People
Staff
Administrative Coordinator
Patty Cañas Fernandez
Markstein Hall 226
E-mail: history@csusm.edu
Fax: (760) 750-4152
Department Chair
Dr. Darel Engen
Markstein Hall 261
E-mail: dengen@csusm.edu
Graduate Coordinator
Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
Markstein Hall 251
E-mail: sepinwal@csusm.edu
Faculty
Patrick Adamiak
Lecturer
Middle Eastern History
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 (New York: Routledge, 2008); "Iraq’s Gulf Policy and Regime Security from the Monarchy
to the post-Baathist Era,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 36:3 (Fall 2009): 449-461; With Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (New York: Routledge, 2017); With Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., A Concise History of the Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2018); "Demobilization minus Disarmament and Reintegration:
Iraq’s Security Sector from the US Occupation to the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 15:4 (2021): 441-458; “Iraq’s popular mobilisation units: intra-sectarian rivalry
and Arab Shi’a mobilisation from the 2003 invasion to Covid-19 pandemic,” International Politics (June 2021): 1-20.
Courses Offered: Hist 102: World Civilization 1500-present; Hist 380: History of the Middle East 600-1700;
Hist 384: Women and the Middle East; Hist 385: History of the Middle East 1700-present;
Hist 389: The History of Pandemics; Hist 300-11: The Spanish Past & the Modern Middle
East.
Fernando Amador II
Assistant Professor of History
Modern Latin America, Environmental, Cultural, Migration, and Digital History.
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).
Courses Offered: Modern US, Culture & Identity in Latin America
Jonathan Bechtol
Lecturer
United States History
Maria Carreras
Lecturer
Modern Spain, Europe, World History
Degrees: Ph.D. UCSD
Darel Engen
Associate Professor of History
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. (University of Michigan); "Ancient Greenbacks: Athenians Owls, the Law of Nikophon,
and the Greek Economy" Historia 54, no. 4 (2005): 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).
Suzanna Krivulskaya
Associate Professor of History
Modern U.S., Gender, Media, Religion, Sexuality, Digital History
Degrees: B.A. LCC International University; M.A. Yale Divinity School; Ph.D. University of
Notre Dame
Courses Offered: HIST 130: U.S. History 1500-1877; HIST 301: Historical Methods and Writing; HIST 332:
Women in the United States; HIST 343: Religion in the United States; HIST 502: History
and Applied Media Technology; HIST 512: History Teaching Practicum.
Selected Publications: “Queer Rumors: Protestant Ministers, Unnatural Deeds, and Church Censure in the Twentieth-Century
United States,” Religion and American Culture 31, no. 1 (2021): 1-32; "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 19, no. 1 (2020): 77-95; "Networks of Piety and Slavery among Late Eighteenth-Century Rural Maryland Catholics,"
Current Research in Digital History 2 (2019); "Paths of Duty: Religion, Marriage, and the Press in a Transatlantic Scandal, 1835-1858,"
Journal of American Studies 53, no. 3 (2019): 636-662.
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, focuses on the understudied
Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its hinterland of Sotavento (Leeward) and
uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial
and national period. It argues how Afro-Mexicans facilitated, complicated, and participated
in multiple socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its borderlands.
My research resituates Mexico’s socio-political, cultural, and economic networks with
the Atlantic World and the Greater Caribbean, and it dissects and problematizes those
networks by centering the Black and Afro-Mexican experience. My research interrogates
and subverts archival silences that have erased Black and Afro-Mexican agency from
narratives of Mexican identity and nation-state formation, seeking to diversify these
narratives by foregrounding the voices, perspectives, and actions of Afro-descendants.
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.” Forthcoming in 2025 in Coming into View: Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Courses Offered: Mexico Past and Present & History 1500-1877
Contact Alan Malfavon
Melissa McGuire
Lecturer
United States History
Reuben Mekenye
Associate Professor of History
Southern and Modern Africa
Degrees: B.A. National University of Lesotho; M.A. University of Wisconsin, La Cross; Ph.D.
UCLA
Selected Research: "Re-Examination of the Lekhotla la Bafo's Challenge to Imperialism in Lesotho, 1919-1966,"
forthcoming in the International Journal of African Historical Studies; "The African Role in the Failure of South African Colonialism, 1902-1910: The Case
of Lesotho," accepted for Publication in UFAHAMU: Journal of African Studies; "My Friend Across The Fence," and "Mother," Ufahamu: Journal of the African Studies 3 (Fall 1989): 123-24.
Robert Miller
Lecturer
United States History
Carmen Nava
Professor of History
Latin America, Brazil, Gender, Chicana/o
Degrees: Ph.D. UCLA
Currently assigned outside of the department
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).
Miriam Riggs
Lecturer
Brazil, Chicana/o History
Degrees: Ph.D. UCSD
Patricia Seleski
Professor of History
Modern Europe, British Isles, International Studies
Degrees: B.A. Georgetown; M.A. Oxford; M.A. Stanford; Ph.D. Stanford
Selected Research: "A Mistress, a Mother and a Murderess Too: Elizabeth Brownrigg and the Social Construction
of an Eighteenth Century Mistress," in Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the 18th Century (Ann Arbor: Univeristy of Michigan Press, 2003); "Domesticity is in the Streets: Elizabeth
Fenning, the London Crowd and the Politics of the Private Sphere," in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1850 (New York: Macmillan, 2001); "Identity, Immigration and the State: Irish Immigrants
and English Settlement in London, 1790-1840," in Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia and Society in Modern Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
Professor of History
Haiti, France, Colonialism, Atlantic World, Jewish, Gender, Historical Film and Video
Games
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); Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012; pprbk, 2021); The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (University of California Press, 2005); "Atlantic Revolutions," in Encyclopedia of the Modern World, ed. Peter Stearns (Oxford University Press, 2008); “History is Too Important to Leave to Hollywood: Colonialism, Genocide, and Memory
in the Films of Raoul Peck,” in Toni Pressley-Sanon and Sophie Saint-Just, eds., Raoul
Peck: Power, Politics and the Cinematic Imagination (Lexington Books, 2015); Still Unthinkable? The Haitian Revolution and the Reception of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s
Silencing the Past,” Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 75-103.
Courses Offered: HIST 102: World Civilizations, 1500-present; HIST 301: Historical Methods and Writing; HIST 324: Enlightenment and European Society; HIST 325: Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1989; HIST 381: Comparative French Colonialism, from the Caribbean to Indochina; HIST 382: Travel and Contact in the Early Modern World; HIST 383: Women and Jewish History; HIST 386: Haiti and World History; HIST 460: Senior Research Seminar in World History; HIST 591: Advanced Seminar in World History; HIST 620: Directed Thesis Research, Writing, and Media Presentation.
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
Andy Strathman
Lecturer
United States History
Degrees: Ph.D. UCSD
Shad Thielman
Lecturer
United States History
Degrees: B.A. & M.A. CSUSM
Selected Research: “Dead Space: Place Attachment and Cemeteries,” in Place Meaning and Attachment: Authenticity, Heritage and Preservation, eds. Dak Kopec and AnnaMarie Bliss (New York: Routledge, 2020), 92-103; “Death by Numbers: How Vietnam War and Coronavirus Changed the Way We Mourn,” The Conversation, May 15, 2020; Digital History project: “No One Here Gets Out Alive: Commodifying Death in the Twentieth Century."
Antonio M. Zaldívar
Associate Professor and Department chair
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.
Courses Offered: HIST 101: World History to 1500 AD; HIST 301: Historical Methods; HIST 313a: Early
Medieval Europe; HIST 313b: Late Medieval Europe; HIST 314: The Crusades; HIST 315:
Church Reform, Heresy, and Witchcraft in Medieval and Early Modern Europe; HIST 317: Renaissance and Reformation Europe; HIST 400: Medieval Spain: A Land of Three Religions; HIST 512: Teaching History: Theory
and Practice; HIST 699c: Independent Study.
Faculty Emeriti
Jeffrey Charles
Professor Emeritus (retired)
Joan Gunderson
Professor Emerita (retired)
Ann Elwood
Professor Emerita (retired)
Anne Lombard
Professor Emerita (retired)
Patty Seleski
Professor Emerita
Jill Watts
Professor Emerita (retired)
Zhiwei Xiao
Professor Emeritus (retired)
