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Alumni Professors

Professor Patricia Cleary, CSU Long BeachAfter finishing her PhD in early American History, Patricia Cleary joined the faculty at California State University, Long Beach, where she has spent her career. (CSULB recently was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education as number three among public universities for numbers of History degrees awarded and was the only institution in the top ten with an increase in the last decade). Her first book, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), grew out of her dissertation research on gender and commerce in British Colonial America, and her second, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis (University of Missouri Press, 2011) took her to Spanish and French materials in her hometown, as well as farther afield. As the recipient of a NEH fellowship for 2020-2021, she is looking forward to the year’s leave to complete work on her third book, Mound City: The Place of the Indian Past and Present in St. Louis (under contract with University of Missouri Press).

jeffrey-manuel-168x210.jpgJeffrey T. Manuel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. A native of Anoka, Minnesota, Manuel received his BA in history and economics from Northwestern University in 2001 and his PhD in history from the University of Minnesota in 2009.

Manuel's research interests focus on the history of industry, energy, and the American Midwest. Manuel's book, Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915-2000, was published by the University of Minnesota Press. His research on the history of the iron ore industry has also appeared in Technology and Culture and several forthcoming edited collections. This research has been supported by grants and fellowships including a STEP Grant from SIUE's Office of Research and Projects and the Norman Johnson Dewitt Fellowship from the University of Minnesota.

Manuel's current research—tentatively titled Agrarian Energy: Alcohol Fuels and Critiques of America's Oil Century—explores the history of fuel alcohol (or ethanol) in the United States from the 1830s to the present. Manuel recently won funding from the American Council of Learned Societies for a collaborative project on climate change US and Brazil.

Manuel is also active in public and oral history. His work as a public historian has appeared in Radical History Review and he has served as curator and online producer for historical exhibitions in Minnesota and Illinois. He has worked with students to interpret the 1918 lynching of Robert Prager in Collinsville, Illinois, and he is a co-editor of Madison Historical: The Online Encyclopedia and Digital Archive for Madison County, Illinois.

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