Recent News

Prof. Erik Seeman's book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America, won the 2020 Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, for the best book in American cultural history. Congratulations, Prof. Seeman!

Prof. Tamara Thornton has been appointed a Council Member of the National Board of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honors Society. Congratulations, Prof. Thornton!

Congratulations to Shanleigh Corrallo who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, "Rustbelt Radicals: Black Power in Buffalo and Rochester, New York in the 1960s-1980s" on February 26, 2020!

Congratulations to Maria Daxenbichler who successfully defender her PhD dissertation, "Knowing the Uterus: The Role of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Abortion in the Professionalization of American Medicine, 1880-1920" on March 11, 2020! 

Congratulations to Elizabeth Masarik who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, "Out of the Realm of Sentiment: Infant Mortality, Single Mothers, and the Formation of the Welfare State, 1883-1927" on March 27th!

Congratulations to Elisabeth Davis who successfully defended her PhD dissertation "The Consolidation Controversy: Women Religious, the Clergy, and the Development of the American Catholic Church, 1800-1870” on Janaury 27, 2020!

Congratulations to Marissa Rhodes and Joshua Schroeder for successfully defending their dissertations this spring! Dr. Rhodes’ dissertation is entitled “Working Bodies: Wet Nursing and Economies of the Breast in London and Philadelphia, 1750-1815.”   Dr. Schroeder’s dissertation is titled “Building a Godly World: The Efforts to Create a Puritan Atlantic in the Early Seventeenth Century.”

Professor Ndubueze Mbah has received a Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and has also been named an "ACLS Centennial Fellow in the Dynamics of Place" for his second book project, "Rebellious Migrants: Forging Cosmopolitan Identity and Postcolonial Spaces in the Bight of Biafra and West Africa, 1840-1960." His work examines how the social mobility and reintegration politics of nineteenth-century Biafran recaptives, particularly the Liberated Africans that returned from Sierra Leone to Calabar, facilitated postcolonial forms of ethnogeneses in West African territories including Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon.

The History Department is happy to announce that several of our faculty and students have received Fellowships from the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo.  Victoria Wolcott and Michael Rembis are two of the eight faculty fellows for the 2019-2020 School Year.  Shuko Tamao and Elisabeth Davis have both received Advanced Dissertation Fellowships. Alexandra Prince is one of the two Humanities Institute Public Humanities Fellows.  Congratulations to our faculty and graduate students for their exciting awards!

On April 13th, UB’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honors society, hosted the society’s regional conference, with over fifty undergraduate and master’s students from colleges and universities in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ontario presenting papers based on their original research.  One hundred and twenty students and faculty attended, held in recently renovated Hayes Hall, including Dr. Clayton Drees, the national president of Phi Alpha Theta.   Dr. Victoria Wolcott, the chair of UB’s history department, presented an illustrated keynote talk, entitled “Roller Coasters and Race in the Postwar City: Crystal Beach, Canada, and the 1956 Canadiana Riot.”