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 's research focuses on the medical and social history of Senegal in the 19th and 20th centuries. His Ph.D. dissertation was titled "City Growth, Health Problems and Colonial Government Response: Saint-Louis (Senegal) from mid-19th Century to 1914." His current research compares the French experience with disease and sanitation in Senegal to the British experience in Ghana. Ngalamulume has published in African Economic History, History of Africa, Revue de Pedagogie Apliquee and the Encyclopedia of African History.
E-mail Kalala Ngalamulume :: Kalala Ngalamulume's Webpage
Elliott Shore
Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries and Professor of History
Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College
Elliott Shore teaches one or two courses each year for the department in his fields of interest, which are the history of advertising, of communications, and of radicalism. He is currently working on a comparative history of German and U.S. advertising between 1850 and 1920 as well as editing and translating a novel published in German in Philadelphia in 1850.
E-mail Elliott Shore
Jennifer Spohrer
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Columbia University
Jennifer Spohrer specializes in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Western Europe and the history of technology. Her dissertation research focused on European policy-makers' opposition to a giant, popular international commercial broadcasting station called Radio Luxembourg in the 1930s, and how their attempts to outlaw this station internationally helped to establish national, publicly funded broadcasting monopolies such as the BBC as the proper European norm. Jennifer's research and teaching interests include media and communications technologies; consumer economies and cultures; the history of food; and placing European history within a global context.
E-mail Jennifer Spohrer
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
Connect to