The members of the department's faculty do research and teach in and across a variety of fields, defined thematically and methodologically as well as by conventional geographic and chronological boundaries. Just click on one of the names below for information on that member of the faculty.
Ignacio Gallup-Díaz
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Princeton University
Ignacio Gallup-Díaz specializes in the history of the early modern Atlantic World. His courses explore how European conquest and settlement of the Americas, coupled with the forced migration of Africans and the continued presence of Amerindian communities, led to the evolution of complex societies. His recently published monograph, The Door of the Seas and Key to the Universe: Indian Politics and Imperial Rivalry in the Darién 1640-1750, (Columbia University Press), examines the interaction between competing European colonizers and Panamá's Kuna people. The text is published as an electronic book in the Gutenberg-e series of scholarly monographs. Gutenberg-e, a publication project directed by Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association, provides access to its texts on the Internet at gutenberg-e.org. Gallup-Díaz is now at work on research projects that explore the development of autonomous African and indigenous communities in Panamá and Suriname during the period of colonization (1500-1800); the intellectual underpinnings of early English expansion; and poetical depictions of the Spanish attempts to subdue eastern Panamá and its peoples.
E-mail Ignacio Gallup-Díaz :: Ignacio Gallup-Díaz's Web Page
Madhavi Kale
Professor of History on the Helen Taft Manning Fund
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Madhavi Kale is a specialist in British and imperial history. Her teaching includes courses on the British empire (focusing on intersecting cultural, social, economic and political histories of metropolitan Britain, colonial India, and the Anglophone Caribbean), and of British women's history. Her book, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean, examines Indian indentured migration to British Caribbean colonies from the abolition of slavery in the 1830's to 1917. In her current research she is exploring notions of domesticity in 20th-century India including the domestications of film and women's education.
E-mail Madhavi Kale
Kalala Ngalamulume
Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies
Ph.D., Michigan State University
Kalala Ngalamulume specializes in the history of health and disease in West Africa. His upcoming book, entitled Colonial Pathologies, Environment, and Western Medicine in Saint-Louis-du-Senegal, 1867-1920 (Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.), explores how the French colonial and medical authorities and the urban residents responded to the emergence and re-emergence of deadly epidemic diseases and environmental contamination in the capital of Senegal and French West Africa.H he is co-editor with Paula Viterbo of Medicine in Africa: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (LIT Verlag Berlin and Michigan State University Press, 2010), and the author of several articles and book chapters on the history of health and disease in Senegal. He is currently working on sexually-transmitted diseases and prostitution in colonial Senegal, and on the invention of the "Lulua" ethnic group in Kasai Province of the Belgian Congo. He teaches courses on the social history of medicine, urban history, social history of witchcraft, and humanitarianism in Africa.
E-mail Kalala Ngalamulume :: Kalala Ngalamulume's Webpage
Elly Truitt
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Harvard University
Elly Truitt specializes in Medieval History and Science and Medicine received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2007. Her research interests include medieval technology, the occult sciences, courtly culture, imaginary lands and faraway places, and all aspects of the strange and weird of the medieval world. She is currently working on a book about medieval robots.
Sharon Ullman
Professor of History
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Sharon Ullman specializes in 20th-century America with an emphasis on popular culture and gender.
She is the author of Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America and Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past (with Kathleen Kennedy). Her current research project, Brainwashing: The Anxious Mind of Cold War America is under contract to NYU Press.
Her courses include such topics as the history of sexuality, the culture of the cold war, and film and national identity.
E-mail Sharon Ullman
Amit Prakash
Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Columbia University
Amit Prakash specializes in the history of modern France and its
empire. His dissertation, "Empire on the Seine: Surveillance,
Citizenship, and North African Migrants in Paris, 1925-1975," focused
on the ideological origins and practices of colonial and postcolonial
policing in Paris before, during, and after the Algerian War. More
broadly, his research interests include the histories of immigration,
surveillance and the police, and anti-colonialism. His teaching
interests include 19th and 20th century European history, comparative
empire, fascism, and the history of surveillance.
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