Associate Professor

Office Hours:  Email Preferred

Bishop Hall 321
(662) 915-7529  |  mlerner@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D, Columbia University

Teaching and Research Interests
Revolutionary Era, Early Modern Europe, Modern Europe

I have been a member of the faculty at the University of Mississippi since 2005 and regularly teach courses on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Age of Revolution and Nationalism.  My research interests are focused on revolutionary Europe in comparative perspective, republicanism and the shift to a modern political world.

My current book project, “The International William Tell: A Republican Symbol in the Age of Revolution”, seeks to examine the trans-national Age of Revolution through the lens of William Tell.  The William Tell story provides an innovative way to capture the breadth of the period.  I propose using Tell, an internationally used symbol and flexible cultural production, as a framing device through which we can analyze the entire revolutionary period.  Revolutionary ideals, principles and problems were not bound by national borders; instead, I can use the Tell story (and how it was used by contemporaries) as a thread to connect various revolutionary experiences and examine civic discourse, the republican tradition, popular culture and the jagged transformation of political culture in the Age of Revolution.  The William Tell story was used by authors, playwrights, songwriters, musicians, composers, poets, painters, engravers, print-makers, clock-makers, politicians, and other political actors and members of the public to discuss fundamental issues of modern politics: who makes up the sovereign body politic, who are the free citizens entitled to natural and civil rights, and who is allowed to participate in the making of a modern political society?

This work will build on my research from my first book, A Laboratory of Liberty. In this book, I looked at three different cantons in Switzerland as a way to understand the shift to a politically modern federal state from an early modern confederation.  By looking at the republics of Switzerland, with both German speaking and French speaking areas, we can better understand the revolutionary period in Europe as a whole.

Publications include:
A Laboratory of Liberty: The Transformation of Political Culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750-1848 (Leiden: Brill, 2012),(Paperback edition: Leiden: Brill, 2014).

“William Tell’s Atlantic Travels in the Revolutionary Era,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture (SECC) 41 (March 2012): 85-114.

“The Search for the Origins of Modern Democratic Republican Political Thought in Early Modern Switzerland,” review essay on Swiss Intellectual History for Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (November 2011): 647-658.

“Radical Elements and Attempted Revolutions in Late Eighteenth Century Republics”, in André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen and Maarten Prak, eds., The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared (Amsterdam University Press, 2008).

“The Helvetic Republic: An Ambivalent Reception of French Revolutionary Liberty,” French History 18, no. 1 (March 2004): 50-75.

 Associate Professor of History

Office Hours: M/W 10-10:50am or by appointment

Bishop Hall 304
(662) 915-1804  |  fckneupp@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D, Northwestern University

Teaching and Research Interests
Medieval European History

Frances Courtney Kneupper is a religious and cultural historian of the Late Middle Ages. Her research focuses on heresy, prophecy, and religious dissent in the Holy Roman Empire. Her publications include The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy and “The Wirsberger Brothers: Contesting Spiritual Authority Through Prophecy,” in Peoples of the Apocalypse/Völker der Endzeit. Dr. Kneupper’s current project is titled Future Things are Hidden from Mankind and Ought Not to Be Known: Contesting Knowledge of the Future in the Late Middle Ages. This project examines the debate in the later Middle Ages regarding knowledge of the future. Specifically, it considers how the contest over knowledge of the future engaged questions of authority and spiritual legitimacy.

Dr. Kneupper is also engaged in the use of digital media in the classroom. She has authored a digital textbook entitled Foundations of Western Culture through 1500. In collaboration with Cine Persona, she is also developing an online lecture series that utilizes visual media in an informal, creative format as a resource for students and educated lay people about the Middle Ages, an example of which can be found available here.

Frances Kneupper CV

Croft Associate Professor of History & International Studies

Office Hours: By appointment

SMBHC Rm. 128

(662) 915-7294  |  vibrahim@olemiss.edu

Education 
Ph.D, University of London

Teaching and Research Interests

Vivian Ibrahim is a historian of the Modern Middle East and joined the University of Mississippi in 2011. She specializes in the history and politics of Egypt in the 19 and 20c.

Ibrahim’s current book project, “Détente Shows: Tutankhamun and the Global Cold War”, is a political interpretation of cultural practice. Prior to the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition, antiquities rarely travelled. Most often, displays remained at the museum where the antiquities were held. Between 1963 and 1978, objects from the tomb of Tutankhamun toured in an unprecedented global exhibition. Cultural exhibits rarely succeed to tell a national and ‘global’ story at the same time. Rather, there is often an inherent tension where the host nation and the exhibit are competing; the host nation is cosmopolitan, the exhibition is not. At its core, my project challenges this assumption. Ancient Egyptian antiquities were used as a tool by the modern Egyptian state to secure a new national and global story at the height of the Cold War. Antiquities provided the symbolic and popular capital, both in the West and in Egypt, to promote political détente.

Books:

The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity, (I.B. Tauris, 2010; second edition 2013)

Muslims in Ireland: Past and Present, co-authored with Scharbrodt, Sakaranaho, Khan and Shanneik (University of Edinburgh Press, 2014)

Political leadership Nations and Charisma, co-edited with Margit Wunsch (Routledge, 2012)

For more details of Ibrahim’s publications see CV or:

https://olemiss.academia.edu/VivianIbrahim

Vivian Ibrahim CV

Croft Professor of History and Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in East Asian Studies

Office Hours: Thursdays, 2:30-3:30pm and by appointment

Bishop Hall 313
(662) 915-5749  |  jhhoward@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D, University of California, Berkeley

Teaching and Research Interests
East Asian History

Croft Professor of History and Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in East Asian Studies

Joshua Howard received a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Oberlin College in 1988 and his Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998. The following year, he joined the History Department and the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi, specializing in modern Chinese history. Dr. Howard offers survey courses of late imperial and modern China, and more specialized courses on contemporary China, the history of the Chinese revolutions, and US-China relations.

His book publications include Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China’s Sonic Nationalism (Hawai`i University Press, 2020) and Workers at War: Labor in China’s Arsenals, 1937-1953 (Stanford University Press, 2004). Composing for the Revolution focuses on the radical song writer Nie Er’s involvement in the proletarian arts movement of the 1930s and the political uses of his commemoration and music. Workers at War examines the process of class formation in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chongqing. In addition Dr. Howard has published a dozen book chapters and articles on topics ranging from child labor to song movements.

Dr. Howard has been the recipient of several fellowships including a Fulbright (2007-08) to the People’s Republic of China and has been a visiting scholar/researcher at Nanjing University and the Central Conservatory of Music.

 Dr. Howard was recently selected a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies during the 2019-20 academic year. He is pursuing two long-term projects: a social history of Nanjing city under the collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei and a study of the Communist press and its working-class readership in Nationalist China during the 1940s.

Joshua Howard CV

Associate Professor of History

Office hours: Tues. 11-12p via Zoom and by appointment

Bishop Hall 316

(662) 915-6945  |  aholm@olemiss.edu

Education

Ph.D, Columbia University

Teaching and Research Interests

19th-century United States, Sectionalism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Christianity, border states, politics of slavery and emancipation

April Holm is a historian of the nineteenth century United States with a particular interest in sectionalism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Christianity, and the border states.  Her work concerns the intersection of the moral and the political.  Her first book, A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2017.  She is currently at work on a book about provost marshals and civilians in the occupied border states during the Civil War.  Professor Holm received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2010 and spent a year as at Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New School and The New-York Historical Society. She joined the University of Mississippi in 2011.

April Holm CV

Associate Professor of History

Office hours at Desoto Center campus: Tuesdays 2:00 pm -4:15 pm in Student Services Center & By Appointment

Tupelo/DeSoto campuses
fleegler@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D., Brown University

Teaching and Research Interest
20th-century America

Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies

Office Hours: T/TH 11:30-12:30p in Bishop 317 or by appointment on MWF via Zoom

Bishop Hall 317
(662) 915-6946  |  jfirst@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D, University of Michigan

Teaching and Research Interests
20th-century Russia

Joshua First is Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies and specializes in the history of Russia and Ukraine during the 20th and 21st centuries.  Professor First came to Mississippi in 2010 after receiving his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan.  His teaching interests include modern Russia, the Soviet Union, post-war Europe, the welfare state and cinema.  Professor First’s first book is Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (2014) and another book on the Ukrainian film, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (2016).  Professor First’s latest interests include the history of the Soviet welfare state and the development of health care and public health after Stalin.

Joshua First CV

Associate Professor of History

Office Hours: Wed. 1:00-2:00p in Bishop 314 or via Zoom and by appointment

Bishop Hall 314
(662) 915-7568  |  esposito@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D, SUNY Stony Brook

Teaching and Research Interests
Modern Europe, Economic & Diplomatic

Chiarella Esposito, an historian of modern Europe, also serves as the director of the graduate advisory committee.

Professor Esposito is the author of America’s Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy, 1948-1950, which was published by Praeger Press in 1994. Unlike earlier studies of the Marshall Plan, this volume concentrates not on events in Washington, but on those in France and Italy–the second and third largest beneficiaries of the Plan. Using U.S., French, and Italian sources, the author analyzes the impact of the Plan on French and Italian economic policy between 1948 and 1950. Taking neither a realist nor revisionist stance, the author argues that massive American aid to Western Europe was a perceived political necessity–that American, French, and Italian governments shared with Truman the strategic-ideological goal of Communist containment. Yet, not all of the philosophy embedded in the Plan could be implemented, and American ideology did not, therefore, have a decisive influence in reshaping postwar French or Italian economic policies.

Chiarella Esposito CV

Croft Associate Professor of History and International Studies

Office Hours: By Appointment

Croft 315
(662) 915-1500  |  dinius@olemiss.edu

Education
Ph.D, Harvard University

Teaching and Research Interests
Modern Latin America

Oliver Dinius is the Executive Director of the Croft Institute for International Studies and an Associate Professor of History and International Studies. A native of Germany, he received the equivalent of a B.A. from the Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg before moving to the United States to pursue doctoral work in Latin American history at Harvard University. Dr. Dinius studies the social and economic development of modern Latin America, above all in 20th-century Brazil. His first book, Brazil’s Steel City: Developmentalism, Strategic Power, and Industrial Relations in Volta Redonda, 1941-1964 (Stanford University Press, 2011), is a history of the country’s foremost state-owned enterprise, the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional. He is also the co-editor of Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-Class Communities (University of Georgia Press, 2011). Currently, Dinius is working on two projects under the umbrella theme of development and inequality in contemporary Brazil. a monograph on the history of regional development initiatives for the Amazon region and a series of essays on the impact of Brazil’s labor justice system on class relations. The underlying goal is to understand how regional and class inequalities shaped (and often undermined) the state’s ambitious social and economic development policies.
Dinius offers lecture classes, upper-division seminars, and graduate courses on Brazil and modern Latin America through the history department. For the Croft Institute, Dinius has regularly taught the Introduction to International Studies (Inst 101), the core course on Latin America (Inst 207), and upper-division courses on “The War on Drugs in Latin America,” “The Problem of Inequality in Latin America,” and “Soccer Madness: From Brazil to the World.” He advises Croft senior theses on a wide range of Latin American topics.

Oliver Dinius CV