Ken Alder - Professor of History, Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities

Ken Alder had a good year in a not-so-good world. He celebrated the 150th anniversary of the meter with a plenary address at UNESCO in Paris. He collaborated with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences to defend the integrity of scientific institutions in the US. He still loves teaching NU students and working with SHC postdocs. And on a personal note, he is now a joyous grandfather, and is delighted to report that his daughter Madeleine and her family have moved back to Chicago.

Michael Allen - Associate Professor

Michael Allen spent much of 2025 barricaded in his library carrell where he advanced but did not quite finish his book manuscript. But a new undergraduate seminar on the Modern American Presidency grew out of his immersion in presidential history and he expects to finish the book in 2026. Other than that, he grew wistful as he watched his daughter speed through her last year at home.

Robin Bates - Assistant Professor of Instruction and Ian Sanders Chair in History

Robin Bates added a lecture class on "Europe in the Age of Total War, 1789-1945" to the undergraduate catalogue. He also led the third installment of the Sanders Seminar on the Historian's Craft, in which the amazing Sander Scholars wrote original research essays on everything from the federalism of the Holy Roman Empire, to the changing fortunes of HBCU college football, to the immigration of Holocaust survivors to Mandatory Palestine. In addition, he presented his own research on France's colonies during the Revolution of 1848 to audiences at the Global Consortium for French Historical Studies in Paris and at the Twenty-Second Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London.

Haley Bowen  - Assistant Professor

Haley Bowen spent the past year thinking and writing about prisons and confinement, which, she promises, was far more enjoyable than it sounds. The two teaching highlights of her year were 1) reworking her favorite witchcraft course for enthusiastic alumnae as part of NU's Continuing Education program, and 2) putting together a new graduate seminar on the history of disability. She also won a handful of writing fellowships to work on her book project on Early Modern convents, and is looking forward to spending the next academic year pondering nuns in the paradisiacal gardens of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA.

Kevin Boyle - William Smith Mason Professor of American History

Kevin Boyle spent the year finishing his term as department chair. He also taught a fabulous group of students in his “American Horror” course; read a lot and wrote a little about peasants; and, on a beautiful September evening, joined friends and neighbors at the corner of Garland Avenue and Charlevoix Street, on Detroit’s east side, for a moving commemoration of the events that took place there on another September evening, exactly a hundred years before. Kevin titled his book about those events Arc of Justice, which always seemed more hopeful than precise.

Lina Britto - Associate Professor of History

Lina Britto was on sabbatical during this academic year, working hard on her next book on a countercultural history of drug trafficking in the Caribbean with the support of a Buffett Faculty Fellowship from the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. She conducted archival research and fieldwork in Bogotá (Colombia), Ohio and Tennessee in the United States, Oranjestad (Aruba), and Kingston (Jamaica). Lina was also busy doing public history. Due to the crisis in Venezuela after the US military operation in January, she was invited to several local and international media outlets to offer a critical perspective on the situation. Some of them were: El Mercurio (Chile's #1 daily), CBS News Chicago, Noticiero Telemundo Chicago, WTTW's Chicago Tonight, ABC Chicago with Mark Rivera, Illinois Public Radio's The 21st Show, Telemundo Chicago's Cuéntamelo Todo podcast, and A Fondo with María Jimena Duzán (Colombia's #1 political news podcast).

Peter Carroll - Associate Professor

In March 2025, Peter Carroll enjoyed the company of Prof. Hsu Hui-ch'I, his host, and her colleagues in the History Department, National Cheng-chih University, Taipei, where he gave a workshop and a lecture. He then took part in a workshop in Beijing and Shanghai with the "Hic Sunt Dracones" comparative dragon performance collective. The Shanghai trip included a great talk by Professor Xu Peng, who will be speaking at NU in fall 2026, and a performance and makeup workshop with the star jing/hualian [mighty male/painted face] performer Xu Zhaoying of the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre Company.

Jeff Eden - Associate Professor of History

Jeff Eden read your diary and therefore he knows you wanted him to publish the first-ever translation of a Turkmen historical epic from Chaghatay Turkic. You are welcome, dear colleagues! Answering prayers is his secondary specialty (after Chaghatay Turkic): The Turkmen Wars: Abdysetdar Kazy's Jangnama.

Caitlin Fitz - Associate Professor of History

Caitlin Fitz has been busy with anniversaries. As part of Brazil's bicentennial, two of her articles were translated into Portuguese and anthologized (one by Brazil's upper house of congress, the other by Brazil's lower house). Closer to home, she worked with the NEH, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the Omohundro Institute on programming, exhibitions, and events commemorating the United States' 250th. She was honored to be named a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence in 2025.

Paul Gillingham - Professor, Director of Graduate Studies

Paul Gillingham published Mexico: A 500-Year History in November in the US and Britain. It went through four printings in four months and was reviewed in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Times Literary Supplement. It was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Barnes and Noble Best History Book of 2025, and a Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of 2025.

Leslie M. Harris - Professor of History and Black Studies - Please read here.

Laura Hein - The Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History

In April, Laura Hein gave the Annual Koichi Takashima Lecture in Japanese Cultural Studies UC Santa Barbara, “Coerced and Forlorn: Centering Forced Labor in the Visual Art of Tomiyama Taeko” and a second lecture on the same artist, “Tomiyama Taeko: Making Good Political Art,” at a conference on Cultural Flow: Ecology Empire and Myth in the Art of Tomiyama Taeko, to celebrate a major gift to the UCSB art museum. In March, she reviewed the History Department at Stanford University for the Dean of Arts and Sciences. In August, she chaired the American Historical Association, LePage Prize in Public History selection committee. In September, she presented on “Women’s Art in Okinawa Today: Between Japan and the Pacific Islands,” at the European Association for Asian Art and Archeology, Triannual Conference, University of Lisbon.

Melissa Macauley - Wayne Jones II Research Professor in History

Melissa Macauley has been serving on the Editorial Board of a major digitization project, The National Archives of Great Britain, Foreign Office Records, China, 1830-1930, and she is happy to see that it is beginning to see the light of day. Module I: “1830-1895,” the first of an anticipated three modules, is now available. She recently has given talks at Berkeley, the National University of Singapore, Rice University, and the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. She is marching toward the end of her three-year term as the chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and is looking forward to devoting more time to her ongoing project, The South China Sea in World History.

Joel Mokyr - Robert H. Strotz Professor

Joel Mokyr was informed on October 13 that he was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. His life has not been the same since. His Nobel Lecture, “The Past and Future of Innovation: Can Progress be Sustained?” will published in the American Economic Review. He has been awarded a doctorate honoris causa by his alma mater, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Alexandra Montero Peters -  Assistant Professor

A collaborative and cross-disciplinary work that Alexandra Montero Peters coauthored with art historian Laura Fernández Fernández (U. Complutense de Madrid) has finally seen the light of day: "Esos curiosos jugadores de ajedrez en Sevilla. Mongoles en la corte del rey Sabio." It comes open access (download away!) in Brill's Mongoles en el Oeste: Noticias de la integración euroasiática en los reinos ibéricos, edited by Antonio García Espada and Bruno De Nicola.

Scott Sowerby - Associate Professor

Scott Sowerby spent the year continuing to work on his next book, a history of religious toleration in Early Modern Europe. It turned out that there was no way to complete this project to his satisfaction without visiting Turin, Italy, and Montpellier, France, so, under great duress, he was forced to tour these beautiful cities for the first time last summer. He can report that the gelato in Turin is excellent, and the andouille sausage with mustard sauce in Montpellier is well worth a trip. He also managed to take digital photographs of several thick volumes of seventeenth-century French and Italian manuscripts that he is now reading through with the assistance of a talented set of undergraduate Leopold Fellows. Next summer, Monaco beckons (just kidding; sadly, there are no relevant archives there).

Leslie M. Harris - Professor of History and Black Studies

2025 marked Leslie Harris's 30th year as a professor of history, first at Emory University, and since Fall 2016 at Northwestern. This anniversary coincided with the Trump administration's attempts to dismantle higher education as we know it. In response Harris, who already had a long track record of consulting with museums and higher education institutions seeking to deepen their engagement with African American history and especially the history of slavery and racial diversity, felt called upon not only to defend the best practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in higher education, but also to explain that work’s importance in its broadest terms. With faculty and student colleagues across the Evanston and Chicago campuses, she co-founded The University Under Threat collective (https://www.theuniversityunderthreat.org), which seeks to explain and respond to the federal government's attacks on higher education. In early March 2025, at a panel discussion attended by nearly 300 Northwestern community members – many of them students – she and other faculty members and graduate students described the attacks on diversity in higher education and on research in medicine, the liberal arts and education, as well as the broader history behind such challenges.  In September, her essay “The High Price of Barring International Students,” was part of a special issue of The New Republic on the Trump administration’s impact on American history. And throughout the year she participated with other faculty and students in writing letters and op-eds, granting interviews and alerting the Northwestern community and the general public of the dangers of the Trump administration's actions to the complex but essential system of US higher education, which has led the knowledge production that has underwritten much of the wealth and health produced in the Post-World War Two global and United States economy. 

In addition, Harris continued teaching her undergraduate and graduate students, her original “public” audience; they continue to inspire her and give her hope for the future. One of these classes is described in her New Republic article. She also continued making progress on her research with her newly published work “What’s in a Name? Defining Race and Class in a New Orleans Family,” the lead essay in Stéphane Gerson, ed., Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments (Chicago, 2025).  And among the many lectures she delivered over the course of the year at Northwestern (including for the Alumnae of Northwestern University Continuing Education Program and for the Black Professionals Network Juneteenth Celebration) and beyond, she was honored to present The Lamar Lectures in Southern History at Mercer University. The Lamar Lecture series began in 1957 and is recognized as the most important lecture series on Southern history and literature in the United States. Her three-lecture series was entitled: “African American History: Telling Stories in Many Forms.” The lectures will be published by the University of Georgia Press in its Lamar Memorial Lecture Series in 2028.

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