People
Staff
Administrative Coordinator
Patty Cañas
Markstein Hall 226
E-mail: history@csusm.edu
Fax: (760) 750-4152
Department Chair
Dr. Antonio Zaldívar
Markstein Hall 232
E-mail: azaldivar@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.
Jonathan Bechtol
Lecturer
United States History
Jeffrey Charles
Associate Professor of History
United States, Urban, Social & Cultural History, Food Studies, California
Degrees: B.A. UC Berkeley; M.A. Johns Hopkins; Ph.D. Johns Hopkins
Selected Research: Service Clubs in American Society: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1993); "Searching for Gold in Guacamole: California
Growers Market the Avocado, 1910-1994" in Food Nations: Selling Tastes in Consumer Societies (New York: Routledge, 2001); "Industrial Films and the Image of Industrial Food,"
presented at Association for the Society for Food and Society Annual Meeting (2005).
Ann Elwood
Lecturer Emerita
Early Modern Europe, History of Animal-Human Relations
Degrees: Ph.D. UCSD
Selected Research: Changes in canine-human relations during the 19th and 20th centuries (in process); Rin-Tin-Tin: The Movie Star (2010), The Dog Park: A Collection of Stories with a Common Cast of Characters (2010); Novellas: See What You Have Done (2011), The Nun, the Priest, and the Tortoise (2011) and A Provencal Mystery (2012).
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).
Michael Henderson
Lecturer
United States History
Richard Ibarra
Lecturer
Late-medieval and Early Modern Iberian World
Degrees: B.A. UC Santa Barbara; M.A. UCLA; C.Phil. UCLA
Selected Publications: “To be buried in Seville: The ambiguous integration of Italian merchants, 1480-1570,”
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 12 no. 3 (October 2020): 404-424; “Burying a Saintly King and His Dynasty: Memory
and Representation in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Castile,” Comitatus 49 (2018).
Suzanna Krivulskaya
Assistant 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.
Julia Lewandoski
Assistant Professor of History
Early America, Native America, Digital History
On leave, AY 2021-2022 at University of Southern California
Degrees: B.A. Harvard; M.A. McGill University; Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Courses Offered: HIST 130: U.S. History 1500-1877; HIST 333: British Empire in the Americas, 1497-1775;
HIST 338b: Native Communities in California from Colonization to the 20th Century;
HIST 346: Development of the American Frontier.
Bio: My current book project explores how small Indigenous nations across North America
exploited imperial transitions to defend land as property in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. I am also at work on a digital companion to the book project, using GIS
to examine how Indigenous property has been mapped and measured. I am broadly interested
in early North America, Native North America, law and legal regimes across empires,
the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds, settler colonialism, and the history of cartography.
My work is also marked by interdisciplinary engagements with Native American and Indigenous
Studies (NAIS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS). I have also worked on several
digital and public-facing projects, including a comprehensive digital atlas of Indigenous
history and culture for the State of California. My research has been supported by
the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Society for Legal History,
the Huntington Library, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
the Harvard Economic History Project, the Bancroft Library, the Canadian Studies Program
at UC Berkeley, and the Louisiana Historical Association.
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: B.A. CSU Northridge; M.A. UCLA; Ph.D. UCLA
Selected Research: Co-editor, Brazil in the Making: Facets of Brazilian National Identity, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006; (authored chapter, "Forging Future Citizens in Brazilian
Public Schools, 1937-1945"); Envisioning Women in Latin American History (under contract with Rowman & Littlefield); "Commemorating Cesar E. Chavez as a Locus
of Latino Identity," article manuscript in progress.
Kimber Quinney
Assistant 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.
David Simpson
Lecturer
Medieval History
Andy Strathman
Lecturer
United States History
Degrees: Ph.D. UCSD
Shad Thielman
Lecturer
United States History
Degrees: BA & MA 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."
Jill Watts
Professor of History
Modern U.S. Social & Cultural, African American, Film, Digital History
Degrees: B.A. UCSD; M.A. UCLA; Ph.D UCLA
Selected Research: The Black Cabinet: The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age
of Roosevelt (Grove Atlantic, 2020); Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2005); Mae West: An Icon in Black and White (Oxford, 2001); God, Harlem U.S.A: The Father Divine Story (University of California, 1992).
Zhiwei Xiao
Professor Emeritus of History
Modern East Asian History
Degrees: B.A. Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China; M.A. Sichuan University, Chengdu,
China; M.A. The College of St. Rose, Albany, NY; Ph.D., University of California,
San Diego
Selected Research: Encyclopedia of Chinese Film (co-authored with Yingjin Zhang), Routeledge, 1998; “For Better or Worse, Don’t Change Your Husband! Remake and Appropriations of American Films in Republican China, 1911-1949” in Lisa
Funnell and Man-fung Yip eds., American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, London and New York: Routledge, 2014, pp. 9-23; “Policing Film in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1905-1923” in Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow eds., The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 452-271; “A Century of America on Chinese Screens” in Journal of American East-Asian Relations, 17:4 (2011): 305-323; “The Reception of American Films in China” in Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen eds., The Interplay of Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema, Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2009, pp. 55-69.
Courses Offered: HIST 101: Critical Thinking in History; HIST 102: World Civilizations, since 1500; HIST 301: Methods & Writing; HIST 360: Classical Asia; HIST 361: Modern East Asia; HIST 362: China and the West; HIST 363: Modern China; HIST 364: Film & Modern Chinese Hist; HIST 365: Modern Japan; HIST 367: Women in China; HIST 460: Seminar in World History; HIST 501: Historical Perspectives on Media.
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
Ann Elwood
Professor Emerita (retired, currently lecturing part-time)
Jeffrey Charles
Professor Emeritus (retired)
Joan Gunderson
Professor Emerita (retired)
Anne Lombard
Professor Emerita (retired)
Patty Seleski
Professor Emerita (currently working part-time)
Jill Watts
Professor Emerita (currently working part-time)
Zhiwei Xiao
Professor Emeritus (currently working part-time)
