Faculty News

Spring 2005

During the summer, Fr. Steve Avella conducted two sessions with California Legislators on Catholic social teaching and the historical roots of anti-Catholicism in the United States and California. He also held a live radio show on his new book on Sacramento from the University of California at Davis radio station. Last fall, he presented a paper at the Milwaukee History Conference at UW-Milwaukee on the topic of religion in Milwaukee. Most recently, he was interviewed on all the major local television news stations, providing commentary on the rituals and procedures associated with the passing of Pope John Paul II.

H. Robert Baker completed his PhD in 2004 at UCLA, shortly before he began teaching at Marquette University. As a legal historian, Baker studies the interaction of law, culture, and society in the practice of both governance and resistance. His article "Creating Order in the
Wilderness," published in Law and History Review (1999) examines the sources of law for nineteenth-century British colonialism. His most recent project examines the rescue of a fugitive slave from a Milwaukee jail. The rescue begat a six-year court battle between Wisconsin and the
United States, which Baker argues was an important moment in American constitutional history. The revised manuscript will be published next spring by Ohio University Press under the tentative title The Rescue of Joshua Glover: Enforcing Constitutional Rights in Antebellum America.
Baker spends his time nowadays developing courses on legal and intellectual history, writing encyclopedia articles, revising his manuscript, and sneaking the history of jazz and popular music into his U.S. history surveys.

Alan Ball on sabbatical in 2004-2005, attempting to organize material and ideas on the "limits of unlimited government" in the Soviet Union. He hopes that this will lead to a book on the frustrations experienced by Soviet leaders (including Stalin) as they struggled to inspire or coerce the behavior they desired from local officials and the citizenry as a whole. Last year, he also chaired a panel at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. "Taking advantage of Marquette's newly-resurfaced (blue!) courts, he hopes to play tennis this winter with his daughter in an effort to help her cling to a spot on her high school team."

Allyson Delnore is just wrapping up her first year teaching at Marquette University. She joined the history department in the Fall of 2005 after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the practice of deporting French political criminals from France to the overseas colonies during the nineteenth century. This topic has allowed her to study such wide-ranging subjects as revolutionary movements and political protest, criminal justice and punishment, and the creation of an overseas empire. Her teaching interests are equally diverse, including consumer culture, a history of crime and punishment, and European imperialism. Dr. Delnore is particularly interested in understanding European national histories within a larger, more global context. She is currently working on her first manuscript entitled “Political Convictions: French Deportation Projects in the 19th Century.” Having just survived her first Wisconsin winter, she is very much looking forward to a summer of festivals and the opportunity to explore more of Milwaukee and the upper Midwest.

Fr. Patrick Donnelly, S.J. continues teaching, preaching, writing and golfing. He recently published Year by Year with the Early Jesuits: Selections from the Chronicon of Juan de Polanco, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004). As Loyola’s secretary, Juan Polanco’s 4,500 page chronicle of the Jesuits under Ignatius of Loyola, 1539-1556 provides keen insights into the early years of the Jesuit order. Fr. Donnelly’s selected translations will appeal chiefly to scholars and interested Jesuits. He has another book of translations in press (Cambridge: Hackett, forthcoming), which illustrate the Jesuits, their activities and mentality during the period 1540-1648. Most of these documents were written by Jesuits, but the book includes a chapter on how the Jesuits were seen by their enemies. In addition, he also recently published Ignatius of Loyola, Founder of the Jesuits (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2004).

Kristen Foster recently joined Marquette’s history faculty as a specialist in post-revolutionary America. Dr. Foster earned her undergraduate degree from Williams College in American Studies and Environmental Studies. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2001 after completing a dissertation on Philadelphia and the republic. This dissertation was a finalist for the Pauline Maier Prize in American history. In 2004, Dr. Foster published Moral Visions and Material Ambitions: Philadelphia Struggles to Define the Republic, 1776-1836, a book based on her dissertation. The book examines Philadelphia in the early republic and how this city’s diverse population used republican discourse to shape their own lives and the future of the republic itself. As a cultural and intellectual historian, Dr. Foster loves to talk not only about early American republicanism, but also about the many ways that ideas are shared, interpreted, and put to work in any given society. In addition to an early American specialty, Dr. Foster also has deep interests in cultural and intellectual history and women’s history. Most recently, she has been awarded a grant to begin a new project that will explore how Americans in the young United States reacted to both the late eighteenth-century revolution in Haiti and the early nineteenth-century revolutions in Latin America. The Atlantic world was truly transfixed with the idea of revolution following the successful independence movement in the United States, but Americans looked often uncomfortably at these other New World upheavals.

Barbara Fox joined the department in the fall of 2002 to teach Western Civilization and classes on Modern Europe. She received her Ph.D. in History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2002. Her research interests in the history of childhood in post-WWI France have allowed her to delve not only into the political, legal, and educational aspects of childhood, but also into young people’s leisure activities such as youth groups and children’s magazines. Especially of interest to her is the way the French worked, often contentiously, to shape the future of the nation through the younger generation. She is currently working on her first manuscript, titled “Rejuvenating France: The Creation of a National Youth Culture After the Great War.” Teaching interests include the history of childhood, youth, and the family, as well as more general topics on European society and culture in the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

Carla Hay continues to juggle multiple balls, serving as the Director of Undergraduate Studies, as well as serving on the Department Executive Committee, the University Core Curriculum Committee, and the University Academic Senate. She also serves on the national AAUP Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, the Board of Editors of The Historian and Milwaukee History; and the Phi Alpha Theta Book Award Committee. But with responsibility comes opportunity: to wit, in January 2004 she represented the Board of Directors of the American Friends of the Institute for Historical Research (University of London) at the inaugural lecture by David Cannadine, the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother Chair of British History at the University of London and was introduced to, shook the hand of, and chatted with Princess Anne who is the Chancellor of the University of London. “Fortunately,” as Dr. Hay relates, “the Princess wore gloves, else I might never again have washed my hand after this brush with royalty.

Tom Jablonsky continues to research the history of Marquette University, which in September, 2006, will celebrate the 125th anniversary of its start as Milwaukee's Jesuit institution of higher education. Marquette was a liberal arts college from 1881 to 1907 when it "affiliated" with the Milwaukee Medical College which had divisions in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing. In the next few years, the new "University" inaugurated programs in Engineering, Journalism, and Music as well as "purchased" two for-profit law schools. His own study starts with the arrival of traveling Jesuits in Milwaukee in the 1840s and proceeds to follow the institution's evolution from its founding in 1881 until the end of Father John Raynor's twenty-five year term as President in 1990. So far, he has completed writing eight chapters in a "first" version. One additional chapter needs to be done and then the endless task of rewriting commences until it should be sent for printing in December, 2006. Outside reviewers will be "enjoying" the task of taking measure of the 500-plus page book some time late this fall.

One of the Department’s newest faculty members is Lezlie Knox, who earned her doctorate in Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently serving as a member of the Undergraduate Committee and as faculty advisor for Phi Alpha Theta, the History honor society. She recently published “What Francis intended: Gender and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Franciscan Order,” in Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe, 1200-1500, ed. Anneke Mulder-Bakker (Brepols, 2004), and “Clare of Assisi: Foundress of An Order?” in Spirit and Life 11 (2004). She also is a contributing editor for Clare of Assisi: Early Documents, 3rd revised edition (New City Press, forthcoming, 2005), and serves on the editorial board for the journal, Franciscan Studies. She just returned from England where she presented the paper, “Non credas istis pissintunicis: The Friars and Masculinity in Early Renaissance Italy” at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America at Cambridge University. In addition to working on her book, Beyond Clare: Enclosed Women and the Medieval Franciscan Order, she spent three weeks last summer teaching a graduate seminar on women and the Franciscan tradition at St Bonaventure University.

John Krugler has been instrumental in designing and gaining university approval for a new Public History interdisciplinary minor, which will begin enrolling students next fall. The new program reflects his long-term commitment to Public History, including his seventh year as a member of the Historic St. Mary’s Commission, the governing board of a museum in southern Maryland dedicated to telling the story of Maryland’s founding. He was appointed the department’s adviser for students interested in Public History careers, and will continue in his role as director of the department’s internship program. This Spring, he lectured on “‘The magic ingredient, of course, is money’: Financing Old World Wisconsin, 1960-1971" at the orientation training program at Old World Wisconsin, and next year, he will team-teach a course on Public History with Jon Pray, the associate vice provost for educational technology. He continues as co-director of the College’s First Year Seminar program, and will this fall teach his eleventh class for entering students.
His publications for 2004 include: two entries in The New Dictionary of National Biography – one on Sir George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore and another on one of his sons, Leonard Calvert, who was the first governor of Maryland; two articles in the Fall issue of The Maryland Historical Magazine – "The Calvert Vision: A New Model for Church-State Relations" and “An ‘ungracious silence’: The Calvert Vision and Historians”; three entries in The Maryland Online Encyclopedia – one Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, another on Leonard Calvert, and a third on the 1649 Act Concerning Religion; and finally, in September The Johns Hopkins University Press published English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in Seventeenth-Century.


In addition to serving as the Department’s newly elected Chair, James Marten has managed to maintain his usual full schedule of activities. He recently published Children for the Union: The War Spirit on the Northern Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2004), was appointed to the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program, and received an Award for Enhancing the Quality of Student Life from MU's Division of Student Life (for chairing the implementation committee for the First Year Reading Program of the Manresa Project). He delivered a talk and participated in a roundtable discussion on children during the Civil War at a conference for high school students, teachers, and the general public at the University of Illinois at Springfield in June 2004, and delivered a public lecture on the same topic at Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library, in Biloxi, Mississippi. He also made presentations on the Milwaukee Civil War soldiers' home at the "Reclaiming Our Heritage" event at the local VA and on "Golda's Neighborhood" (on changes in the downtown neighborhood where Golda Meir grew up) to fifth graders at Golda Meir School (where his son Eli attends sixth grade) and where he serves on the School Governance Council. He has also begun working on the arrangements for the Third Biennial Conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, which will be hosted by Marquette in the summer of 2005.
Last June, he joined eleven of his sixteen high school classmates for the 30th graduation anniversary from a high school that no longer exists in the old quonset-hut gym in Canova, South Dakota. The good news, he relates, is that none of the class has died yet and only one of us has been in jail. The bad news: for no apparent reason we're all getting old.

The newest member of our department, Laura Mathew, is a specialist in Colonial and Modern Latin American history. She received her BA and MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The past year, she has been teaching as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Miami. Although she will be moving to Milwaukee this summer, she will not begin her teaching duties until the 2006-07 academic year. In the meantime, she will be conducting research at the Newberry with support from a “Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.” Her most recent publications include: “Nahuatl and Pipil Documents from Central America,” (co-authored with Sergio Romero and Hector Concoha Chet) in Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians, Ethnohistorical Sources, Vo. 2: Indigenous Alphabetical Manuscripts (University of Texas Press, forthcoming), and “El Nahuatl y la identidad mexicana en la Guatemala colonial,” Mesoamerica 40 (December 2000).

Timothy G. McMahon is a recent addition to the permanent faculty. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1987 from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and 2001 respectively. He then joined the Marquette faculty as a visiting assistant professor in Fall 2001, and worked for three years teaching primarily the Western Civilization survey, before moving into his current position as assistant professor of Modern Irish and British History. A social historian, he has particular interests in nationalism and national identity, the Gaelic language revival and its connections with the Irish literary revival, the Irish War of Independence, and the place of Ireland within the British Empire. His first book, Pádraig Ó Fathaigh’s War of Independence: Recollections of a Galway Gaelic Leaguer (2000), was published as a part of Cork University Press’s “Irish Narratives” series. He is currently completing his next book manuscript, The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910, which is based on his doctoral thesis. In addition, he has published several articles, including studies of the social composition of the Gaelic League (Éire-Ireland, 2002) and of James Joyce’s use of Irish-Ireland rhetoric in the writing of Ulysses (Joyce Studies Annual, 1996), as well as book reviews in the Irish Literary Supplement and New Hibernia Review.

Daniel Meissner, another addition to the junior faculty, taught one year in the department as a visiting professor in 1997 before returning full time in 2000 to fill the new East Asian position. After earning his undergraduate degrees at the University of Washington, he taught for several years in China before completing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. His research has centered on China’s early modern economic development and Sino-American trade and diplomacy. His first book, Chinese Capitalists versus the American Flour Milling Industry, 1890-1910: Profit and Patriotism in International Trade is due out in fall 2005, as is his most recent article “The Business of Survival: Competition and Cooperation in the Shanghai Flour Milling Industry,”Enterprise and Society. His most recent publications include: “Casting Bread Upon the Waters: Researching China’s Industrial Response to the Global Flour Trade, 1880-1810,” Chinese Business History (Spring 2004), "Theodore Wilcox: Captain of Industry and Magnate of the China Flour Trade, 1884-1918" Oregon Historical Quarterly (Winter 2003), and "Imports and Industrialization: China's 'War' Against American Flour Imports, 1895-1910" Twentieth-Century China (April 2003).

Ordained in 1968, Fr. Michael Morrison, SJ earned five degrees, including a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1971. He taught at Marquette in the History Department from 1971 to1977, where his research focused on American religion and intellectual history. He left Marquette to pursue a higher calling as President of Creighton University, a position he held from1977 to 2000 (the longest tenure as President in school history). This spring, in recognition of his years of dedicated service, Creighton University named its nationally acclaimed collegiate soccer complex the Michael G. Morrison, S.J. stadium. After two years and a sabbatical at the Jesuit Retreat House Oshkosh, he resumed teaching in the History Department at Marquette. In addition to serving as one of two chaplains in the College of Arts and Sciences, he teaches Introduction to American History: the American Experience from Columbus to Iraq War.

After stepping down as “Leader of the Band” in the Varsity Theater western civ program, Phillip Naylor has been busy writing and publishing. Serving as Senior co-consultant and coauthor, he recently revised his popular textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal Littell 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005). He also recently published France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation (University Press of Florida, 2000), as well as “A Reconsideration of the Fourth Republic’s Legacy and Algerian Decolonization,” French Colonial History 2 (2002): 159-80. In addition, he has contributed sixty new or revised entries on Algerian subjects/topics to the second edition (2004) of The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East (Middle East Institute, Columbia University, [New York: Macmillan, 1996]). And finally, he has recorded with the Western Civilization Blues Band, Bluesbook (2003), a CD of Varsity Theater songs for use in his History of Rock and Roll course to demonstrate the art of performance and the craft of production.


Julius Ruff is serving this year on the Executive Board of the Society for French Historical Studies and as a member of the Leo Gershoy Book Prize Committee of the American Historical Assciation. He coauthored (with Franklin M. Doeringer, Merry E. Wiesner, and William Bruce Wheeler) Discovering the Ancient Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and (with Kenneth Curtis, Franklin M. Doeringer, Merry E. Wiesner, and William Bruce Wheeler, Discovering the Twentieth-Century World (Boston: Houhton Mifflin, 2004).






Alan Singer is a Visiting Assistant Professor, who has taught Western Civilization since fall 2002. He was originally from the suburbs of Chicago, attended Northern Illinois University, and received his PhD in Modern British History at the University of Missouri-Columbia. While in Columbia, he taught a variety of courses in European and British history at the University of Missouri and Stephens College (a small women’s liberal arts college). Although his teaching interests are varied, he has concentrated on social, political, and intellectual topics. He truly enjoys teaching the Western Civilization courses, because, “It is great to see students get interested in history in the introductory classes.” His research interests are concerned with how growing economic and political liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century affected British national identity. For fun, he is usually playing guitar or bike-riding.

Athan Theoharis continues to organize and anchor the History Department basketball team. In between games, he has maintained a frenzied pace of publication, that – as Dr. Marten noted in his introduction to this newsletter – earned him the University’s Faculty Award for Research Excellence. Among his most recent publications or works in press are: The CIA: A Comprehensive Reference Guide (Greenwood press, forthcoming late 2005/early 2006); “A More Creative and Aggressive FBI: The Victor Krevchenko Case,” Intelligence and National Security (forthcoming, 2005); “Cold War Scholarship,” in Barbara Burgess and Hilary Meyer, eds., The Festschrift for Ivan Dee (Chicago: Festschrift, March 2005); The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (University Press of Kansas, October 2004); “Secrecy and Power: Unanticipated Problems in Researching FBI Files,” Political Science Quarterly (Summer 2004). He was a panelist at two conferences: “Intelligence and Civil Liberties: The Patriot Act and Homeland Security,” at Ohio University (April 2005), and a “Symposium on FBI and Surveillance” at Brandeis University (November 2004); lectured on “Surveillance and Civil Liberties” at the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters (Appleton, WI, May 2005). He also lectured on “Intelligence Reform,” in the Great Decisions series at Fond Du Lac, WI (March 2005); was interviewed for the documentary, “Someone’s Watching,” produced by Ed Gray (aired December 18, 2004 on the Discovery-Times channel), and also interviewed for the documentary “J. Edger Hoover,” produced by Satoko Tanaka (aired November 20, 2004 on Asahi TV in Tokyo); and held a book signing at Harry Schwartz Bookstore for The FBI and American Democracy. And finally, his edited collection of essays, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide (published in 1998) was published in a Russian edition by Astrel Publishers (2005).In addition to concert performances on the violin,

Fr. Mike Zep, S.J. has kept busy with work inside and outside the department. He evaluated applications for the Smith Family Fellowships, and reviewed Absolute Destruction by Isabel Hull, a book on German military culture. Although the first third of the book was flawed, he reported favorably on the rest: “Glimpflich davongekommen, as they say.” He also reviewed a prize winning Masters thesis in musicology for a Midwest competition. It involved varieties of Gregorian Chant found in an old hymnal from Silesia where the Zeps family has its roots. Alan Ball's gift of eight varieties of tomato seeds has been transmogrified into c.160 young plants. Then there have been lots of Masses with the occasional wedding, funeral, banquet invocation and similar clerical involvements. But, he relates, he was not involved in electing the new pope.