Welcome New History Department Faculty

 

 

Dr. Rohan Chatterjee | Assistant Professor

I am a historian of Peru, modern Latin America, and the environment. My current book project traces the dramatic expansion and intensification of peasant agriculture over the twentieth century. Today most people think of peasant agriculture as an increasingly marginal activity, an anachronistic holdover form an agrarian past doomed to disappear. And yet, following a period of unprecedented demographic growth, I show how the Peruvian countryside filled with a historic number of people who began to farm at a previously unimaginable scale, upending the ecological status quo in the process. In so doing, this book upends a series of received wisdoms in Peruvian, Latin American and environmental History. 

Fall 2025 Courses: INTL 3000: Foundational International Area Studies

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Dr. Catalina Mackaman-Lofland | Assistant Professor

I am a historian of modern France and its empire, with a particular focus on French colonialism in North Africa, higher education, and the history of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences. My current book project, Algeria’s French University: Research and Resistance at the Faculté des lettres d’Alger, 1930-1965, examines the social, intellectual, and political history of France’s leading center for social scientific research on North Africa in the first half of the twentieth century: the humanities college of the University of Algiers. By bridging the colonial and national periods of Algerian history, I argue that academic research on North Africa proved an unreliable and unwieldy aid to not only French colonial projects, but also Algerian nation-building efforts after the country won independence from France in 1962.
Fall 2025 Courses: HIST 4260: French Colonial Empire from New France ot the Algerian WarHIST 4990: Senior Seminar

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Dr. Wenrui Zhao | Assistant Professor

Wenrui Zhao is a historian of science and medicine, with a focus on early modern northern Europe and its connections with the wider world, particularly Asia. Her research explores the intersection between arts and sciences and the conditions under which knowledge of nature was produced across cultures. Her first book project, The Eye and the Art of Medicine in Early Modern Germany, examines the ways in which artisans and surgeons, through their investigations of the eye’s anatomy, physiology, and pathology, shaped new ways of seeing. Her second book project, German Artisans in the East Indies, studies the German artisanal and scientific practitioners – such as surgeons, miners, and painters – who traveled to Southeast Asia in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. Wenrui is also committed to excellence in teaching and learning. She has extensive experience in implementing active learning strategies across a wide range of history courses.

Fall 2025 Courses: HIST 3100: HISTORians Craft