Meet the History Department's Newest Faces

Mira Green received her PhD from the University of Washington in 2015. After she received her PhD, she was a Lecturer in Ancient History in the History Department at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on questions of hierarchy and power that are intertwined with ideas about status, gender, food, daily routines and household technologies, and the material expressions of mastery in the Roman world. She has recently finished a book manuscript that examines Roman attitudes towards bodies that eat, digest, and excrete, and the practices associated with these most basic somatic demands. She has also published articles on the sexual lives of female and boy slaves in ancient Rome and the embodied experience of cooks in Roman homes.

 Mira is excited to return to the History Department at the University of Utah.  Having received her MA from the History Department at the U, she knows many people already in the department and looks forward to getting know those who have joined it since she left. She also looks forward to working with students at the U, enjoying Salt Lake’s evolving restaurant scene, and hiking in the mountains.

Eric's research and teaching focus on slavery and abolition; eighteenth and nineteenth century American history; science, medicine, technology, and the environment; the Atlantic and Black Atlantic World; and African American history. His first book, The Science of Antislavery: Scientists, Antislavery, and the Myth of Slavery’s Backwardness (Yale University Press, forthcoming), explores how abolitionists used scientific ideas to discredit slavery, and his next book will place slavery at the origins of today’s climate change crisis. His research has been supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at The New York Public Library, The Huntington Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Philosophical Society, among other places. His scholarship has appeared in The Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Studies, and a forthcoming volume of new scholarship on Frederick Douglass to be published by Cambridge University Press. He also contributes to mainstream publications, including The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books. Eric completed postdoctoral fellowships at the African American & African Studies Department at The Ohio State University and the Schomburg Center in Harlem, and received degrees from Columbia University (PhD in History; M.S. in Journalism) and Princeton University (B.A.).

“I’m thrilled to be able to work with the U’s ambitious students and to collaborate with the history department’s highly accomplished faculty. As a teacher, my hope is for students to leave my classroom not simply excited about history, but to feel empowered by the tools I give them to interpret history for themselves. I also believe strongly that academics have important ideas to share with the broader public, and as someone whose research cuts across several disciplines, I am eager to build bridges between the history department and other departments across the university.”