History Faculty

Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies

Kabria Baumgartner is an award-winning historian of early United States history, specializing in African American women’s and gender history, public history, and the history of education. She is the author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and …

Professor of History

Timothy Scott Brown is the author of Sixties Europe (Cambridge, forthcoming, 2020). His previous books include West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 (Cambridge, 2013) and Weimar Radicals (Berghahn, 2009). He is…

Associate Teaching Professor of Urban Landscape and History

Nicholas Brown teaches in the Urban Landscape Program and the Department of History at Northeastern University. He holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture (History & Theory) from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a MFA degree from UIUC’…

Associate Professor of History

Victoria Cain is a social and cultural historian of the twentieth century United States. She takes special interest in the history of education, media, and technology. Her most recent book, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History (MIT Press, 2021), c…

Dean of the Library; Vice Provost for Information Collaboration; Professor of History

Dan Cohen is the Vice Provost for Information Collaboration, Dean of the Libraries, and professor of history at Northeastern University. His work has focused on the impact of digital media and technology on all aspects of knowledge and learning, from…

Associate Teaching Professor of History and International Affairs

Winner of the CSSH Outstanding Teaching Award (2025). Before coming to Northeastern, he taught at Colgate, Loyola Marymount, and Tufts, as well as at Vanderbilt, where he held a postdoctoral fellowship from 2012 to 2014. Dr. Cross’s broad range of re…

Assistant Teaching Professor in History and International Affairs

Pete Fraunholtz teaches courses for the History Department, International Affairs, and the Global Studies MA Program. Recent and upcoming courses focus on The Vietnam Wars, The World in a Decade: 1990s, Emerging Economies, History of the Soviet Union…

President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor

Richard Freeland teaches the introductory survey of American history.  He has also taught a variety of courses in 20th century American history and is an historian of American higher education. He has published three books: The Truman Doctrine and th…

Chair and Professor of History

Gretchen Heefner teaches and researches the history of the U.S. in the world, with a focus on militarization, the environment, and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday. Her latest book,Sand, Snow and …

Associate Professor of History

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi teaches courses in Middle Eastern history, World history and urban history. She is particularly interested in Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean cities in the late 19th, early 20th centuries and the movements of people and ideas. Profe…

Assistant Professor of History

Jessica C. Linker is a historian of early America and digital scholar. She is working on a book project that examines how women practiced science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the various social and cultural trends that contemporane…

Associate Professor of History and International Affairs

Katherine Luongo is a specialist in the anthropological history of Kenya. She studies legal systems in colonial and contemporary Africa, global legal regimes, and human rights. She is the author of Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 (Ca…

Stearns Trustee Professor of History and Global Studies

Kris Manjapra works at the intersection of global history and the critical study of race and colonialism. His research connects the Caribbean and Indian Ocean worlds. His books include a comparative study of global emancipation processes and the impl…

Assistant Professor of History and Civil and Environmental Engineering; Legacy Survey of Space and Time Discovery Alliance Catalyst Faculty Fellow

Tiffany Nichols is a historian of science, technology, and the environment. Her current book manuscript focuses on the siting history of large-scale instruments and science facilities, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (…

Professor of the Practice in History, Director of Public History

Jessica Parr (she/they) is a historian of the Early Modern Atlantic, specializing in race and memory long eighteenth century, as well as in digital humanities, and archival studies. They are the author of Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism…

Associate Professor of History; Interim Director, Health, Humanities, and Society (HHS)

Chris Parsons is an interdisciplinary historian of science, medicine, and the environment in early modern Atlantic World. His current research traces the devastating spread of smallpox and other European illnesses in the northeast (New France, New En…

Professor of History

Together with Kabria Baumgartner and Dan Cohen, Uta G. Poiger leads the Mellon-funded initiative Reckonings: A Local History Platform for the Community Archivist. In her research, Poiger examines 20th-century German culture and society from a transna…

Assistant Teaching Professor of History

Malcolm F. Purinton is a Food and World historian whose work focuses primarily on the sociocultural relationships of empire, trade, and technology in the history of beer and brewing. His first book Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer t…

Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies

Simon Rabinovitch is the Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies, and he teaches and writes on a range of topics in European, Jewish, Russian, and legal history. His latest book is Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish Histo…

Professor of History

Professor Salter’s work focuses on the history of imperialism and colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is particularly interested in the anticolonial movements in South, East, and Southeast Asia. She is trained in the field of World Histor…

Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies

Philip Thai is a historian of Modern China and East Asia with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history. He is currently working on his new book tentatively titled, “Front Companies and Red C…

Assistant Teaching Professor of History

Michael Thornton teaches and researches Japanese and East Asian history, with a particular interest in the history of cities and urbanization. He has two major projects underway: the first focuses on the relationship between urbanization and colonial…

Professor of History

Louise E. Walker is a historian of Mexico and Latin America. Her new book, Debts Unpaid: Two Centuries of Trouble and Conflict in Mexico’s Economy (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), illuminates how ordinary people fought for economic just…

Dr. Ayers is an Associate Professor in History at Northeastern University of London, where he also leads the research cluster focused on Cities: Past, Present and Future. His research centres on themes of race, urban space and digital historical anal…

Research Professor of History & Senior Director, DIBI

Scott Gabriel Knowles is originally from Dallas, Texas—he attended the University of Texas at Austin and Johns Hopkins University. Knowles is the Senior Director of Research for the Defense Industrial Base Institute (DIBI) and Research Professor in t…

Visiting Lecturer, History

Erina Megowan is a historian of the Soviet Union, with particular interest in the legitimization of war and the Soviet creative intelligentsia. She teaches widely in Russian, Soviet and European history. Currently she is working on a project that ex…

Garrett Dash Nelson (he/him) is a historical geographer who currently serves as President & Head Curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. His scholarly work focuses on the relationship between community st…

Professor of the Practice of Public History, Emeritus

Marty Blatt served as Professor of the Practice and Director of the Public History Program at Northeastern until Spring 2020. He coordinated bringing the Humanities Action Lab exhibit, States of Incarceration, to campus. Blatt is part of the Universi…

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History

William Fowler, previously Distinguished Professor of History, is the author of a number of books dealing with American history including: Under Two Flags: The Navy in the Civil War; Silas Talbot Captain of the Old Ironsides; co-author America and Th…

Professor, Emeritus

Dr. Frader’s research focuses on the historical and cultural foundations of social inequality, particularly gender inequality in modern Europe. She is currently working on the history of gender equality policies of the European Community since the Tr…

Professor of African American Studies and History, Emeritus

Robert L. Hall’s articles have been published in such journals as the Florida Historical Quarterly, the Griot, the Western Journal of Black Studies, the Independent Schools Bulletin, the Maryland Historical Magazine, Sociological Inquiry, and t…

Professor of History, Emeritus

Educated in history at Princeton and UC Berkeley, Tom Havens taught at University of Toronto, Connecticut College, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UC Berkeley before arriving at Northeastern in 1999 as professor and chair of the Histo…

Matthews Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History

Dr. Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians; Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography; Selected Letter…