Core Faculty
Sam RedmanDirector, Public History Program Research Interests and Professional Activities: Professor Redman studies U.S. cultural, social, and intellectual history. His first book Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums was published by Harvard University Press in 2016. He is also the author of Historical Research in Archives: A Practical Guide distributed by Oxford University Press. Professor Redman has written on the history of museums and collecting as well as other topics in modern U.S. history. He offers courses in U.S. history, public history, and oral history.
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Marla MillerAssociate Dean for Strategic Initiatives of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and Distinguished Professor of History Research Interests and Professional Activities: Though Professor Miller's primary research interest is U.S. women's work before industrialization, over the course of her career she has worked in museums, preservation agencies, and archives, and continues to consult with a wide variety of historical organizations. Her teaching interests extend to the Introduction to Public History, American Material Culture, Museum and Historic Site Interpretation, and courses on writing history beyond the academy, including History Communication and The Art and Craft of Biography. She also works closely with the M.S. in Design/Historic Preservation UMass offers, directed by Professor Max Page. Miller is the author of The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (UMass Press, 2006); ed., Cultivating a Past: Essays on the History of Hadley, Massachusetts (UMass Press, 2009); Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Holt, 2010), Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation (UMass Press, 2016, with Max Page); and Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). She was also on the team that produced the prizewinning 2016 study Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service.
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Jon OlsenAssociate Professor, Department of History Office: Herter 710 Research Interests and Professional Activities: Public History and New Media/Digital History, as well as memory and historical consciousness in Modern Germany, especially the role of monuments, museums, and commemorations in East Germany. His first book titled Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945-1990. Before coming to UMass, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at George Mason University and worked at the Center for History and New Media as the editor of an e-learning Website commemorating the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989). He offers graduate courses in Digital History and Comparative Memory, as well as German and European History.
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Diana Sierra BecerraAssistant Professor, Department of History Professor Becerra is a historian of women and gender in Latin America who specializes in social movements and revolutions. Her current courses include Women and Revolutions, Women and Gender in Latin America, and History and its Publics. Her book manuscript is tentatively titled, Insurgent Butterflies: Gender and Revolution in El Salvador. It tells the stories of peasant and working-class women who fought for a world without capitalists, imperialists, and patriarchs. Drawing from over fifty interviews and new archival sources, the book demonstrates how women confronted sexism and developed a vision of women’s liberation within the workers’ movement of the mid-to-late twentieth-century. It narrates a dynamic and contentious political process in which rank-and-file women changed the meaning and course of revolution. Their powerful history challenges dominant characterizations of revolutionary movements as monolithic, static, and dominated by urban male intellectuals, moving us to rethink dominant conceptions about armed struggle and feminism.
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Allied Faculty
Faculty across the UMass Campus and throughout the Five Colleges contribute to our Public History curriculum. Students regularly take courses with faculty in other departments, work with them on special projects, and read with them for exams. Some faculty whose interests are most closely related to our program's include:
Ethan CarrProfessor, Department of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning E-mail: @email Ethan Carr, Phd, FASLA, is a landscape historian and preservationist specializing in public landscapes, particularly municipal and national park planning and design. He has taught at the Harvard GSD, the University of Virginia, and at the University of Massachusetts, where he is a professor. He has written two award-winning books, Wilderness by Design (1998) and Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma (2007), and he is the volume editor of Volume 8 of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, The Early Boston Years, 1882-1890 (2013).
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Richard ChuFive College Associate Professor E-mail: @email Research Interests and Professional Activities: Professor Chu's research centers on the Chinese and Asian diasporas in the U.S. and the Philippines, focusing on themes of ethnicity, race, nationalism, empire, and gender. He is author or editor of several works, including Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture 1860s-1930s (Brill, 2010); and More Tomboy, More Bakla [Gay] than We Admit: Insights into Sexual and Gender Diversity in Philippine Culture, History, and Politics (Vibal Publishing, Forthcoming 2020). He has been working closely with the Asian American community organizations of Western Massachusetts and the Asian American Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to conduct oral history projects for members of the Bhutanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, and Tibetan communities. The videos are uploaded on to the website of the Special Collections and Archives Division of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and hence made available to the public for research and other purposes, but most importantly, for the public to learn about the life stories of Asian Americans living in Pioneer Valley. |
Mark HaminSenior Lecturer of Regional Planning E-mail: @email Mark Hamin received his PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 (MA HSS 1993) as well as his BA in History and BA in Philosophy from Brown University in 1984. He is a Senior Lecturer of Regional Planning and Sustainable Community Development, Director of the Master of Regional Planning Program, Faculty Supervisor for the BDIC Program (STEAM and Sustainability Majors), Lead Coordinator for the Sustainability Curriculum Fellows Program, and Faculty Associate of the Science, Technology and Society Initiative in the School of Public Policy. Courses that Dr. Hamin offers that might be of interest to students in the public history program include: REGIONPL 891: Advanced Planning Theory; REGIONPL 651: Planning History and Theory; SUSTCOMM/REGIONPL 574: City Planning; and REGIONPL 580: Sustainable Cities (seminar). Dr. Hamin has also taught LANDARCH/REGIONPL 635: Research Issues; REGIONPL 591A: Seminar on Economic Development Theory; and REGIONPL 692H: Technology and Urban (Re)Form. Dr. Hamin's previous teaching experience includes: Temporary Assistant Professor in Community and Regional Planning at Iowa State University, and Instructor in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hamin's special research interests are the history of civic planning, design, and development; the influence of life sciences on the formation of the planning field; urban infrastructural and environmental history; social/cultural perspectives on risk, security, and 'quality of life' in cities; long-term trends in technologically transformed metropolitan-regional food systems; sustainability in the STEAM disciplines; and mentoring in relation to pedagogy and professionalism.
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Emily T. HamiltonAssistant Professor, Department of History E-mail: ehamilton@history.umass.edu Emily Hamilton specializes in the history of science, focusing on the 20th century United States. Her doctoral work, completed at the University of California at Berkeley and titled “The National Science Foundation and a Comparative Study of Precollege Mathematics and Science Education Reform in the United States, 1950-2000,” examines how the federal government has been historically involved in reforming K-12 mathematics curricula. This project has led to Hamilton’s active engagement with the local community of mathematics educators in utilizing historical understanding of past policies and practice to inform future reform efforts. In addition, Hamilton’s work incorporates oral history sources as a means of engaging with the community of scholars and activists that were central to the period she studies. Hamilton’s involvement with oral history began during her time in Berkeley, where she worked for five years with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library, conducting oral history interviews with prominent scientists and helping lead the Oral History Summer Institute. She intends to continue her work in oral history through her next anticipated projects which will explore the cultural history of the New Math and the ways in which educational programming brought mathematics instruction to television. Other projects include involvement with the local and campus community on issues of food science and policy. Hamilton is also currently undertaking the expansion of a public history of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics/Medicine) initiative here at the University of Massachusetts.
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Alice NashAssociate Professor, Department of History E-mail: @email Alice Nash is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University (1997) and an M.A. in American and New England Studies from Boston University (1989). Her research interests range from the impact of colonization on family and gender relations in Wabanaki history before 1800 to the ongoing work of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Much of her work is collaborative in ways that might be of interest to Public History students, including four awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead Summer Institutes for K-12 Teachers on Teaching Native American Histories with the Five College Schools Partnership. The most recent institutes (2017, 2019) were co-directed with Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag), an educator with long experience in Massachusetts museums. Dr. Nash is the UMass representative to the State Commission for Plymouth 400 and co-chair of the Education Committee, engaged with planning commemorative events for 2020 to mark the arrival of the Mayflower. She is working with the Five College Native American & Indigenous Studies committee to plan their Spring symposium, What’s your #1620?: Confronting Colonization in 2020, to be held April 24-25, 2020 at UMass. She is a member of the Mellon Urban Humanities Advisory Board at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, which has an extraordinary library and funding for researchers; speak to her if this interests you. Dr. Nash has published numerous articles on northeastern Native American history including three in French translation in the Quebec journal Recherches amérindiennes au Québec (RAQ). In 2003-2004 she was awarded the first Fulbright-Université de Montréal Distinguished Chair. During this year, she served on the RAQ editorial board and taught a course on the Deerfield Raid of 1704, connecting New England and New France. Her most recent publication is an essay on “Indigenous Peoples of the Americas to 1900,” published in The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas (Routledge 2019) which she co-edited with Olaf Kaltmeier, Josef Raab, Michael Stewart Foley, Stefan Rinke and Mario Rufer. Her current book project, An Ethnic Shapeshifter in New York, is a biographical study of a multiracial African American man from the Midwest who moved to New York City in 1946 and shapeshifted twice, first claiming to be from Tanganyika, then presenting himself as Comanche, in order to work as a fashion designer, dancer, and performer. Her interest in shapeshifting as an expression of multiracial identity reflects her own background as a non-Indigenous scholar of mixed settler-colonial and Japanese descent whose work is grounded in History and Indigenous Studies.
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Max PageProfessor of Architecture and History and Director of Historic Preservation Initiatives (On Leave) E-mail: @email Max Page is Professor of Architecture and History and Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He received his education at Yale University (BA, magna cum laude in History, 1988) and from the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1995). He is the author and editor of the following books: The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which won the Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, for the best book on architecture and urbanism; The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (Yale University Press, 2008); Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Environment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, co-edited with Steven Conn); Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (Routledge, 2003, co-edited with Randall Mason); The Future of Higher Education (Routledge, 2011, with Dan Clawson); Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Planners Press, 2011, co-edited with Tim Mennell); Campus Guide to the University of Massachusetts (Princeton Architecture Press, 2013, with Marla Miller; Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation (UMass Press, 2016, with Marla Miller), and Why Preservation Matters (Yale University Press, 2016). He is a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation and the Fulbright Commission, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He is also an activist on behalf of public education, as a founder of PHENOM, the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts, as a former president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the faculty and librarian union at UMass Amherst), and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the 110,000-member teachers union.
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Haeden StewartAssistant Professor, Department of Anthropology Email: hestewart@umass.edu Haeden Stewart is a historical archaeologist who is interested in industrialization, labor, migration, and human/environment relations. His research focuses on the adaptation of archaeological methods and theories to the study of contemporary social crises, namely environmental degradation, long-term effects of colonialism, and undocumented migration.
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Jim WaldAssociate Professor, Department of History, Hampshire College E-mail: jwald@hampshire.edu Jim Wald is an associate professor of history at Hampshire College. Principal research and teaching interests include modern European cultural history, the history of the book, nationalism and fascism, historic preservation and material culture, German studies, and Jewish studies. He has led field courses in historic preservation and cultural heritage in Prague and Kraków under the auspices of Hampshire College and Rutgers University. Active in the town of Amherst, Wald has served as Chair of the Amherst Historical Commission and Comprehensive Planning Committee; a member of the Amherst Select Board, and liaison to the Historical Commission, Design Review Board, and Public Arts Commission; trustee of Amherst Historical Society; Treasurer, Society for the History or Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), Chair of the Board of the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
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