Curricula Vitae in History

Name	Personal Focus	Summary
Christine Ames Professor	Medieval European History, History of Religion	Professor Ames teaches surveys of Medieval Europe and of Western Civilization, as well as more specialized courses on the history of the Middle Ages. She has published several articles, including "Does Inquisition Belong to Religious History?", which appeared in The American Historical Review (February 2005).
Dr. Andrew Berns Associate Professor	Jews of Renaissance Italy	I specialize in the history of the Jews in pre-modern Europe, with a particular focus on the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. My first book, The Bible and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy, was published by Cambridge University Press. It shows how changes in European medicine prompted new readings of the Bible and other classical texts.
Dr. Thomas J Brown Professor	Civil War, Reconstruction era, Cultural and intellectual history	Dr. Thomas Brown teaches U.S. history with special interests in the Civil War and Reconstruction era and in cultural and intellectual history.
Matthew Childs Associate Professor	Latin American and Caribbean History with a focus on race and slavery	My primary research and teaching interests are Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic history with a particular emphasis on the importance of understanding the historical legacies of slavery and racism in shaping the modern world.
Dr. Saskia Coenen Snyder Professor	European Jewish history	Professor Coenen Snyder's interests lie particularly in the relationship between the built environment and Jewish identity formation in nineteenth century Europe. Her first book, a comparative study of synagogue building and synagogue architecture in Amsterdam, London, and Berlin, explores how Jewish religious edifices became central to the public face of Judaism. Coenen Snyder's work thus aims to cross the conceptual boundaries of history, architecture, and urban studies.
Dr. Bobby J. Donaldson Associate Professor		Presently, I am completing a monograph tentatively entitled "New Negroes in the New South: Race, Power, and Ideology in Georgia, 1890-1925." The project critiques the varied and often competing rhetorical, ideological, and political strategies black intellectuals in Georgia employed as they battled white supremacy and negotiated African Americans' precarious "place" in both the South and the nation.
Dr. Kathryn A Edwards Professor	History of religion, popular belief, families, and cities. Frontier life	I teach Renaissance and Reformation European history (c. 1400-1700), with special interests in the history of frontiers, religion, families, and folklore.
Jessica Elfenbein Department Chair/Professor	Urban Studies, Social Entrepreneurship, Community/University Partnership	A belief that history has the power to be a productive tool of community building moved me to become an historian and has informed and enriched my work in the fields of American urban and public history, religious history, and the history of philanthropy. I have published broadly about American urban life, contemporarily and historically, in a variety of formats. I have also undertaken major (and prize winning) public history initiatives and successful grant seeking.
Professor Kent B. Germany Professor	Civil Rights Movement, Presidential Politics, recent US History	Dr. Germany is currently developing documentary history projects that make extensive use of digital technology.
Joshua Grace Associate Professor		I currently teach Hist. 106 (Introduction to African History) and Hist. 352 (Africa Since 1800). I am developing an upper level course called, "Saving Africa: Humanitarianism and Development in Historical Perspective," and another on the history of East Africa and the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Carol E Harrison Professor	History of women and gender in modern Europe, especially France, Religion, secularization and gender	Regularly teaches the survey of European history, women in modern Europe, and the Enlightenment. She teaches a graduate seminar on history and theory and another on women and gender.
Na Sil Heo Assistant Professor	studies of childhood, the cultural Cold War, race, and gender and sexuality	Dr. Na Sil Heo is an Assistant Professor of East Asian History. Her research interests include studies of childhood, the cultural Cold War, race, and gender and sexuality. She is currently completing a book manuscript that examines how childhood was a crucial site of postwar reconstruction and transnational anticommunism in 1950s-1960s South Korea.
Dr. Abner Woody Holton, III Professor	American Revolution, North American Colonial era (from before Columbus to 1776), Economic History	I study the intersection of social history (the everyday lives of ordinary Americans) and traditional political history. I am especially interested in the way founding-era outsiders (especially African Americans, Indians, small farmers, and women of all ranks) affected grand political events such as the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the United States Constitution in 1787.
Sheridan (Wright) Kennedy Assistant Professor	spatial history methods, public history, and the history of public health	S. Wright Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in public-facing spatial history projects, and he uses geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis to study past and present health, environmental, and socioeconomic issues. Professor Kennedy has investigated a wide range of spatial history topics with GIS, including epidemics, streetcar corruption, hurricane recovery, and residential segregation.
Professor Elisabeth Gabrielle Kuenzli Associate Professor	Indigenous political mobilization, Historical images, Historical memory	My work explores the relationship between race, ethnic identity, citizenship, and the formation of the nation state in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bolivia, with important ramifications for contemporary indigenous mobilizations in Bolivia.
Dr. Thomas M. Lekan Professor	Modern German History, Environmental History, Urban Studies	Professor Lekan teaches undergraduate surveys of European civilization and modern Germany, as well as specialized undergraduate courses and seminars on environmental history, the urban experience in modern Europe, and Nazi social history.
Dr. Allison Marsh Associate Professor	history of factory tours in America, history of technology	Dr. Marsh is working with the McKissick Museum on campus to develop several new exhibits. She is also working with the South Carolina Fall Line Consortium on the exhibit From the Pee Dee to the Savannah: Enduring Legacies of South Carolina's Fall Line Region, which will open at the State Museum in September 2009.
Professor Matthew Melvin-Koushki Associate Professor		Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow of History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a philological focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of philosophy and history of the book.
Joseph November Associate Professor	History of Life Sciences and Medicine, History of Computing , Modern American History	Professor November teaches courses in history of the life sciences and medicine, history of computing, and modern American history. He is particularly interested in how developments in information technology and the life sciences have shaped one another.
Dr. Elena A. Osokina Professor	Russian History, Soviet History	Teaches Russian history from the genesis of the East Slavs and the creation of the Russian State to the present.
Dr. James Risk Senior Instructor	scientific policy and practice of the United States Lighthouse Establishment	James Risk came to the University of South Carolina as a graduate student in 2011. Family kept him in Columbia after graduation and he joined the History Department faculty as an Instructor in 2017. He teaches undergraduate surveys in the History of Science and Technology and United States History. In 2015, his teaching was recognized by the History Department when they honored him with the John A. and Annie Rice Excellence in Teaching Award.
Benjamin Schaffer Instructor
Adam M Schor Associate Professor	Ancient Mediterrnean History, Roman Empire, Roman-era religious communities	I am currently working on several aspects of religious conflict and community in the Eastern Mediterranean between the second and sixth centuries. I generally use anthropological and sociological theory to examine the links between what ancient people claimed to believe and whom they knew. At present, I am finishing a project on the formation of competing religious parties among Christian clerics in the fourth and fifth centuries.
Lauren Sklaroff-Lamey Professor	20th Century American History, Cultural and Intellectual History, Racial Identity in the US	My new project is a biography of singer, vaudevillian, and cabaret superstar Sophie Tucker.  Tucker rose to celebrity in the 1910s and 1920s and continued to perform in venues across the U. S. and in Europe until her death in 1966. My interests in Tucker address my larger fascination with the relationship between the culture industry and the construction of racial and ethnic identities.
Dr. Mark Michael Smith Professor	History of American South; slavery; plantation economies, History of senses, US Civil War, Disaster history	Sensory history-a vibrant area of historical inquiry dedicated to examining the roles played by olfaction, hearing, touch, and taste (as well as vision) in shaping the past. My concern is to help restore the full sensory texture of history and examine what the senses in addition to seeing might be able to tell us about historical experience and causation.
Melissa N Stuckey Associate Professor	African American communities and institutions, Black migration movements, early twentieth century Black freedom struggles	Melissa N. Stuckey joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina as Associate Professor of History and Director of Public History in 2023. Prior to coming to USC, Stuckey held faculty positions at the University of Oregon and Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. Stuckey teaches a variety of courses in Public History and African American History. She earned her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University and her A.B. from Princeton University.
Dr. Patricia Ann Sullivan Professor	African American History, Race Relations, Civil Rights Movement	Dr. Patricia Sullivan is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She teaches courses in Twentieth Century United States History, with particular interest in the areas of African American history and the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
Sarah Waheed Assistant Professor		Sarah Waheed is a specialist of South Asian history, and teaches about medieval, early modern, and modern South Asia. She is a cultural historian who specializes on South Asian Islam in global and local contexts across the India-Pakistan divide. Her approach to the past is transregional and comparative and her scholarship broadly speaks to issues of religion and secularism, colonialism and nationalism, and gender and memory.
Dr. Colin F Wilder Associate Professor	Digital Humanities, Historical network analysis, German intellectual and legal history	I am the associate director of the Center for Digital Humanities at USC. There I design and supervise digital humanities projects. I frequently collaborate with faculty in the humanities departments, computer science and library and information science. As a historian by training, my own interest is especially on using text analysis and network analysis to reground intellectual history, with a particular focus on the history of concepts of freedom, equality and property in European history.
Jeffery Williams Visiting Assistant Professor