Members of the history department are dedicated teachers and active scholars, having earned numerous awards and prizes for their books -- including a Pulitzer Prize nomination -- and grants from such prestigious institutions as the National Endowment for the Humanities. Several members of the department have been recognized by students for their teaching excellence.
Ambrose, a professor at Hamilton since 1990, holds a Ph.D. in history from the State University of New York at Binghamton. His teaching and research interests include early America, the Old South, and American religious history. His publications include Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South (LSU 1996) and The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America's Most Elusive Founding Father (NYU 2006), a volume he co-edited with Hamilton colleague Robert W. T. Martin. He has also written numerous articles, book reviews and encyclopedia entries about Southern slavery and Southern intellectual life. Ambrose is a recipient of the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award.
John Eldevik received his Ph.D from UCLA and taught at UCLA and Pomona College before coming to Hamilton in 2010. He also holds the Licence in Mediaeval Studies (2004) from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. His primary research and teaching interests are in medieval social and religious history, particularly the role of the bishop in the early Middle Ages, as well as the Crusades and the history of political and religious dissent. His first book, Episcopal Lordship and Ecclesiastical Reform in the German Empire, 950-1150 was recently published by Cambridge University Press and examines how medieval bishops used the collection of ecclesiastical tithes (taxes) to foster important social and political relationships in their dioceses. Eldevik is currently working on a study of the manuscript transmission of texts on the Crusades and Islam in medieval Bavaria.
Grant is a historian of the British Empire, with expertise in humanitarian politics. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997, and he has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Historical Association. He received the John R. Hatch Class of 1925 Excellence in Teaching Award at Hamilton in 2003.
Grant is the author of A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884-1926 (2005), and he is the co-editor of Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, c. 1880-1950 (2007). He has also published articles in leading scholarly journals, as well as essays in edited collections. Grant is now working on a comparative history of hunger strikes.
Isserman received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, and is an expert on 20th-century U.S. history and the history of exploration and mountaineering. A former Fulbright grant-winner, his prize-winning books include The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, and his co-authored book Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes. He is co-author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, now in its 4th revised edition. His most recent book is On the Hill: A Bicentennial History of Hamilton College.
More about Maurice Isserman ...
Kanipe came to Hamilton in 1976 as an assistant professor of history. She earned a master's and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Kanipe's areas of research are modern French history and governmental social policy toward women and family. She worked as principal organizer of a conference for middle school, high school and college teachers to discuss the National History Standards, funded by the Organization of American Historians and the Rockefeller Foundation.
More about Esther Kanipe ...
Paquette is professor of American history at Hamilton College. He received his B. A. cum laude in 1973 from Bowling Green State University. He received his Ph. D. with honors in 1982 from the University of Rochester. He has published dozens of books and articles on the history of slavery. His Sugar Is Made with Blood (Wesleyan University Press, 1988) won the Elsa Goveia Prize, given every three years by the Association of Caribbean Historians for the best book in Caribbean history. More recently, his essay "Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair" (co-authored with Douglas Egerton) won the Malcolm C. Clark Award, given by the South Carolina Historical Society. He is currently working on A Grand Carnage (Yale University Press), a study of the largest slave insurrection in United States history. In 2005, the University of Rochester invited him to return to his alma mater to receive the Mary Young Award for distinguished achievement. A recipient of grants from the American Historical Association, the National Endowment of the Humanities,the Jack Miller Institute, Watson-Brown Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, Paquette co-founded the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. In 2006, he was appointed to the Scholars Council of the Jack Miller Center. In 2008, President George W. Bush forwarded Paquette's nomination to the Senate for a seat on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
John Ragosta is an historian and lawyer who has published extensively in both legal and historical journals in the areas of early American history, constitutional law and international relations. He has held fellowships at both the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. Ragosta practiced international trade law and litigation for 20 years in Washington, D.C., and has taught at the University of Virginia history department and law school, George Washington University School of Law, and Randolph College.
His first book, Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty, was released by Oxford University Press in 2010. Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, his second, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.
Focusing on modern Latin America, Rebecca Tally earned a Ph.D. in history at Cornell University. Her dissertation, titled “At the Mercy of the Millers: Empire, Science, and Import Substitution in Colombia, 1930-1966,” examined the interaction between economic development policies and nation, state and social class formation, and focused specifically on techno-scientific, political, and cultural debates surrounding the production and importation of wheat. Prior to Cornell, Tally earned a master's degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University with a thesis examining the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in agricultural modernization and land reform in Colombia. Her research and teaching interests center on Latin American history, the history of economic development, commodities production and trade, environmental history, and the connections among race, gender, science and society.
Trivedi is a cultural and social historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of nationalism, colonialism and women. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis in 1999. Her first monograph, Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Indiana, 2007) was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship to India in 1996. In 2004 Trivedi was a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Pembroke College, where she began research on her second monograph project, Bound By Cloth: women textile workers in Bombay and Lancashire, 1890-1940. Research for this project has received support from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright Scholars Program. Trivedi is working concurrently on a project of 70 photographs taken by an Indian photographer, Pranlal Patel, in 1937. The Jyoti Sangh Series is an extraordinary collection of photographs of ordinary women at work on the streets and in the neighborhoods of Ahmedabad, India. In addition to publishing these photographs for the first time with three critical essays, Trivedi is curating a photographic exhibition that has been scheduled for the Wellin Art Museum in January 2014. Trivedi currently serves as co-editor of ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, the premier publication of ASIANetwork, a consortium of 165 liberal arts with Asian Studies programs.
More about Lisa Trivedi ...
Kirsten Ziomek received a bachelor's degree in history from Northwestern University and she recently received a Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also earned her master's degree. Ziomek is a historian of modern Japanese history and specializes in Japanese imperialism. Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE, the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, Japan Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. At Hamilton she will teach courses about the history of Japan as well as courses from a world history perspective, with regard to non-western empires and imperialisms.
Back to History overview.
The History Department is known – perhaps notorious – on campus for asking intellectual rigor from professors and students alike. Students are trained to do research in primary and secondary sources from all over the world. The department's expertise spans many areas of the globe and all historical disciplines and approaches: social, intellectual, political and cultural.
History majors apply their reading and research skills through extensive writing — essays, reviews, papers and an independent senior project. Three dozen of the department's regular course offerings — about half — are writing intensive.
Faculty members are highly respected in their specialties and often are honored with teaching awards, fellowships and grants. Several have won and been nominated for major publishing prizes.
The department awards four prizes each year at Class & Charter Day for high academic achievement in history. The Edgar Baldwin Graves Prize is awarded to the top senior in the department; the Darling Prize is awarded to the senior with the most distinguished record in American history; the Putnam Prize is a gift of books to the senior with the second-most distinguished record in American history; and the Edwin B. Lee Jr. Prize goes to a senior who has excelled in Asian history or Asian studies.
The History Department is known – perhaps notorious – on campus for asking intellectual rigor from professors and students alike. Students are trained to do research in primary and secondary sources from all over the world. The department's expertise spans many areas of the globe and all historical disciplines and approaches: social, intellectual, political and cultural.
History majors apply their reading and research skills through extensive writing — essays, reviews, papers and an independent senior project. Three dozen of the department's regular course offerings — about half — are writing intensive.
Faculty members are highly respected in their specialties and often are honored with teaching awards, fellowships and grants. Several have won and been nominated for major publishing prizes.
The department awards four prizes each year at Class & Charter Day for high academic achievement in history. The Edgar Baldwin Graves Prize is awarded to the top senior in the department; the Darling Prize is awarded to the senior with the most distinguished record in American history; the Putnam Prize is a gift of books to the senior with the second-most distinguished record in American history; and the Edwin B. Lee Jr. Prize goes to a senior who has excelled in Asian history or Asian studies.
The History Department is known – perhaps notorious – on campus for asking intellectual rigor from professors and students alike. Students are trained to do research in primary and secondary sources from all over the world. The department's expertise spans many areas of the globe and all historical disciplines and approaches: social, intellectual, political and cultural.
History majors apply their reading and research skills through extensive writing — essays, reviews, papers and an independent senior project. Three dozen of the department's regular course offerings — about half — are writing intensive.
Faculty members are highly respected in their specialties and often are honored with teaching awards, fellowships and grants. Several have won and been nominated for major publishing prizes.
The department awards four prizes each year at Class & Charter Day for high academic achievement in history. The Edgar Baldwin Graves Prize is awarded to the top senior in the department; the Darling Prize is awarded to the senior with the most distinguished record in American history; the Putnam Prize is a gift of books to the senior with the second-most distinguished record in American history; and the Edwin B. Lee Jr. Prize goes to a senior who has excelled in Asian history or Asian studies.
The History Department is known – perhaps notorious – on campus for asking intellectual rigor from professors and students alike. Students are trained to do research in primary and secondary sources from all over the world. The department's expertise spans many areas of the globe and all historical disciplines and approaches: social, intellectual, political and cultural.
History majors apply their reading and research skills through extensive writing — essays, reviews, papers and an independent senior project. Three dozen of the department's regular course offerings — about half — are writing intensive.
Faculty members are highly respected in their specialties and often are honored with teaching awards, fellowships and grants. Several have won and been nominated for major publishing prizes.
The department awards four prizes each year at Class & Charter Day for high academic achievement in history. The Edgar Baldwin Graves Prize is awarded to the top senior in the department; the Darling Prize is awarded to the senior with the most distinguished record in American history; the Putnam Prize is a gift of books to the senior with the second-most distinguished record in American history; and the Edwin B. Lee Jr. Prize goes to a senior who has excelled in Asian history or Asian studies.
