Welcome New History Department Faculty

 

 

Dr. Edith Chen | Assistant Professor

I am a historian of the premodern Islamic world and the Mongol Empire, specifically of the polity known as the Ilkhanate. My interests include Islamic history, legal history, and the transmission of people and ideas across Eurasia. I am interested in those moments in history where different peoples were brought into interaction with one another and the consequences of such encounters. While focusing on the Middle East and the Persianate world, I also apply a global perspective to medieval history and when investigating the connections between different parts of Eurasia – specifically between the Islamic world, the Central Asian steppes, and East Asia, and how these connections affected societies, law, and culture. I draw on local histories written in Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.

Fall 2024 Courses: HIST 4410: Arabian Days Caliphates   HIST 4200: The Mongols

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Dr. Dwain Coleman | Assistant Professor

Dr. Dwain Coleman is an assistant professor of history studying the history of African Americans, the Civil War era, the environment, Latter-day Saints, and Native Americans. He is currently working on a book that examines how Black Civil War veterans and their families utilized the political capital of Black military service to redefine American citizenship in their fight to secure equal rights and build communities. In addition, he is writing a chapter on the history of Afro-Native studies for a textbook on Native American and Indigenous Studies entitled An Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies to be published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Dr. Coleman is also the co-director of the Iowa Colored Conventions Digital Project, which examines the transformative 19th-century national civil rights movement known as the colored conventions movement in Iowa.

 

Fall 2024 Courses: HIST 3730: Civil War & Reconstruction

 

 

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Dr. Annie Greene | Assistant Professor

Dr. Annie Greene is Assistant Professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Utah. Her scholarship focuses on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century cultural and intellectual production in the Ottoman Arab provinces in general, and in Iraq in particular. Her current book project examines multilingual press networks, neoclassical poetry, and Ottoman civic participation as part of the Nahda (Arab renaissance) in Iraq. She is also interested in gender histories of the Islamic world, print histories, and histories of nondominant religious communities. 

 

 

Fall 2024 Courses: HIST 3398: History of the Middle East 1798 - 1914   HIST 3910: History of Israel & Palestine

 

 

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Dr. Daniela Samur | Assistant Professor

I am a historian of modern Latin America and am broadly interested in the relation between culture and power, spatial history and theory, and in ways of connecting history and fiction. In my research, I focus on everyday state formation, the social relations of production, exchange, and consumption of mundane objects, material culture, and urban worlds. My current book project Binding the State: Bogotá’s World of Prints is a social history of prints, the materiality of state formation, and the making of urban spaces from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The book’s main argument is that books, prints, and paper forms were the material basis on which the operation and articulation of the Colombian state-system depended. My second book project, which is about the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages, examines state-led projects of social engineering and the geographical hierarchies of state formation in the modern Andes.

Fall 2024 Courses: HIST 4300: Space & Politics in Modern Latin America   HIST 3910: Urban Latin America