2025 History Newsletter

Message from the Chair
Department Spotlights
Faculty Kudos
Alumni Class Notes

Message from the Chair

Greetings to all of our alumni from the George Washington University Department of History! In this newsletter, you’ll read about some of the exciting things happening in the department, including the achievements of our community of alumni, faculty and students.

The History Department has enjoyed another banner year thanks to our talented faculty, students and alumni. This January, Lisa Ford, one of the world’s preeminent scholars of the British Empire, will be joining the department as the Endowed Professor of Modern British Imperial History. We have also continued to defy national trends by more than doubling the number of incoming undergraduate majors, while the department’s graduate program remains vibrant.

Thank you so much for your support and involvement, which makes our continued success possible. Please stay in touch.

Sincerely,

Denver Brunsman
Department Chair

Department Spotlights

New Endowment Memorializes Beloved Professor’s Impact

History and Classics’ Professor Diane Harris Cline, who passed away in 2023 following a battle with cancer, is remembered as a passionate scholar and devoted educator. Through a generous gift to the university, her husband Professor Eric Cline established the Diane Harris Cline Memorial Prize for Classics and History to honor her legacy and aid students. It was featured in the CCAS Spotlight newsmagazine.

Service Makes Student’s Pride Take Flight

Rising senior Demetrius Apostolis, a history and criminal justice major and a pilot-in-training, is taking service to new heights as an advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community on campus. He was profiled in GW Today.

Faculty Kudos

Hugh Agnew was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Palacky University in Olomouc, Moravia, Czech Republic. Agnew was also a short-term Visiting Senior Fellow in the Graduate Programs Office of the Elliott School’s partner institution in Singapore, the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technical University, in March 2024.

Tyler Anbinder (emeritus) authored Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York to wide critical acclaim, including a notice in The New Yorker.

Aaron Bateman authored Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which promises to be a foundational work in the growing field of outer space studies.

Denver Brunsman delivered the Constitution Day Lecture, “‘Neither to Stretch, nor Relax’: George Washington, Executive Power, and the Constitution,” as part of the Amicus Curiae Lecture Series for the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy at Marshall University in Huntington, W.V.

Theo Christov was awarded the Class of 1973 Fred Minier Resident Ethics Fellowship at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where he is in residence for the 2024-25 academic year.

Eric Cline and illustrator Glynnis Fawkes collaborated on a full-color graphic version of Cline’s bestselling book 1177 B.C. with 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press).

Dane Kennedy (emeritus) authored Mungo Park's Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa, the latest in a series of groundbreaking works on the British Empire.

Jisoo Kim was awarded a 2024-2025 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship.

Sara Matthiesen received a fellowship from the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut for the 2024-2025 academic year. She is spending the year working on her new project on abortion organizing in the U.S.

Shawn McHale won a FIAS (French Institutes for Advanced Study) award at the University of Lyon, France, for 10 months (September 2024-June 2025). He will be affiliated with the Institut d'Asie Orientale and plans to finish research and writing on a study of the 20th century Vietnamese Buddhist search for “original Buddhism” at South and Southeast Asian, transnational (Vietnam-Cambodia), and borderlands levels. McHale was also a Directeur d'Études/Director of Studies in November 2024 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), one of the leading graduate research schools in France, where he gave a series of four lectures on transformations in southern Vietnamese Buddhism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Daniel Schwartz was appointed chair of the Center for Jewish History’s Academic Advisory Council and named a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Timothy Shenk authored Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, which received wide media attention during the presidential election, including as an adapted lead guest essay in the New York Times.

Ashwini Tambe received a Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Scholar award for 2024-2025. She is spending part of the year in India focused on a book project about feminist approaches to justice in digital spaces, affiliated with the National Law School of India University. Tambe also received an American Institute for Indian Studies fellowship for a research trip to India for this book project.

Alumni Class Notes

Nana Evison, BA ’21, is a devout mom to her beautiful son, Henry, and is a full-time graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Josh Gonzalez, BA ’07, runs a financial advisory firm in Tyson Corner, Va., and lives with his wife and two sons in Fairfax County.