Recent News

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.”

Registration is now open for the Western New York Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference, hosted by UB's Department of History.  To register, please fill out the registration form.   For participants not affiliated with the University at Buffalo, there will be a $10 registration fee due at the time of the conference. 

Victoria Nachreiner has received a pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the West African Research Association which will allow her to perform preliminary dissertation research this summer in Nigeria. Congrats Victoria!

On March 8-9, 2019, the Graduate History Association held their annual Milton Plesur Graduate History Conference.  The keynote was Dr. Katherine Ott from the National Museum of American History. The Milton Plesur Graduate History Conference is the longest continuously running graduate conference at the University at Buffalo.  It attracts not only students from the United States, but also hosts international students. 

In February 2019, Professor Andreas Daum published a biography of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), an intellectual globalizer who is regarded as one of the last universal scholars.  Daum’s book provides an overview of the transatlantic life, widespread oeuvre and networks of Humboldt.  Today Humboldt enjoys renewed appreciation for his comparative views on the natural environments, culture and history of the various spaces in Europe, the Americas and Asia he visited (C. H. Beck Publishers, Munich).

Congrats to Dr. Mark Nathan for his recent promotion to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure and for the publication of his book, From the Mountains to the Cities: A History of Buddhist Propagation in Modern Korea. Congratulations Dr. Nathan!