Associate Professor of History

Contact Information:

• Office: 8 Gilbert House
• Telephone: (973) 408-3542
• E-mail: fbernste@drew.edu

Biography:

Frances Bernstein is associate professor of history at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. She received her doctorate in Russian history from Columbia University in 1998. She teaches courses in Russian and European history, with a special focus on the history of sexuality, history of disease, history of medicine and the body. In 2007 she published The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). She is currently editing a collected volume on the history of Soviet medicine, which will include her article “‘Behind the Closed Door’: The Politics of Doctor-Patient Confidentiality in Early Soviet Medicine.” Her current research focuses on the culture and politics of disability in the Soviet context. Projects include: Empire of Broken Men: Disability and Medicine at the End of World War Two; “The 1937 Trial of the Deaf-Mutes: Purging Disability During the Great Terror”; and “All the Ward’s a Stage: Disabled Veterans and their Doctors in World War Two Health Plays.”

Education: B.A. with honors, Brown University, 1987, M.A. 1991; Ph.D. 1998, Columbia University.

Areas of Specialization: Russian history, history of sexuality, European women’s history.

Current Research Interests: a book, City of Broken Men: Disability, Memory, and Masculinity at the End of World War Two, and an article “Behind the Closed Door: The Politics of Doctor-Patient Confidentiality in Early Soviet Medicine.”

Recent Publications:

• The Dictatorship of Sex: Gender, Health, and Enlightenment in Revolutionary Russia, 1918-1931 (Northern Illinois University Press).
• “Panic, Potency, and the Crisis of Nervousness in the 1920s,” in Everyday Subjects: Formations of Identity in Early Soviet Culture, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Indiana University Press).
• “Visions of Sexual Health and Illness in Revolutionary Russia,” in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Veneral Diseases in European Social Context since 1870, ed. Lesley Hall and Roger Davidson (Routledge, 2001).
• “Prostitutes and Proletarians: The Labor Clinic as Revolutionary Laboratory in the 1920s,” in The Human Tradition in Modern Russia, ed. William Husband (Scholarly Resources, 2000).

Awards and Other Academic Contributions:

• Social Science Research Council Eurasia Fellowship, 2002.
• International Research Exchange Board travel grant, Russia, 2001.
• Kennan Institute research scholarship, 1998-99.

Associate Professor, History

Contact Information:

• Office: Gilbert House 14
• Telephone: 973-408-3411
• Email: jcarter1@drew.edu

Biography:
I teach a broad range of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. I specialize in the U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. since World War II and the Sixties. My book, Inventing Vietnam, is an analysis of the failed nation building effort undertaken by the United States in Vietnam and how that failure led to the war. In related research, I have also written on privatization of war and war profiteering, using the invasion of Iraq as a case study.

My more recent research focuses on the Sixties in the U.S. and specifically the counterculture and advent of rock music culture, with a particular emphasis on the role of the college campus.  My article, “Campus Rock: Rock Music Culture on the College Campus during the Counterculture Sixties, 1967-8,” has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Popular Music Studies.

This project has also taken me into the realm of digital history/digital mapping. Thanks in part to a couple of Mellon Grants at Drew during the spring and summer 2019, I and three research assistants have created an extensive GIS mapping project of rock music during the late sixties.  For more information, see my website: jmarloncarter.com.

Associate Professor of History
Director, History & Culture Graduate Program

Contact Information:

• Office: Bowne Hall 100
• Telephone: (973) 408-3329
• Email: wevans@drew.edu

Biography:

Wyatt Evans returned to academics following stints as a Peace Corps volunteer and U.S. Army civil affairs officer. Trained as an intellectual and cultural historian, his main areas of interest included collective memory and the interaction of the modern state and the individual. His first book, The Legend of John Wilkes Booth (Kansas, 2004), won the Organization of American Historians’ Avery O. Craven Award in 2005 and Drew University’s Bela Kornitzer Prize in 2007. He is currently at work on a study of Civil War domestic security for Oxford University Press as well as a longer-range project on the “memory of the good” in American history. He is a distinguished lecturer from the OAH speaker series.

Education: B.A. Carnegie-Mellon University, 1980, M.A., Drew University, 1999; Ph.D., 2003.

Areas of Specialization: American intellectual and cultural history, vernacular history and collective memory, conspiracy theory in American history.

Current Research Interests: historical understanding in the digital era and the development of digital literacy using historical topics in the classroom.

Courses Taught: American Civil War, History by the Numbers, Conspiracy Theory in U.S. History, Monsters & Gangsters: Film and the United States in the Great Depression Era, The American West in Myth and History, Creating “America”: Intellectual History of the Early Colonial Period (g).

Publications and Recent Presentations:

• “The Future of History Graduate Education: The View from 35,000 Feet,” Process: A Blog for American History, Organization of American Historians, Nov. 2, 2015: http://www.processhistory.org/?p=1155.
• “The Lincoln-Obama Moment,” in Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial, Thomas Brown, ed. (John Hopkins University Press, October, 2011).
• “We’ve become a Nation Dangerously Beholden to the Past,” History News Network, Oct. 17, 2011: http://hnn.us/articles/weve-become-nation-dangerously-beholden-past.
• “Lafayette Baker and Security in the Civil War North,” North and South Magazine, September 2008.
• The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory and a Mummy (Kansas, 2004).
• “The Future of History in the Digital Era,” presentation to the annual Arts & Letters dinner, Drew University, April 4, 2016.
• “Vermont Newspapers and the St. Albans’ Raid,” presentation at the Brattleboro, Vermont Civil War Memorial Day Event, May 24, 2015.
• “Teaching History to the Digital Natives,” presentation to the Madison Historical Society, Madison, NJ, April 2013.
• “The Emancipation Proclamation: Process and Intentions,” address to the Drew Club of Greater Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, March 2, 2013.
• “What the University of the Future Looks Like,” address for the History & Culture Public Humanities workshop, Drew University, February 22, 2013.
• “The Social and Cultural Dimensions of the Digital Revolution,” presentation to the Madison Men discussion group, January 22, 2013.
• Organizer, moderator, and roundtable participant at “The Future of Civil War History,” conference held at Drew University, March 30-31, 2012.
• “John Dewey and Education in the Digital Age,” paper presented at the 2011 fall New England Historical Association (NEHA) conference, Emmanuel College, Boston.

Awards and Other Academic Contributions:

• Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), Senior Leadership Academy fellow, 2015/16.
• Organization of American Historians (OAH), Distinguished Lecturer, 2005-2015.
• Drew University Bela Kornitzer Award for outstanding faculty publication, 2007.
• OAH Avery O. Craven Award, 2005.
• Drew University Mary Lester Pennywitt dissertation prize, 2003.

Professor, History Department and Program in the Study of Religion

Contact Information:

• Office: Faulkner House 5
• Telephone: 973-408-3124
• Email: kpechili@drew.edu

Biography

Professor Pechilis is an historian of religions who specializes in the study of India and South Asia. She teaches courses in world history, gender and history, and religion and spirituality in late modernity. She has served as Director of the Humanities Program in the College and Director of Arts & Letters in Drew’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies. Her recent publications in the history of religions that engage translation, history, gender studies and ethnography include the monograph, Interpreting Devotion: The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India (2012), the co-edited volume Re-Figuring the Body: Embodiment in South Asian Religions (2017), and a journal special issue, “Contemporary Images of Hindu Bhakti: Identity and Visuality,” in the Journal of Hindu Studies (2019). Current research includes a volume on devotional visualities. For more information, please go to kpechilis.net.

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History
Drew University Scholar-Teacher of the Year (2001)
Presidential Award for Career Scholarship (2006)

Contact Information:

• Office: 16 Gilbert House
• Telephone: (973) 408-3545
• E-mail: jerose@drew.edu

Jonathan Rose (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is the William R. Kenan Professor of History. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history, and the history of the book. He served as the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize, and the British Council Prize. He has also published A Companion to the History of the Book (2007), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001), The Revised Orwell (1992), British Literary Publishing Houses 1820-1965 (1991), and The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (1986). He is coeditor of the journal Book History, which won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for the Best New Journal of 1999. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University, and he reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph (London). His most recent books are The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale UP, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize; and Readers’ Liberation (Oxford UP, 2018).

Education: B.A. in History cum laude (1974), Princeton University. M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1981) in History, University of Pennsylvania.

Areas of specialization: British history and history of the book.

Current research: A global history of reading.

Publications:

• Coeditor (with Simon Eliot), A Companion to the History of the Book (Blackwell, 2007).
• Reinventing Graduate Education in History,” Perspectives on History (February 2009)
• “Arriving at a History of Reading,” Historically Speaking (January 2004).
• The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale UP, 2001). Winner of the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize, the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the British Council Prize, the SHARP Book History Prize, the Bela Kornitzer Prize, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize. Named a Book of the Year by the Economist magazine.
• Editor, The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (U Massachusetts P, 2001).
• Editor, The Revised Orwell (Michigan State UP, 1992).
• Coeditor, British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1965 (Gale, 1991).
• The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (Ohio UP, 1986).
• “The Horizon of a New Discipline: Inventing Book Studies,” Publishing Research Quarterly (Spring 2003).
• “Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Blackwell, 2002).
• “The History of Books: Revised and Enlarged,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 359 (1998).
• “How Historians Study Reading,” in Literature in the Marketplace, eds. John O. Jordan and Robert Patten (Cambridge UP, 1995).
• “Working-Class Journals,” in Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, eds. Rosemary VanArsdel and J. Don Vann (U Toronto P, 1994).
• “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences,” Journal of the History of Ideas, January-March 1992.
• Contributor, The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP).
• Readers’ Liberation (Oxford UP, 2018)
• The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale UP, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize

Professional Activities:

• Founding President, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (1991-97).
• Past President, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (1989-92).
• Coeditor, Book History (winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals Award for the Best New Scholarly Journal of 1999).

Associate Professor of History

Education: B.A. University of Michigan, 1994, Ph.D., Harvard, 2001.

Areas of Specialization: Early American history, American women’s history, American social history, history of childhood, and the origins of inequality.

Courses Taught: American Revolution, Colonial America, History of Work, History of Childhood, American Women’s History, African American History to 1877.

Publications and Conferences:

• Industrious in Their Stations: Young People at Work in Urban America, 1720–1810, University of Virginia Press.
  Read our Q&A with Professor Sundue about the book.
• “Confining the Poor to Ignorance? Eighteenth-Century American Experiments with Charity Education,” History of Education Quarterly, Winter 2006.

Awards and Other Academic Contributions:

• SHEAR/Mellon Summer Undergraduate Fellowship steering committee.
• Drew University Honors Review Committee.
• Committee on Pan-African Studies
• Student Judiciary Board
• Historiae Faculty Sponsor

Contact Information:

• Office: 12 Gilbert House
• Telephone: (973) 408-3171
• E-mail: ssundue@drew.edu

Professor of Classics

John Lenz (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Chair of the Department of Classics. He teaches ancient Greek history, literature, language, philosophy, archaeology, myth, and religion. He is interested in the history of ideas and the legacy of Classical thought in succeeding centuries, the “Classical tradition.” He has presented numerous papers on intellectuals and society in ancient Greece, the transition from paganism to Christianity, and the use of Classics at the time of the founding of the modern Greek state. His interest in the history of ideas led him to utopianism, or the study of how ideas may or may not change history. He has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Greece and as president of the Bertrand Russell Society. His published articles include “Bertrand Russell and the Greeks,” “Deification of the Philosopher in Ancient Greece,” and contributions to The Dictionary of Art (now Grove Art Online). Read more on his personal page.

Associate Professor of Classics

Read more on his personal page.