Edward Baring, Associate Professor of Modern European History
Edward Baring (PhD, Harvard University) is Associate Professor of Modern European History, specializing in twentieth-century intellectual life. Professor Baring is the author of The Young Derrida (Cambridge 2011), which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas for the best book in intellectual history. With Peter. E. Gordon he edited The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion (Fordham University Press, 2014). In addition, he has published a number of articles in Critical Inquiry, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas and New German Critique among others. His 2014 article “Ne me raconte plus d’histoires: Derrida and the Problem of the History of Philosophy,” in History and Theory, was the joint winner of the Society for French Studies Malcolm Bowie Prize for the best article by an early-career researcher in French. His work has been funded by the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH and the American Philosophical Society. He is a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.
Frances Bernstein, Associate Professor of History
Frances Bernstein (PhD, Columbia University) teaches courses in Russian and European history, with a special focus on the history of medicine, disability, sexuality and the body. In 2007 she published The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses. In 2010 she co-edited and contributed to Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, and Science. She is actively researching the culture and politics of disability in the Soviet context. Recent publications include “Prosthetic Manhood in late Stalinist Russia,” OSIRIS 30: Scientific Masculinities (2015), ed. Robert A. Nye and Erika Lorraine Millam, “Rehabilitation Staged: How Soviet Doctors ‘Cured’ Disability in the Second World War” in Disability Histories, ed. Susan Burch and Michael A. Rembis, 218-236 and “Prosthetic Promise and Potemkin Limbs in late-Stalinist Russia,” in Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia, 42-66. In recent years she has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, New York University, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.
James M. Carter, Associate Professor of History
James M. Carter (PhD, University of Houston) specializes in American foreign relations, the Vietnam War, the United States and East Asia, the Cold War, modernization theory, political economy and nation building. His book Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. He also has written articles on war profiteering in Vietnam and Iraq and the U.S. advisory effort in Vietnam, and he has published reviews and essays in The Journal of Military History, Peace & Change, Education About Asia, Itinerario, History News Network, The Asia Times and the BBC. Currently he is pursuing two research projects: the first focuses on U.S.-China relations during the Boxer Rebellion, the second examines the relationship between the government and private corporations in the realm of foreign policy from World War II through the 1960s.
Allan C. Dawson, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Allan C. Dawson (PhD, McGill University) is Associate Professor of Anthropology. His research is concerned with issues of ethnicity and identity in West Africa and in the African Diaspora, ethnicity and globalization, identity and violence, religious innovation, chieftaincy and traditional religious practice in the West African Sahel. Dawson also explores questions of Blackness and African identity within the context of the broader Black Atlantic world. His recent book, In Light of Africa: Globalizing Blackness in Northeastern Brazil (2014), seeks to reconcile theories of African cultural survival in the plantation with ideas of creolization by engaging the symbolic constructions of Africanity in Brazilian Black identities. His other works include Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues between State and Tradition (2014) and Shrines in Africa: History, Politics and Society (2009). His current ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa explores the interface between urban migration, climate change and religious radicalization in the Ghanaian Sahel.
Wyatt Evans, Associate Professor of History
Prior to re-entering academe, Wyatt Evans (PhD, Drew University) served in the Peace Corps and as a civil affairs officer in the U.S. Army. He teaches history at the graduate and undergraduate levels. A member of the Council of Independent Colleges’ Senior Leadership Academy, he is very involved with developing digital scholarship and literacy initiatives at Drew. His research areas include the Civil War and the use of historical memory in politics. His first book, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth, won the 2005 OAH Avery O. Craven award and he is currently at work on a study of domestic security in the Civil War North.
Joshua Kavaloski, Professor of German
Joshua Kavaloski is Professor of German and his primary research explores early twentieth-century European culture. He is the author of the book High Modernism: Aestheticism and Performativity in Literature of the 1920s. He has also published scholarly essays about texts by Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Jurek Becker and Daniel Kehlmann, as well as about graphic novels. He teaches a wide variety of topics at Drew, encompassing language, literature, film and history. Recent courses include: The Culture and History of the Weimar Republic, Perspectives on the Holocaust, Vampires on Film from German Expressionism to Today, Monsters of Modernity, Fantasie und Literatur, Das Roadmovie im deutschen Kino and Die Liebeskomödie im deutschen Kino.
Angie Kirby-Calder, Interim Director, Adjunct Assistant Professor of History
Angie Kirby-Calder (PhD, University of Houston) specializes in modern American cultural history and women’s and gender studies, with secondary fields in environmental history and the Atlantic world. Her areas of interest include popular culture, identity politics, marginal spaces/places in society, material and ephemeral cultural products, pornography and sex work and historical theory. She teaches graduate seminars in American popular culture, gender identities/identity formation and sexuality. Her dissertation, More than a Centerfold: Gender and the Politics of Playboy Magazine in Modern America, explores identity formation via consumption and commodity culture. She has recently developed a course on the cultural history of American foodways.
John Lenz, Associate Professor of Classics
John Lenz works on the history of ideas, especially the legacy of ancient Greece, on ancient history and on 20th century British philosopher Bertrand Russell. John received his PhD from Columbia, was a Fulbright fellow in Greece and was trained as an ancient historian. He is currently completing with a colleague the first English translation with commentary and revised text of a work by the primary figure of the modern Greek Enlightenment and plugging away at a book in progress,
The Ideal World of Bertrand Russell: Russell as a Utopian Thinker. He formerly served as President of the Russell Society. His H&C courses are The Classical Tradition and Utopias and Utopian Thought from the Bible to the WWW. Some publications are available on
academia.edu.
Karen Pechilis, Professor of History
Karen Pechilis (PhD, University of Chicago) explores issues of interpreting the embodied self through poetry, biography and practice in devotional traditions of Hinduism. She understands ‘devotion’ to be a site for the intersection of wonder and self-expression and for an exquisitely participatory impulse, especially in the arts and letters. Over the past twenty years, she has conducted research in Chennai (Madras), south India through grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Program and the Asian Cultural Council. Her published work, both independent and collaborative, engages many scholarly discussions about the making of religious tradition, including interpretive history, translation, cultural analysis and feminist and gender studies.
Kimberly Rhodes, Professor of Art History
Kimberly Rhodes (PhD, Columbia University) writes and teaches about modern and contemporary visual culture and has worked as an art historian in both museum and academic settings. She teaches courses on 19th century art, 20th century art and the history of photography. She also is the director of Drew’s New York Semester on Contemporary Art. Her publications include “Archetypes and Icons: Materialising Victorian Womanhood in 1970s Feminist Art” in Neo-Victorian Studies, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2008), “Double Take: Tom Hunter’s The Way Home (2000)” in The Afterlife of Ophelia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and “Degenerate Detail: John Everett Millais and Ophelia’s Muddy Death” in John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Paul Mellon Centre, 2001). Her current research projects continue the exploration of relationships among Shakespeare’s plays and visual culture, primarily in the arena of landscape, and gender and sexuality in Victorian art.
Jonathan Rose, William R. Kenan Professor of History
Jonathan Rose (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) specializes in modern Britain, British intellectuals, the history of the book and the history of reading. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and he continues to serve as an editor of the society’s journal, Book History. He was also a past president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) won numerous awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize. His other books include The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919, The Revised Orwell, The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, A Companion to the History of the Book (2007), The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (2014), Readers’ Liberation (forthcoming early 2018) and the two-volume anthology The Edinburgh History of Reading (forthcoming late 2019). He occasionally reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Christopher Taylor, Professor of History
Christopher Taylor (PhD, Princeton University) has more than 25 years of experience as a professor and administrator at Drew. He is an expert on religion and Middle East studies who still dedicates some of his time to classroom teaching. His research and scholarship deal with the social history of religion in the medieval Islamic world and the crisis of religious leadership in the contemporary Islamic world. He is the author of In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt and a number of articles on aspects of popular piety in Islam. He is currently working on a study about the social construction of moral imagination in the medieval Islamic world.
