The Department of History is committed to pursuing excellence in historical scholarship and teaching across many different time periods and research interests. Its outstanding faculty specializes in a wide array of historical issues and themes that transcend particular regions and periods. Courses connect undergraduate and graduate students with the excitement of historical discovery and provide a rigorous training in researching and analyzing the human past.
The department thrives on its close relationship with many other departments, centers and area studies programs in the humanities and social sciences at Cornell. The faculty includes more than a dozen prize-winning authors as well as winners of Cornell’s prestigious teaching and advising awards.
Department websiteMayer Juni
Bruce Slovin Assistant Professor
Alan van den Arend
ALI Postdoctoral Associate
Publications
Education
- Ph.D., History, Johns Hopkins (2022)
- M.A. w/ distinction, History, Johns Hopkins (2020)
- M.A., Classics, University of Kentucky (2017)
- A.B., Classics, Cornell (2010)
Departments and programs
Peidong Sun
Distinguished Associate Professor of Arts & Sciences in China and Asia-Pacific Studies; Associate Professor of History
Publications
Books in Chinese
Peidong Sun. 2013. Fashion and Politics: Everyday Clothing Choices in Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution(Beijing: People’s Publishing House).
Peidong Sun. 2012; 2013. Who Will Marry My Daughter? The Parental Matchmaking Corner in Shanghai’s People’s Square(Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Press).
Edited books in English
Patricia Thornton, Peidong Sun & Chris Berry eds. 2017. Red Shadows: Memories and Legacies of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Books in progress in English
Red Genes: How the Cultural Revolution Has Shaped the Xi Jinping Generation.
The CCP Mind: A Hidden Story.
A Certain Regard for China: Personal Accounts of French Academics Across Generations(Under contract with Routledge)
Fashion and Politics in China's Cultural Revolution(English Version)
Crossing the Three Great Walls: A Memoir
Education
- Ph.D., Sociology, Sciences Po Paris
- Ph.D., Law, Sun Yat-Sen University
- M.A., French Literature, Sun Yat-Sen University
- B.A., French, Sun Yat-Sen University
Departments and programs
Links
- The New York Times-‘Moving Backward’: In Xi’s China, Some See an Era of Total C…
- Los Angeles Times-China’s crackdown on professors reminds many of Mao era
- The Spectator-Healing the ‘cancer’ of the Cultural Revolution
- The New York Times-In the ‘Great Game’ of Central Asia, China’s leader seeks th…
- The New Statesman-How the Chinese Communist Party is policing the past to secur…
- BBC- Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution
- The Washington Post In- Xi Jinping’s China, a top university can no longer prom…
- Quartz-China wants to redefine democracy
- Times Higher Education-Chinese scholars pressured over criticism of state on Co…
- The New York Times-Chinese Students Denounce Limits on Free Speech, in a Rare P…
- The Quardian-Making China great again’: Pomp and propaganda as CCP marks centen…
- The New Statesman-China doesn’t just want to be part of the global order
- Reuters-In echo of Mao era, China's schools in book-cleansing drive
- The Associated Press-China university revises charter boosting Communist control
Keywords
China
PRC History
CCP History
CCP Mind
Chinese Cultural Revolution
Xi Jinping Generation
Tamika Nunley
Associate Professor and Sandler Family Faculty Fellow
Publications
BOOKS
The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, April 2023)
At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, February 2021)
*Winner of the 2021 Pauli Murray Book Prize
*Winner of the 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize
*Winner of the 2021 Mary Kelley Book Prize
*Honorable Mention, 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Award
*Finalist for the ASALH Book Prize
*Shortlist for the MAAH Stone Book Award
ARTICLES/ESSAYS
“Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts” Journal of Southern History 87, No. 1 (February 2021)
*Winner of the 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Prize for Best Article
*Winner of the 2021 Anne Braden Prize for Best Article in Southern Women’s History
“Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius in the Age of Revolution” (forthcoming in Journal of Women’s History 36, no. 1 Spring Issue).
“Race, Freedom, and the Intimate Worlds of Women,” Journal of Women’s History 35, no. 2 (June 2023).
"Slavery and the Political Touchstones of a Young Republic," The William and Mary Quarterly (79) 1
“The New Civil War Revisionism,” with Edward L. Ayers, Gregory Downs, Daniel Crofts, Christopher Phillips, and Matthew E. Stanley, Civil War History 65, No. 4 (December 2019)
“’I Know What Liberty Is’: Elizabeth Keckly’s Union War” New Perspectives on the Union War eds. Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon in The North’s Civil War Series (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019)
“By Stealth’ or Dispute: Freedwomen and the Contestation of American Citizenship” in The Civil War and the Transformation of the American Citizenship, ed. Paul Quigley (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018)
“Teaching in Climes of Unrest: BLM, Slavery, and the Intellectual Underpinnings of Student Protest at Oberlin” in The Panorama, a digital publication of the Journal of the Early Republic (Aug. 21, 2017)
BOOK REVIEWS
Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Homes, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) forthcoming in The English Historical Review (2021)
Loren Schweninger, Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) William and Mary Quarterly 76, no.3 (July 2019).
Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) in American Journal of Legal History 58, no.1 (Spring 2018).
Amber D. Moulton, The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Journal of the Civil War Era December 2016.
Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015) Civil War Book Review August 2016.
Education
Ph.D., University of Virginia, History
M.A., University of Virginia, History
M.A., Columbia University, African American Studies
B.A., Miami University, African American Studies/History
If you would like to reach Tamika Nunley for a speaking engagement outside of Cornell University, please contact Camry Wilborn at CCMNT Speakers: cwilborn@ccmntspeakers.com
Departments and programs
Tejasvi Nagaraja
Assistant Professor
Publications
Tejasvi Nagaraja (et al). 2020. "AHR Conversation: Black Internationalism" — American Historical Review. 125(5):1699–1739
Departments and programs
Links
Angelica Aguirre
Graduate Student
Education
B.A. in History (Latin America), University of California Berkeley, 2019
Departments and programs
Keywords
Latin America, Mexico, Insurgency, Counterinsurgency
Duncan MacLean Eaton
Graduate Student
Publications
[Review] "Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Realm, Review of Diana T. Kudaibergenova, Toward Nationalizing Regimes: Conceptualizing Power and Identity in the Post-Soviet Realm," H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews, March 2022.
[Op-ed] “Czech Freefall,” "Sidecar" New Left Review blog, October 20, 2021.
Education
MA, History, University of Toronto, 2018.
BA, History, SUNY New Paltz, 2017.
Departments and programs
David Rubinstein
Graduate Student
Education
B.A., History and Political Science, Middlebury College, 2018
Departments and programs
Keywords
History; Jewish Studies Program
Eric S. Lee
Graduate Student
Education
M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures (Chinese History), Columbia University, 2018.
B.A. in History, Binghamton University SUNY, 2015.