Fall 2025 Departmental Accomplishments

Fall 2025 Departmental Accomplishments

UIC Faculty Accomplishments

Books

• Danielle Beaujon (UIC Professor) published Criminalizing the Casbahs: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1918-1954, from Cornell University Press. As the description says, the book "explores how French police officers in Marseille and Algiers associated the spaces they saw as North African — the 'Casbahs' — with a particular form of criminality, one they insisted was inherently North African. Through local but connected histories of policing in these two cities, Danielle Beaujon traces how police practices mapped the racialization of North African colonial subjects onto urban space... The invasive, often violent, policing of North Africans in the French Mediterranean blurred the political and the personal, broadening the spectrum of police power with lasting consequences for post-colonial policing. Criminalizing the Casbahs shows how patterns of discrimination created in the daily interactions between police officers and North Africans continue to resonate in debates about police accountability in France today."

• William Hoisington (UIC Professor Emeritus) will publish The Politics of Collaboration: Establishing the French Protectorate in Morocco,1912-1927 by Cornell University Press in April 2026.

• Kevin Schultz (UIC Professor and Chair) released his latest book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History with University of Chicago Press.  The book was (briefly) a No. 1 new release on Amazon.com. The book was excerpted in Harper's Magazine for its 175th birthday issue and in Mark Oppenheimer's new magazine, ARC.
• Elizabeth Todd-Breland (UIC Professor) published I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education (Haymarket Books), a work she wrote with and about the longtime CTU President Karen Lewis.

Awards

• The Urban History Association announced our colleague Danielle Beaujon (UIC Professor) as the winner of the 2025 Arnold Hirsch Award for best scholarly article of the year. This award is in recognition of her article published in French Historical Studies: "The Algerian Enemy Within: Policing the Black Market in Marseille and Algiers, 1939-1950."  The Arnold Hirsch Award was named after one our department's most famous PhDs, the late Arnold Hirsch.
• Jennie Brier (UIC Distinguished Professor) was just named by the Dean as an LAS Distinguished Professor. The award was established in 2006 to recognize exceptional LAS faculty members for their significant and sustained intellectual scholarship in their chosen fields, as well as for their contributions to the LAS and UIC communities. Prof. Brier is one of UIC’s most visible public intellectuals. A specialist in the history of AIDS, women’s history, and the LGBTQ+experience, she has developed her scholarly presence in multiple contexts and for an uncommonly broad range of audiences. Her work has opened new paths of scholarly inquiry, made histories of lesser-studied social groups visible, and invited public participation in the process of the production of historical knowledge. This intellectual generosity epitomizes the public-facing scholarship to which UIC aspires and she is richly deserving of our recognition.
• Joaquín Chávez (UIC Professor) was appointed member of the scientific committee of “The International Congress Transnational Solidarity in Latin America during the Twentieth Century,” an event organized by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Universitá IULM, and Centro de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales y Estudios Regionales (CICSER). The Congress took place in Cuernavaca, Mexico, August 20-22, 2025.
• Jon Connolly’s (UIC Professor) book, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation, was this year's winner of the Stansky Book Prize awarded by the North American Conference on British Studies.  As the award committee put it: "In this book, Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of 'freedom' in a post-abolition world."

• Ralph Keen (UIC Professor) will return to the history department after being Dean of the Honors College for the past ten years.

• Young Kim (UIC Professor) was elected President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America for 2025-26.

• Ben Whisenhunt (UIC Ph.D., 1997 and Visiting Lecturer) was just appointed as an Executive Editor of History: Review of New Books starting in 2026. He was also appointed to a three-year term (2026-2029) on two committees (Convention Opportunity Travel Grant and Convention Inclusion Travel Grant) for the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (ASEEES).

Articles

• Danielle Beaujon (UIC Professor) published "The Algerian Enemy Within: Policing the Black Market in Marseille and Algiers, 1939-1950” in French Historical Studies.
• Lilia Fernandez (UIC Professor) penned this piece for In These Times on the history of Mexican Independence Day as a way to celebrate community amid adversity.
• Rick Fried (UIC Professor Emeritus) published an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune commemorating the 100th birthday of the great humor columnist Art Buchwald.  As Rick notes, in his heyday, Buchwald appeared in something close to 550 newspapers each week, giving him a reach (and safeguards) unlike those of today's political satirists, like, say, Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel.  Rick is working on a biography of Buchwald and the heyday of American liberalism.
• Michael Jin (UIC Professor) with his co-author Naoko Wake (Michigan State University), has an article in the current issue of the American Historical Review, "Surviving the Bomb in Diaspora: Intergenerational Suffering and Justice-Seeking Among Korean Pihaeja."  The AHR accepts fewer than 10% of the submissions it receives, and this one is certainly meritorious.  In "Surviving the Bomb in Diaspora," Wake and Jin dug deep into transnational archives, using "the voices of the Korean diasporic atomic bomb survivors across multilingual and transimperial spaces in archives and memories in East Asia and the Americas," to get at the "historical meaning of compensatory justice for those who have been deprived of their national right of redress."  The article goes on to elucidate "how Korean survivors have formed their diasporic identities, memories, and activism as they have grappled with the fraught, US-centric notion of compensatory justice and, by extension, offered textured critiques of the dualistic notion of the war between Japan and the United States that has circumscribed the bomb’s historiography." Michael Jin also published "Citizen Aliens: American Xenophobia, Japanese American Migrants, and the Transpacific Borders of Belonging" in the Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 2025): https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/jaeh/article-abstract/44/4/73/401303/Citizen-Aliens-American-Xenophobia-Japanese?redirectedFrom=fulltext.
• Young Kim (UIC Professor) published “Reflections on Nicaea at 1700: A Forum on the Legacy of the Council and Creed.” Church History 94, no. 2: 338–77.
• Celso Mendoza (UIC Professor)  published the article, On the Invention of Conquest Myths: The Instructive Example of the Legend of the Battle of Otumba, appeared online last month and will appear in print in a few months time, in the journal Colonial Latin American Review.  As those of us who have watched Celso present a few times at UIC over the two years of his postdoc may remember, the article strongly counters the traditional argument of an easy Spanish conquest over the Aztecs, instead arguing "that this story is largely a fabrication that Spanish writers and non-Indigenous historians elaborated over time, feeding off and reinforcing inaccurate beliefs about Mesoamericans. Eyewitness testimony, especially from the Indigenous, tells a story of the battle at odds with the aforementioned legendary narrative. This essay’s examination of the mythmaking surrounding the battle serves as an instructive lesson on the errors that scholars have continued to make in studies of Indigenous people, often allowing Spanish narratives to shape assumptions." To see Celso present a version of this argument, you can watch the video of a presentation he gave last year.
• Kevin Schultz (UIC Professor & Chair) had a short article on liberalism published in The Conversation, which was picked up by Yahoo! News.
• Jeff Sklansky (UIC Professor) had a great article published in The Conversation, an online magazine that publishes popular versions of more traditional academic topics -- "Academic rigor, journalistic flair" is its tagline.  Jeff's article, "Labor Day and May Day emerged from the movement for a shorter workday in industrial America," details the history of how Labor Day differs in meaning in the US compared to other countries, and how those celebrations originated out of a concerted effort to bring together a wide alliance of labor advocates around a single issue (in this case, the shorter work day).

• Keeley Stauter-Halsted (UIC Professor) published "Negotiated Filtration: The Surprising Fate of Poland's Postimperial Civil Servants,”  in January's Contemporary European History, was picked by one of the editors as her favorite article of the past year.  I love awards crafted in times of austerity, but anyone who has worked closely with an editor knows how special that bond is.  The editor, Emile Chabal, said of the piece, “What happens to a bureaucracy when the state to which it belongs ceases to exist? This question, which has a wide applicability across different historical contexts, lies at the heart of this beautifully written examination of civil servants in the Polish lands after the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Stauter-Halsted tells the stories of state officials caught in the complex post-imperial space of East-Central Europe in 1918: how they responded, how they adapted their claims, how they reshaped their belonging in public and in private. Mixing micro and macrohistory, this terrific article tells us an awful lot about how states change (and how they don’t).”

Appearances

• Jonathan Daly (UIC Professor and Associate Chair) led a workshop to discuss his article, “Richard Pipes’s Advice on Russia for Policymakers,” at the Institute of Central Europe in Lublin, Poland, and presented a keynote address, "Richard Pipes’s Interpretation of the USSR as ‘The Only Surviving European Colonial Empire,'” at the 5th Conference of the Richard Pipes Laboratory of the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.  Also, an endorser of Daly’s How Europe Made the Modern World: Creating the Great Divergence, Joel Mokyr, Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, recently won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

• John D’Emilio (UIC Professor Emeritus)  in October, which is LGBTQ History Month, presented the new lecture  "Finding Our Past: How LGBTQ History Has Developed as a Field of Study" which is a historiographical account of the field's development since its origins in the 1970s. Audiences of faculty and students at Arizona State University and University of North Texas responded very enthusiastically to it.  His work was featured on ABC7's "Our America" segment last week.  The interview mostly consists of John giving a tour of the Gerber/Hart LGBTQ+ Library and Archives, and also usefully provides a capsule periodization of queer history in America.
• Lilia Fernandez (UIC Professor) was quoted in this Chicago Tribune article about the demise of street vendors amid the ICE surge, and was quoted in this Chicago Sun-Times article about the use of ICE enforcement on Mexican Independence Day.
• John Kulczycki (UIC Professor Emeritus) taught a course in the Adult Education Program of the Newberry Library entitled "Eastern Europe: From 18th Century Empires to 19th Century Nation-States." The class was filled on the first day of registration with 28 adults.
• The publication of Kevin Schultz’s (UIC Professor and Chair) latest book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History (University of Chicago Press) led to a slew of podcast interviews and book talks, traveling the political spectrum from The Nation to the Ronald Reagan Institute.  To promote his book, Kevin spent the summer traveling to Rhode Island, New York City, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and all over Greater Chicagoland. He was profiled in Chicago Magazine (with a photoshoot featuring both University Hall and BSB), UIC Magazine, and California Magazine, and has done several Reddit "ask me anythings" on the history of liberalism in the United States.  One Reddit AMA got nearly a million views.  His appearances on several radio stations (including the call-in show “Say More” on WBEZ) led him to be invited to do a standing monthly "History Hour with Professor Schultz" on Chew's Views morning program on WCPT. He has also appeared as a historical expert on the national morning show, “NewsNation Live, with Marni Hughes,” speaking about the funeral of former Vice President Dick Cheney. He was also interviewed extensively as a historian of American political violence on PBS and in Brazil and Denmark.
• Ben Whisenhunt (UIC Ph.D., 1997 and Visiting Lecturer) presented a talk about Anna Louise Strong in Russia in 1921-1924 on the roundtable: “American Phenomenology of Revolutionary Russia: Memory of the Ideal Revolution in Travelogs,” at the National Convention of ASEEES in Washington, DC in November 2025.

UIC Graduate Student Accomplishments

Publications

• Hashim Ali (UIC Ph.D. student) published in Critical Pakistan Studies an article entitled “Memorializing the Nation-State: Minar-e-Pakistan between Memory and History.”  "When analyzing the nation-state, studies of Pakistan often portray the Pakistani state as autocratic and dictatorial. While the Pakistani nation-state performs various hegemonic roles, it is also “cultured.” This article illustrates this point by focusing on the nation-state’s patronage of cultural projects in the 1960s (and beyond), tracing the genealogies of sites in Lahore’s Greater Iqbal Park (the Minar-e-Pakistan monument, Hafeez Jalandari mausoleum, and the National History Museum) along with the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum in Karachi. The article centers these as “sites of memory,” exploring the hybrid tensions between tourism, citizenship, and modern memory in postcolonial Pakistan."
• Eliot Fackler (Ph.D., 2020), Assistant Professor of History at Governors State University, has three recent or forthcoming articles, including a pedagogy piece entitled “What Can Bird Poop Teach Us about the History of U.S. Imperialism?: Guano Islands and Manifest Destiny Beyond Continental Borders,” appearing in the October 2025 issue of The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies; a short piece on the history of Lake Erie's algae blooms entitled "Lake Erie’s Toxic Algae and the Dismal History of the Black Swamp,” published in the November 2025 edition of Environment & History; and a forthcoming article appearing in Northwest Ohio History, entitled "John E. Hunt and the Maumee Odawas: Narrating Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Northwest Ohio."
• Jeff Nichols (UIC Ph.D. student) who has just had yet another article published in the Chicago Reader, this one entitled, "Chicago Has Always Defied Kidnappings of Our Neighbors."  Grounded in numerous examples of how Chicagoans defied the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the article provides story after story of the "lawyers, judges, and politicians [who] jammed up the legalized kidnapping of men, women, and children who had escaped slavery. Ordinary Chicagoans refused to be silent when armed 'slave catchers,' which included enslavers and bounty hunters, attempted to snatch Black people from public spaces."
• Dominic Pacyga (UIC Ph.D., 1981) published his newest book, Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine this fall (The University of Chicago Press).
• Sohini Mukhopadhyay (UIC Ph.D. student) published "Janmashashon: Sexology, Birth Control, and the Nation," appears as a chapter in the book, Exploring Power and Authority in Indian History Across the Ages, edited by Vijaya Ramadas Mandala. As the abstract reads, the article "examines the interplay of sexology, birth control, and nationalism in colonial Bengal. It explores how amateur Bengali sexologists like Abul Hasanat and Nripendrakumar Basu, in the first half of the twentieth century, appropriated Western or Euro-American theories surrounding sex to construct a distinct sexology suited to the needs and interests of Bengali society. Birth control was framed as essential for economic stability, improving women’s health, and producing 'quality' children to strengthen the nation. Apart from providing channels to express anxieties about caste, class, and religion, interestingly, however, for these sexologists, birth control also served as a tool for strengthening family units as they encouraged ‘happy’ and ‘healthy’ conjugal lives for heterosexual couples. Although these ideas surrounding ‘healthy sex lives’ were appropriated mainly from the likes of Havelock Ellis and others and thus reconfigured in the process, this chapter contends that the ultimate goal was still nation-building; even concerns for women’s sexual pleasure and health were also a part of the nationalist pursuit."

Appearances

• Paul Ribera (UIC Ph.D. student) presented a paper, “Legislative and Bureaucratic Violence: Colonization, Whitening, and Belonging in Bolivia 1930-1960,” at the 2025 Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust Inaugural Emerging Scholars Conference, hosted by the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, MA. The conference took place from November 6 to 9.

Awards

• Ian Darnell (UIC Ph.D., 2019) was promoted to Associate Curator of Community History at the Missouri Historical Society (MHS) in St. Louis. Ian began work at MHS in 2019 with a focus on coordinating the institution's LGBTQIA+ collecting initiative and developing an exhibit on local LGBTQIA+ history. That exhibit, Gateway to Pride, closed in July 2025 at the end of a 13-month run that saw more than 100,000 visitors. In his new role, Ian curates collections and exhibits related to topics such as foodways, immigrant and ethnic communities, and labor and small business, in addition to LGBTQIA+ history. Ian invites historians from UIC to explore the Missouri Historical Society's rich archival collections.

• Aleksei Epishev (UIC Ph.D. student) will work as a fellow at the Institute of Transnational History of China at the University of Hong Kong.  His dissertation, tentatively titled “Resistance, Accommodation, and the Crossroads of National Identity: Chinese Workers in the Russian Empire during the Rise of State Capitalism, 1890s-1920s,” focuses on, well, Chinese workers in the Russian empire, and he will be researching that as a visiting scholar at the University of Hong Kong from January to May 2026. His academic mentor will be Xu Guoqi, the David H. Y. Chang Professor of Chinese History at the University of Hong Kong and a specialist on global Chinese diasporas.  Aleksei plans to use this opportunity to do research in mainland China, too, either in person or via a research assistant.

• Ada Marys Lorenzana (UIC Ph.D. student) has been selected as an Imagining America (IA)-Arts and Scholars in Public Life 2025-2026 Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow. She is one of only eight fellows selected from around the country.   As a fellow, she will participate in the year-long program and receive a fellowship stipend, professional development funds, and access to bidirectional mentorship and community-building events.
• Neal McCrillis (UIC Ph.D., 1993, UIC Vice-Provost for Global Engagement and Professor) will be returning to the History Department after nine years as Vice-Provost.  His leadership has been characterized here: “Neal joined UIC as the inaugural vice provost for global engagement, bringing vision and energy to unify multiple offices into a cohesive and highly effective Office of Global Engagement. Under his leadership, the campus developed and implemented two comprehensive internationalization strategies, strengthening global partnerships, expanding study abroad opportunities and supporting faculty international initiatives. Neal's leadership has directly enriched the experiences of thousands of UIC students and faculty, doubling the number of students studying abroad, strengthening international collaborations with leading institutions worldwide and championing recognition for faculty contributions to global engagement. He also expanded scholarships for study abroad and international students. Through his vision and dedication, Neal has left a lasting impact on UIC's global engagement and the internationalization of our academic community.”

• Dominic Pacyga (UIC Ph.D., 1981) received the Złotym Krzyżem Zasługi  (Gold Medal of Merit) from the Polish government on February 26, 2025. In May he was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Lifetime Achievement Award in Midwestern History from the Midwestern History Association.

UIC Undergraduate Accomplishments

Publications

• Fourth-year History major Daniel Kaliszyk published this piece in the Chicago Sun-Times about the recent goings on at the Chicago History Museum, where union organizing has led to layoffs and shortened research hours.

Awards

• Colin Goss won The Lillian Edinger Scholarship for Undergraduates.
• Angelica Aguillon won The David Stahl and Karol Weigelt Endowed Scholarship.
• Nancy García-Vazquéz won the 2025 Davee Foundation Scholarship.