earned a B.A. in intellectual history and political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in history from Stanford University. Before coming to CSUSM, she was Lucius N. Littauer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2000, Prof. Sepinwall was one of thirty early-career scholars selected to participate in the International Seminar on the Atlantic World at Harvard University. Her research specialties include the French and Haitian Revolutions, modern Haitian history, Slavery and Film, French colonialism, modern Jewish history, history and video games, the history of gender, and the history of ideas of racism and antiracism. Her current research centers on antiracist Jewish writers in Hollywood in the mid-20th century.

Sepinwall is the 2023 recipient of the California State University's top honor for teaching, the systemwide Wang Family Excellence Award for Outstanding Faculty Teaching. She is also a past winner of CSUSM’s Harry E. Brakebill Outstanding Professor Award (the university’s top honor for faculty, 2014), as well as of the CSUSM President's Award for Innovation in Teaching (2004).

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Citlali Sosa-Riddell

Assistant Professor of History
19th century Southwest borderlands

Degrees:Ph.D. UCLA

Selected Research: Her research bridges the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, Latinx studies, Latin American independence history, and intellectual history to examine the indigenous and mixed-race populations and their engagement with national rights.She received her Ph.D. in History at UCLA in 2020.  Her book project explores how Mexican Californios made claims for their rights to American citizenship and equality based on Latin American notions of race, citizenship, and the struggles for nationhood.  She also writes about Latino food cultures in the 20th century and enjoys engaging with her students about the history of indigenous and Latino foods.  She also hosts a podcast, The Discursive Power of Rock en Español and the Desire for Democracy and it is available on Spotify

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Antonio M. Zaldívar

Associate Professor
Medieval Europe

Degrees: B.A. Florida State University; M.A. Western Michigan University; Ph.D. University of California Los Angeles

Selected Publications: Iberia, the Mediterranean, & the World in the Medieval & Early Modern Periods. Edited by Thomas W. Barton, Marie A. Kelleher, and Antonio M. Zaldívar. Special Issue of the journal Pedralbes, vol. 40 (2020), 47-208; “La lengua como instrumento de diplomacia en la correspondencia entre las cancillerías reales de Aragón y Mallorca, 1341-1349.” In Diplomacia y desarrollo del Estado en la Corona de Aragón (Siglos XIV-XVI). Ed. by Concepción Villanueva Morte. Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2020, 345-58; “James I and the Rise of Codeswitching Diplomacy in Thirteenth-Century Catalonia." Viator 47:3 (2016), 189-208; “Patricians’ Embrace of the Dominican Convent of St. Catherine in Thirteenth-Century Barcelona,” Medieval Encounters 18 (2012), 174-206.

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