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Many Changes! – Message from the Department Head

Many Changes! – Message from the Department Head

Susan Lawrence

A lot has happened since our last newsletter. We have a new department head, we’ve moved from Dunford Hall to the Stokely Management Center (SMC), we’ve welcomed two new faculty members, and we’ve continued to be active and productive scholars. I started as department head on August 1, 2022, when Ernie Freeberg stepped down after heroically serving nine years. I agreed to take this on because we have such a great department, as you’ll see in the stories that follow. 

We learned in August that we would definitely be moving out of Dunford Hall by the end of 2023. The soon-to-be-demolished Dunford, Greve, and Henson halls are making way for a new Haslam College of Business building. After months of uncertainty and unsuitable plans, we finally ended up on the sixth floor of SMC, former home of the Haslam College of Business Department of Accounting. We moved in January 2024, getting hit by a major snowstorm right in the middle of transferring our boxes and furniture into our new space.

We could not have done this without the hard work of our staff, Kim Harrison, Bernie Koprince, and Mary Beckley. We have been assured that we are in temporary space, as we hope for a new interdisciplinary classroom and humanities building to go up in the next ten years. In the meantime, if you are in Knoxville, stop by to see our new home. 

In August of 2022, we welcomed Assistant Professor Duygu Yıldırım, our new historian of the modern Middle East. In August of 2023, Assistant Professor Emma Snowden, our new historian of early Islam, joined us. Next fall we will have three new faculty faces: Yasser Nasser (modern China), who deferred his arrival for a year; Emma Schroder (gender & sexuality, environmental history); and Natalia Doan (modern Japan). 

As usual, we have had new books, fellowship awards, grants, and awards to celebrate:

  • Assistant Professor Brooke Bauer saw her award-winning Becoming Catawba: Catawba Women and Nation-building, 1540-1840 (University of Alabama Press, 2022) into print.
  • Assistant Professor Victor Petrov published Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023).
  • Assistant Professor Nikki Eggers welcomed her Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo (Ohio University Press, 2023) to bookshelves. Eggers has also had 2023–2024 to work on her next project, funded by an NEH Collaborative Research Grant. 
  • Yıldırım, too, has had 2023–2024 to finish her first book with the help of an ACLS fellowship, while Professor Sara Ritchey took Fall 2023 on a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
  • The College of Arts and Sciences gave Associate Professor Tore Olsson the James R. & Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award for 2022, and Ritchey a New Research, Scholarly, and Creative Projects in the Arts & Humanities Award.
  • In 2023, we were pleased that the college recognized Bauer with an Early Career Research Award and Professor Charles Sanft with a New Research, Scholarly, and Creative Projects in the Arts & Humanities Award.

All this doesn’t begin to cover the articles, book chapters, and conference papers our faculty have contributed to historical scholarship.