Dear Students, Student Families, Alumni, and Friends of History,

Happy Spring! I hope you are all enjoying the blooming flowers and trees as well as the warmer days.

This year has been an excellent one for the History Department. The number of history majors and minors has increased significantly. A group of students and two faculty members recently attended the Phi Alpha Theta regional conference in person for the first time since “the before times” – that is, before the COVID-19 pandemic. This followed our second Annual History Day, a series of talks by history professors organized by history students for the SCU community. We also conducted “Program Review” and benefitted from dialoguing with and hearing the insights of our external reviewers from Carnegie Melon University and University of California, Davis. Faculty members sponsored or co-sponsored speaker events (featuring Mark Arax and Oleg Budnitskii – see below) and exhibits, the History “Dia de los Muertos” Ofrenda, and the Bracero Photo Exhibit, "Harvesting Mobility: Bracero Migration, Labor & Life in California, 1942-1964." The History Club has also been very active, organizing movies, “pizza with the prof” nights, pre-registration events, a potluck, and other activities. Department Manager, Heidi Elmore, has created a welcoming atmosphere – so much so that sometimes the History Department Office is teeming with history students. Our History community feels stronger than it has in a while.

This is my last spring and summer as History Department Chair. It has been a privilege to work with my wonderful department colleagues, the Dean’s Office, chairs in other departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, and students – history majors, minors, and aficionados. I have also enjoyed hearing from and getting to know some of our accomplished and generous alumni. Please keep sending alumni updates! Next year I’m looking forward to spending more time on my teaching and scholarship and continuing in my leadership role at the Center for Arts and Humanities.

It has been a particular pleasure to grow our faculty in the last few years. Since I began as Chair in January 2020, we have hired three tenure-track faculty and two assistant teaching professors! We are posed to grow some more in the next few years at the same time as we also rethink and revise our curriculum. It has also been a gift to work with students and faculty to develop new student initiatives: peer advising; a History Ambassador program; History Day; a student summer research stipend program; and a History Internship Program (HIP), with some assistance in the last 2 years from the CAS’s REAL office to help fund these paid internships. These internships have involved partnering with the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco; the De Saisset Museum on campus; the Santa Clara County Historical and Genealogical Society; the Santa Clara City Library; the Japanese American Museum of San Jose; the Northern California Innocence Project (SCU Law School), and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

The History Department will be in excellent hands as Dr. Matthew Newsom Kerr becomes the next Department Chair in September 2024. Dr. Newsom Kerr is the author of Contagion, Isolation, and Biopolitics in Victorian London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) as well as numerous academic articles and chapters, including most recently “Environment,” in A Cultural History of Medicine in the Age of Empire, edited by Jonathan Reinarz. He has also written various public-intellectual essays, such as “Wearable Immunity: Beauty Lessons from the Pockmarking Era.” His courses include: “Health, Medicine, and the Body,” “Plagues, Epidemics, and Infections,” “The History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” “Crime, Prostitution, and Poverty in Victorian London;” and “Britain and World War I.” We look forward to his vision and leadership!

Best wishes to you all for a good summer.
Amy E. Randall

Phi Alpha Theta Northern California Regional Conference

Students Naomi Sneath (left), Dylan Ryu (center), and Rosie Huang (right) presented fabulous papers to audiences of approximately 15 or more participants.

On April 26th Phi Alpha Theta Faculty Advisor, Professor Paul Mariani, and Chair, Amy Randall, traveled with nine history students to Hayward for the Northern California regional conference at Cal State East Bay. It is the first time SCU students and faculty have traveled for such an event in a long time. The History Department at Cal State East Bay developed a first-class program and we are grateful to the hosts.

Student Spotlights

Max Silveiri, Sarah Cohen, Rosie Huang, Payton Stewart, and Patrick Gammon reflect on their experiences with the SCU History Department.

Read more »

Hayes Research Fellowship, University Honors Program

The University Honors Program awarded junior history major Naomi Sneath a Hayes Research Fellowship (in memory of Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., SCU's first Rhodes Scholar in 1955 and a former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration), accompanied by a $5,000 stipend. She will use the funds to conduct research for her forthcoming senior thesis project on the history of Indigenous boarding schools in the American West.

The Center for Arts and Humanities Student Fellowship

The CAH selected Samuel Cao to be one of its Student Fellows in 2024-2025. Sam will be working on his senior thesis project, “The Chualar Accident and Preceding Tragedies: Categorizing Bracero Worker Injuries in California and the Legislative Response,” with history advisors Drs. Mateo Carrillo & Meg Gudgeirsson.

Phi Alpha Theta Induction

The Phi Alpha Theta induction ceremony was held on April 9th. Phi Alpha Theta is the National Honors History Society, and it is quite an honor when students meet the criteria for membership and become inducted as members. It was a festive affair with a reception and award ceremony. The Phi Alpha Theta Faculty Advisor, Paul Mariani, and History Chair, Amy Randall, made remarks as did PAT student president Samuel Cao.

History Ambassador Program

This was the inaugural year for a new History Ambassador Program. Students applied to become ambassadors to represent the History Department at various department, college, and university events, offer advice and guidance to fellow students in a new mandatory peer advising program, and organize History Day. The History Department is very grateful to these students for their energy and enthusiasm and all that they have done to make “History” more visible to the SCU community!

Gabby Nelson '25

History major

"I play four different drums!"

Anna Nicolae '25

History and Biology double major

"I speak three languages and understand two more!"

Samuel Cao '25

History and English double major

"I play competitive billiards for SCU!"

Dylan Ryu '26

History and Communication double major, Urban Education minor

"I used to be a math major!"

Naomi Sneath '25

History and Political Science double major, Urban Education minor

"I studied abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland in the fall!"

Caitlin Gronowski '25

History and Classics double major

"I rode horses competitively for five years!"

Naomi Andrews

Dr. Naomi Andrews, Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor, presented, The Mobile Metaphor of Slavery and the Development of French Antislavery Sentiment, 1748-1848, at the Humanities Brown Bag Speaker Series on March 7. Professor Andrews presented the same work at Stanford’s European History Workshop in February as well.

Nancy Unger

Professor Nancy C. Unger presented “Winning Women’s Suffrage:  Celebrating Victories, Learning From Mistakes,” to the law firm Beveridge & Diamond PC.  Her article, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Betty Smith’s Bestselling Introduction to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," appears in a special issue on literature co-edited by Nancy for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Read more »

Sonia Gomez

Dr. Sonia Gomez took part in the second International Remembering Spaces of Internment Symposium as well as two public forums on Asian-Black Alliance, a project led by Dr. Hsin-I Cheng (Communication).

Read more »

Harry Odamtten

Dr. Harry Odamtten published a review essay in the prestigious Journal of African History. "Ray Kea and the Historians of the Gold Coast: Debates Over Continuity and Rupture in African and African Diaspora Atlantic Histories," is a comprehensive analysis of the latest historiography of the Gold Coast.

Amy Randall

Dr. Amy E. Randall participated in a book incubator workshop sponsored by the Petrach Program in Ukraine at George Washington University in mid-February. Here she joined other experts on Ukrainian and Soviet history, Eastern European politics, and women’s and gender studies to support a young Ukrainian scholar.

Matthew Specter

Dr. Matthew Specter presented at two conferences. The first was held at St. John’s College, Oxford University, on “Geopolitics and the Critique of Liberal Order”; the second presentation was held at the annual International Studies Association (ISA) meeting in San Francisco. His book, The Atlantic Realists, will be translated into Mandarin.

Read more »

Award-winning Journalist Marx Arax Visits Campus

Drs. Mateo J. Carrillo and Bryson White (Religious Studies) welcomed award-winning author Mark Arax to campus for two events on Wednesday, February 28, 2024. A journalist, writer, historian, and biographer of California and the U.S. West, Mark painstakingly documents how the myth that is California was built upon the exploitation of the state's natural and human resources.

In the morning Q&A session, "Chronicling the Human Condition: Perspectives on a Career in Media, Writing & History," Mark spoke with SCU students about the importance of storytelling and fostering human connection in the age of A.I.

In his afternoon talk, "Big Ag & Big Tech: A Tale of Two Valleys Where Innovation, Inequality & Plunder Meet," Mark spoke about the rise of A.I. and how the technological development of Silicon Valley beginning in the mid-twentieth century paralleled the agricultural development of California's San Joaquin Valley beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.

Preview Day

April’s Preview Day was a resounding success, as a robust contingent of History majors and faculty engaged dozens of prospective Broncos and their parents. Kudos to our history student ambassadors and volunteers who, via both the History Department booth and classroom presentations, left lasting impressions on many of the attendees.

Photo Exhibit: Harvesting Mobility: Bracero Migration, Labor & Life in California, 1942-1964

Dr. Carrillo and colleagues from the Departments of Anthropology, Modern Languages and Literatures, and Global Engagement organized a photo exhibit in the SCU Library commemorating the 60-year anniversary of the end of the Bracero Program (1942-1964). The Bracero Program was a series of guest worker agreements that brought millions of rural Mexican laborers to the United States to work in agriculture and industry. The exhibit aimed to engage SCU students by providing historical context and perspective on the current immigration situation at the US-Mexican border. The exhibit, "Harvesting Mobility: Bracero Migration, Labor & Life in California, 1942-1964," was free and open to the public at the Learning Commons through the middle of May, and was attended by dozens of visitors.

Annual History Day

The second annual History Day was held on April 26 where several dozen students came to hear faculty research talks by Drs. Meg Gudgeirsson, Marwan Hanania, Amy Randall, Matthew Newsom Kerr, Naomi Andrews, and Barbara Molony.

Distinguished historian Oleg Budnitskii visits SCU

Dr. Amy Randall organized a talk by Dr. Oleg Budnitskii, who is currently a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, and from 2011-2023 was the founding director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of WWII and its Consequences in Moscow, Russia. Dr. Budnitskii is the author or coauthor of nine books, and editor or coeditor of 27 other volumes on imperial Russian, Soviet, and modern Jewish history. His most recent books are War, Conquest, and Catastrophe (Jews in the Soviet Union: A History, 1939–1945) (2022, coauthored with David Engel, Gennady Estraikh, and Anna Shternshis) and Another Russia: Studies in the History of the Russian Emigration (2021, in Russian). He is on the editorial boards of the Russian Review and East European Jewish Affairs.

At SCU Budnitskii discussed his pioneering research on Soviet Jews in the Red Army during World War II.