Faculty

"This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher." - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The Department of History faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park is an esteemed community of scholars dedicated to furthering the future of historical scholarship and the enrichment of generations of students. Spanning a wide range of regions, cultures, chronologies, and themes, our faculty offer students the chance to explore the globe. Specialties such as the Americas, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe as well as thematic fields such as business, environmental, religious, and social history are all present within the department, among many others. The Department of History faculty optimizes UMD’s proximity to the D.C. metro area and Maryland historical resources such as the Smithsonian, Library of Congress, National Archives, and Maryland State Archives to conduct ambitious research and introduce students to unique cultural and historical opportunities. As an international community, they are dedicated to studying the past in an effort to face the challenges of today and strive to provide a global view in understanding the human experience. Since the foundation of the department, our faculty have been critical in ensuring the success of all undergraduate and graduate students through their inventive research, forward-thinking curriculums, and inspiring encouragement.

Mikhail Dolbilov | Life of a Novel Being Created: From the Avantexte toward the Context of Anna Karenina

Mikhail Dolbilov’s monograph, Life of a Novel Being Created: From the Avantexte toward the Context of Anna Karenina (“Zhizn' tvorimogo romana: Ot avanteksta k kontekstu ‘Anny Kareninoi’”), has been published by the Moscow publishing house New Literary Observer (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie).

Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel is justifiably associated with a massive swath of Russian social, political, intellectual, and cultural life in the aftermath of Alexander's transformative reforms. Combining historical approaches and literary genetic criticism, the book historicizes Anna Karenina by demonstrating how its long writing and serialization (1873–77) were affected by, and, in turn, exerted their own influence on, diverse events of the time. Most thoroughly discussed are such societal developments as shifts in gender relations in aristocratic society, emerging new forms of emotionality, the spread of religious revivalism in Russian Orthodoxy, and the rise of politically charged Russian Pan-Slavism.

Antoine Borrut | Between Memory and Power

Antoine Borrut's new book has now been published by Brill, translated by Anna Bailey Galietti. According to the publisher, Between Memory and Power intends to demonstrate that a robust culture of historical writing existed in 2nd/8th century Syria, and to offer new methodological approaches to access this now lost history, torn between memory and oblivion. By studying the making of Umayyad heroes or Abbasid origins-myths, this book aims to reveal the successive meanings granted to Syrian history, and to identify the various layers of historical writing and rewriting during the first centuries of Islam. Taken together, these elements make possible a history of meanings of the very space of Syria, articulated around power and its expression, which grants a clear coherence to the period, extending well beyond the dynastic caesura of 132/750.

See the publisher's website here for more information.

Julie Greene | Global Labor Migration: New Directions

Co-edited with Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, and Joo-Cheong Tham, Julie Greene has published Global Labor Migration: New Directions with the University of Illinois Press. According to the publisher, "Around the world, hundreds of millions of labor migrants endure exploitation, lack of basic rights, and institutionalized discrimination and marginalization. What dynamics and drivers have created a world in which such a huge--and rapidly growing--group toils as marginalized men and women, existing as a lower caste institutionally and juridically? In what ways did labor migrants shape their living and working conditions in the past, and what opportunities exist for them today?

Global Labor Migration presents new multidisciplinary, transregional perspectives on issues surrounding global labor migration. The essays go beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians contributing research that extends comparison among and within world regions. Looking at migrant workers from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the contributors illustrate the need for broader perspectives that study labor migration over longer timeframes and from wider geographic areas. The result is a unique, much-needed collection that delves into one of the world’s most pressing issues, generates scholarly dialogue, and proposes cutting-edge research agendas and methods."

See the publisher's website here for more information.

Julie Taddeo | Writing Australian History On-Screen

Julie Taddeo's new book has now been published by Lexington Books, co-edited with Jo Parnell. According to the publisher, Writing Australian History On-Screen: Television and Film Period Dramas "Down Under" "reveals the depths of Australian history from convict times to the present day. The essays in this book are thematically driven and take a rounded historical-cultural-sociological-psychological approach in analyzing the various selected productions. In their analyses and interpretations of the topic, the contributors interrogate the intricacies in Australian history as represented in Australian filmic period drama, taken from an Australian perspective. Individually, and together as a body of authors, they highlight past issues that, despite the society’s changing attitudes over time, still have relevance for the Australia of today. In speaking to the subject, the contributing writers show a keen awareness that addressing new areas arising from the humanities is key to learning; and hence to developing an understanding of the Australian culture, the society, and sense of the ever-unfurling flag of an Australian something that is not yet a national identity."

See the publisher's website here for more information.