Spring 2026 Departmental Accomplishments

Introduction

UIC History faculty, students, and graduates continued to publish pathbreaking research, earn presitgious awards, and contribute to important public conversations about the past and present.

UIC Faculty Accomplishments

Publications

• Jonathan Daly (UIC Professor of History) published The Man Who Knew Russia: Richard Pipes, Humanist and Cold Warrior with Stanford University Press. The first of its kind, Daly’s book is a scholarly biography of a towering Cold War public intellectual and longtime Harvard professor of Russian and Soviet history. Prof. Daly and Joanna Dobrowolska (UIC PhD ‘26) organized the Richard Pipes Memorial Conference, sponsored by the Department of History and hosted by the UIC Institute for the Humanities, to accompany the book’s publication. Titled “the State of the Russian History Field,” the conference featured papers and panels from over a dozen world-renowned scholars of Russian and imperial history on Pipes’ legacy and cutting-edge developments in Russian and Soviet history.

Awards

• Jennifer Brier (UIC Professor of HIstory and Gender & Women’s Studies) was honored as an LAS Distinguished Professor, an award established by the UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2006 to honor exceptional faculty members for their significant and sustained intellectual scholarship. LAS Dean Lisa Freeman presented the award medal. Prof. Brier gave a compelling talk on her latest work creating an archive of the struggles of patients suffering from Long COVID: a public history digital archive titled “Listening for the Long Hall.” The talk and awards ceremony can be watched here: “Prof. Jennifer Brier Named LAS Distinguished Professor.”

• Marina Mogilner (UIC Professor of History) was honored as UIC’s 2026 Distinguished Scholar in Humanities, Arts Design, and Architecture, one of the most prestigious awards at UIC. The award is given each year to a UIC faculty member who has demonstrated “outstanding achievements in their field.” Prof. Mogilner was honored in a ceremony at the Field Museum and interviewed in UIC Today about her incredibly productive career transforming the way we understand the history of Europe and Asia: “How can rethinking the borders reshape history’s telling?”

• Jon Connolly (UIC Associate Professor of History) was selected as UIC’s 2026 Rising Star in the Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture, also one of the most prestigious awards at UIC. The award is given each year to “UIC early-career faculty who have shown outstanding promise to become future leaders in their fields.” Prof. Connolly was honored in a ceremony at the Field Museum and interviewed in UIC Today about his groundbreaking work on freedom, abolition, and law in European empires: “What does freedom look like after abolition?”

• Barbara Ransby (UIC Distinguished Professor of Black Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History) was awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award from the Organization of American Historians, the largest professional association of historians of the United States.. The award goes to “an individual whose contributions have significantly enriched our understanding and appreciation of American history.” In winning the award, Prof. Ransby joins a list of pillars of the profession, including Edmund S. Morgan, Eric Foner, and Linda Gordon. UIC professor emeritus John D’Emilion won the award in 2013.

• Bao Bui (UIC Visiting Lecturer in History) was selected by the graduating seniors of the class of 2026 to receive the UIC 2026 Silver Circle Award for Teaching Excellence, one of UIC’s highest honors. Prof. Bui will be honored at the LAS commencement ceremony in May.

• Keely Stauter-Halsted (UIC Professor of History) won a prestigious Faculty Fellowship at the UIC Institute for the Humanities. Prof. Stauter-Halsted will use the fellowship to work on her latest book project, "Refugees and the End of Empire: Constructing Citizen Subjectivity in the Polish Second Republic."

Appearances

• Joaquin Chavez (UIC Associate Professor of History) appeared in an interview with Elizabeth Trabanino and Emilio Delgado, hosts of the talk show “Encuentros” on Radio Clásica El Salvador 103.3 FM, about Poetas y Profetas de la Resistencia: Los intelectuales y los orígenes de la guerra civil en El Salvador, the Spanish translation of his book originally published by Oxford University Press in 2017, March 23, 2026.

• Hayley Negrin (UIC Assistant Professor of History) was quoted in an article about the meaning of mascots in March Madness in the New York Times, demonstrating excellently how to infuse serious history and politics with a supposedly playful topic.

• Jennifer Brier (UIC Professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies) appeared on WBEZ’s Say More with Mary Dixon and Patrick Smith on International Women’s Day to discuss honoring women’s unpaid labor with hosts and listeners.

• Elizabeth Todd-Breland (UIC Associate Professor of History) was quoted extensively in an episode of WBEZ’s Curious City, “What’s the First Chicago School Named in Honor of a Black Person?”

• John Abbott (UIC Senior Lecturer in History) appeared on-stage as a panelist in a scholarly and musical exploration of 1933 in Europe titled “1933 - The Turning Point: Art, Oppression & Resistance,” hosted at the Harold Washington Library and presented by Chicago Opera Theater and the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

• Nick Doumanis (UIC Professor of History and Illinois Chair in Hellenic Studies) became reviews editor of The Journal of Modern Greek Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press). Along with Young Kim he is hosting the 29th biennial Modern Greek Studies Symposium here at UIC in October 2026. The second edition of his extensively revised and updated A History of Greece, which is to be published in May 2026 with Bloomsbury, discusses the continuities of Greek history since early antiquity. Prof. Doumanis gave a public lecture on Greece and World War II at the University of Chicago on October 28, 2025, and interviewed the new Greek Ambassador to the United States at a public event here at UIC on March 6.

• Robert Johnston (UIC Professor of History) was recently quoted in an extensive article on vaccine debates in American history, appearing in Infectious Disease Special Edition.

UIC History Student Accomplishments

• Nico Soto (UIC PhD ‘26) will be joining the faculty in the Department of History at DePaul University this fall as a tenure-track assistant professor of Latinx history following a nationwide search. Soto’s dissertation about the exploitation of agricultural workers in the Midwest pickle industry was advised by Prof. Adam Goodman.

Awards

• Greg Pratt (UIC History and Political Science, ‘10) won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for the Chicago Tribune on Operation Midway Blitz. After studying at UIC he went on to work for the Chicago Tribune, quickly becoming the top reporter covering the mayor's office during Lori Lightfoot and Brandon Johnson's term.  He wrote a book on Chicago during Covid, called The City is Up for Grabs: How Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led and Lost a City in Crisis.  He then focused his research on President Donald Trump's attacks on Chicago, leading to the reporting that led to him winning a Pulitzer Prize.

• Katie Batza (UIC PhD ‘11) was awarded a University Scholarly Achievement Award from the University of Kansas, where she is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The award, reserved for mid-career scholars, recognizes significant scholarly or research contributions. Prof. Batza turned her UIC dissertation advised by John D’Emilio and Jennifer Brier into her first book, Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s, which explored gay health activism in the period before the AIDS epidemic changed the global LGBTQ health landscape. Her 2025 second book, AIDS in the Heartland, examines the unfolding health crisis and local response to the AIDS epidemic in the Midwest, methodically documenting the transformative political activism that emerged from communities dealing with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s.

• Francis Balquin (UIC PhD student, advised by Michael Jin) and Nimrod Barnea (UIC PhD student, advised by Robert Johnston) each won the UIC Award for Graduate Research.

• Aleksei Epishev (UIC PhD student), in addition to serving as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Hong Kong during the Spring 2026 semester, was awarded the Stephen F. Cohen-Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (ASEEES). It is one of the most prestigious fellowships in the field, and highly competitive. The award includes a year-long stipend to do research and write, which will allow Aleksei to focus exclusively on his dissertation, currently entitled, "'We need them desperately:' 'Chinese Labor,' Global Capitalism, and Imperial Modernity in the Russian Empire and Early USSR, 1880s-late 1920s.”

Appearances

• Rick Elliott (UIC PhD student) was featured on WTTW News for his work as a researcher at UIC's Center for the Recovery and the Identification of the Missing (CRIM). Elliott and the other researchers art CRIM use historical research to locate possible locations of persons still missing from the Korean and Vietnam Wars and then anthropological skills to seek out their remains. Elliot himself has been on six trips to search for missing service members.
• Sarah Gawo (UIC History) organized and moderated a series of academic lectures on Assyrian history, language, and heritage as a part of the Assyrian Cultural Foundation’s “Assyrian Renaissance" festival