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Faculty and Staff

Department Chair

Richard Conway, associate professor and chair, received a PhD from Tulane University. A historian of colonial Latin America, his research interests include the social and environmental history of Mexico. He teaches courses including: Early Latin America, the History of Mexico, and Indigenous Societies in Latin America. His book, Islands in the Lake: Environment and Ethnohistory in Xochimilco, New Spain” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. He also serves as the book review editor of the academic journal Ethnohistory.

Deputy Department Chair

Nancy Carnevale, associate professor, received a PhD from Rutgers University. A social and cultural historian of modern America specializing in the history of migration, race, and ethnicity, her research interests include  Italian American history, women’s and gender history, and ethnoracial relations. She teaches courses including:  The Immigrant in American History, History of American Women, Italian American History and Culture, and Women and Migration. She is the author of A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945 (University of Illinois Press, 2009), winner of a 2010 American Book Award. She is co-editor of the Critical Studies in Italian America book series of Fordham University Press. For more information, view her profile on Academia.edu – Nancy Carnevale.

Department Administrative Support Staff

Our administrative team can be reached at 973-655-7031, via email at chssadmin@montclair.edu, or in person in Dickson 170.

Full-Time Faculty

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, associate professor, received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests include modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World History and Philosophy of History. She teaches courses including: Introduction to African Civilizations, The Study of History, and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).
Shannan Clark, associate professor, received his PhD from Columbia University in 2006.  His research focuses on the social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century United States. Professor Clark teaches The Study of History, US History Survey since 1876, Social History of the US, History of the American Worker since 1860, Cultural and Intellectual History of the US since 1880, Senior Seminar: Inequality in Modern America, and The Rise and Decline of the New Deal Order: US Politics and Society, 1920-1980.  He is the author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Robert E. Cray, professor, received a PhD. from Stony Brook University in 1984. A historian of the early United States and the early republic, his research interests include poverty and poor relief, Revolutionary memory, and war and society.  Cray is currently researching religion and sensationalism in Gilded Age New York City.  He teaches the US History Survey to 1876, American Revolution and Early Republic, Colonial History, and Biography in American History. Publications include Paupers and Poor Relief: New York City and Its Rural Environs, 1700-1830 (Temple University Press, 1988) and Lovewell’s Fight: War, Death, and Memory in Borderland New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), and A Notable Bully: Colonel Billy Wilson, Masculinity, and the Pursuit of Violence in the Civil War Era (Kent State University Press, 2021).  Cray has also published in the William & Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, Slavery & Abolition, New York History, and the Historian.
Dawn Marie Hayes, professor, received a PhD from New York University. A historian of medieval Europe, her research interests include the social, religious and cultural history of the period, especially as it unfolded in the twelfth-century Mediterranean world. The courses she teaches include Foundations of Western Civilization, Medieval European Civilization, Women in the Middle Ages, Heresy and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages and Cross-Cultural Contacts in the Medieval World. She is the author of Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389: Interpreting the Case of Chartres Cathedral, Roger II of Sicily: Family, Faith and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World, and numerous articles. She is also the director of The Norman Sicily Project, an ongoing interdisciplinary digital humanities effort to document the Norman state in Sicily (ca. 1060 – 1194) and the state of its survival, for which she received support in 2019 from the National Endowment for the HumanitiesHumanities Collections and Reference Resources Program. For more information, see her website as well as her profile on Academia.edu.
Julia Landweber, associate professor, received a PhD from Rutgers University. A historian of early modern Europe, she specializes in 17th- and 18th-century France. Her research interests include cultural history, women’s and gender history, and the history of food and drink. She teaches courses including: The Emergence of European Civilization 1500-1915, Feminist Thought in Western Perspective, and Food and Society in Early Modern Europe. She has published articles in French Historical Studies, The Journal of Ottoman Studies, The International History Review, Romance Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book manuscript,  Embracing the Queen of Beans: How Coffee was Adopted into French Medicine, Fashion, and Diet, 1660-1789. Landweber also teaches in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program. For more information, view her profile on Academia.edu – Julia Landweber.
Benjamin Lapp, associate professor, received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. A historian of modern Europe, he specializes in twentieth-century German history and his current research is focused on German-Jewish identity in post-war Germany. He teaches courses including: Holocaust, the Nazi Third Reich, and Contemporary Europe. He is the author of Revolution from the Right: Politics, Class and the Rise of Nazism in Saxony (1997) and the co-editor of Rebirth of a Culture: Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria Today (2008).
Elspeth Martini, assistant professor, received a PhD from the University of Michigan in 2013. A historian of the U.S. and British empires, her research interests include nineteenth-century U.S.-American Indian relations and comparative colonialisms. She teaches courses including: History of the United States to 1876, Native North America, and the American West. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Paternalist Reckonings: Humanitarianism, Colonial Authority, and Indigenous Removal in the United States and British Empire, 1820-1848.
Megan Moran, assistant professor, received a PhD in European History from Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on family and gender in early modern Italy. She teaches general courses on European history as well as more specialized classes on early modern Europe, women and gender, and Renaissance Italy.
Negin Nabavi, associate professor, received a D.Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. A historian of Modern Iran and the Modern Middle East, her research interests include the intellectual and cultural history of modern Iran, the history of the press, the public sphere, and women’s and gender history. She teaches courses including: Introduction to the Modern Middle East, Women in the Muslim World, and Modern Iran. Her most recent publication is Modern Iran: A History in Documents (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2016). She is also the author of Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse, and the Dilemma of Authenticity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003) and has edited two volumes of collected essays: Intellectual Trends in Twentieth Century Iran (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), and Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She has been the Section Editor for History of Iran (since 1500) for the Encyclopedia of Islam Three, since 2020.
Ezra Rashkow, associate professor, received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research interests include South Asian history, the history of colonial anthropology, oral history, and world environmental history. He teaches courses including: Introduction to Modern South Asia, Indigenous Peoples in Environmental History, and Introduction to Postcolonialism. His articles appear in journals such as History Compass, Modern Asian Studies, Environment and History, and Economic and Political Weekly. For more information, view his profile on Academia.edu – Ezra Rashkow.
Jeff Strickland, professor, received a PhD from Florida State University. A historian of the nineteenth century United States, he primarily teaches courses on the Civil War Era. His first book is Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War Era Charleston (University Press of Florida, 2015). His second book is All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), He is working on a third book: The Reconstruction Era in United States History, 1861-1877 (in contract).
Leslie Wilson, professor, received a PhD from the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His research interests are popular culture, urban history, history of science and environmental history. He teaches courses including History of Black Americans and The Study of History.
Professor James Woodard is a historian of Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. from Brown University, where he studied with the late Thomas E. Skidmore. His publications include two books, A Place in Politics: São Paulo, Brazil, from Seigneurial Republicanism to Regionalist Revolt (Duke University Press, 2009) and Brazil’s Revolution in Commerce: Creating Consumer Capitalism in the American Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), as well as numerous articles, essays, and chapters in edited collections. This scholarship is complemented by teaching across the Latin American field.

Part-time Faculty

Michael Burke
Barbara Calluori
Joseph Catania
Peter Clavin
Ari Finkelstein
Jeff Gould
Francis Hittinger
Joanna Madloch
Ryan McMillen
Jonathan Nunez
Patrick Peace
Anne Ricculli
Scott Shubitz
Stefan Stankovic