Meet our Faculty

 

Albert I. Berger
Hans Peter Broedel (Graduate Director)
Eric Burin
Caroline Campbell
Bill Caraher 
Jim Mochoruk
Kimberly Porter
Cynthia Culver Prescott
Ty M. Reese (Department Chair) 

 

Albert I. Berger (AB, Cornell, 1969; MA, PhD, Northern Illinois University, 1972, 1978) teaches the 20th- and 21st century history of the United States, military history, and the history of United States foreign relations. Dr. Berger’s first research explored popular responses to scientific and technological change in the mid-20th century United States. His book The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology (Borgo Press, 1993) won the J. Lloyd Eaton Prize in 1995. He is currently completing A Christian Conscience and a Billion Dollars: The Life and Works of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Dr. Berger has also written on issues of national and collective security; and he is collecting material for a study of the nuclear strategy issues that confronted the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. He served as president of North Dakota’s State Historical Board from 2007 to 2009, and was recently appointed to a fourth three-year term on that board.

 

Hans Peter Broedel (Graduate Director) received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Dakota, where he teaches courses on medieval and early modern European history, witchcraft, and the history of science. He is the author of The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft, and has publish articles on witches and apparitions in the late middle ages, and on early modern natural history; his current research investigates the place of fabulous animals in Early Modern thought.

 

Eric Burin earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign in 1998. The following year, Dr. Burin joined the History faculty at the University of North Dakota. Over the years, Dr. Burin has taught undergraduate and graduate classes on a variety of topics, including the Early American Republic, the Civil War Era, Comparative Slavery, and African-American History. In 2005, he published Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, 2005), which was a finalist for the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Thereafter, Dr. Burin won a prestigious year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on his American Colonization Society Database, a project that was featured on PBS’s History Detectives. He is currently working on another book, tentatively entitled, Liberia and the Politics of Slavery.

 

Caroline Campbell. As a historian of modern France, Caroline Campbell’s research interests focus on the intersections between women, gender, and extremist politics. Professor Campbell is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Fascism and the Extreme Right in Greater France: Gender, Empire, and Extremist Politics in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français, 1927-1947. Focusing on one of the largest and most powerful political movements in French history, the Croix de Feu, this project explores the strong impact that conservative and reactionary women had on French politics. It suggests that women, through their participation in the Croix de Feu, created new models of feminine and masculine political action as a response to the rise of communism, fascism, and colonial separatism across Europe and the French colonies. These new models reshaped French understandings of what constitued political and social action across Greater France.

In addition to teaching the second half of the Western Civilization survey course, Professor Campbell also teaches courses on European social history, the Holocaust, and Europe and human rights. Additionally, she teaches graduate courses on gender in modern Europe and a general modern European seminar course. Professor Campbell joined the UND History Department after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2009.

 

Bill Caraher took his Ph.D. from Ohio State in 2003. He teaching History 101: Western Civilization and History 240: The Historians Craft. His research interests include the Late Antique East, Byzantium, and Mediterranean archaeology.

 

Jim Mochoruk earned his BA (Hons) from the University of Winnipeg and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba, where he studied under Gerry Friesen, Ross McCormack, John Milloy, Jack Bumsted, Nolan Reilly and Ed Rea (Canadian History), John Kendle, Keith Sandiford, Robert J. McCormick, and Peter Bailey (British Empire and Modern British History). Since arriving at UND in 1993 Jim has developed a series of classes in the fields of Canadian, Canadian-US, British, and British Imperial History. He has also been heavily involved in the development of a Canadian Studies Program at UND and created the core curriculum for the interdisciplinary “Introduction to Canadian Studies” course which lies at the heart of this minor. Because of his work in northern and western Canada Jim has also developed a strong interest in First Nations history on both sides of the Canada-US border and works closely with UND’s Department of Indian Studies both in terms of courses taught and graduate thesis supervision. He is also very much interested in questions of historical theory and practice – having offered both the Department’s graduate-level historiography seminar and the undergraduate “Historian’s Craft” course several times over the years.

Jim was recognized as UND's Outstanding Graduate Teacher of the year in 1998 and has been the recipient of a Faculty Research Grant from the Government of Canada, a Faculty Research Seed Money Grant from UND, and a variety of other awards and distinctions in both the United States and Canada. He has also been the author or editor of numerous publications including articles, book chapters, abstracts, monographs, and books. In these publications Jim has explored the history of northern development in Canada and the social, ethnic, and labor history of western Canada. In the latter regard he has been particularly focused upon the radicalized immigrants who took up residence in Winnipeg: groups and individuals who helped to transform that western “gateway” city from the 1890s onwards into a centre of “oppositional consciousness.” Jim’s book-length publications include, The People’s Co-op: The Life and Times of a North End Institution (Halifax: 2000); “Formidable Heritage:” Manitoba’s North and the Cost of Development, 1870 to 1930 (Winnipeg: 2004); and Re-Imagining Ukrainian-Canadians: History, Politics and Identity (Toronto: 2010), a collection of essays co-edited with Rhonda Hinther.

Jim’s is currently working on a book-length study concerning the social and economic history of Winnipeg – and its many real and imagined communities - in the Inter-war period, while simultaneously working on a larger examination of the development of Winnipeg’s “oppositional consciousness” from the 1870s onwards . Increasingly, however, Jim’s research interests are being drawn closer to his admittedly eclectic teaching interests. Most notably he is interested in further exploring the linkages and discontinuities in the borderlands regions of Canada and the US and in addressing the ways in which various regions of Canada need to be “re-inserted” into the larger (and theoretically exciting) intellectual world of contemporary Imperial studies.

 

Kimberly K. Porter received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1995, studying under the direction of Dr. Ellis Hawley. She has been at the University of North Dakota since 1996 and focuses her attention on United States history, particularly the 1877-1945 era. Accordingly, she teaches courses in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as the New Era and the New Deal. Dr. Porter also teaches the History of North Dakota course.

With regard to research, she focuses her work on matters related to rural/agricultural history and oral history. She currently edits The Oral History Review, the journal of record for the English-speaking oral history community. Dr. Porter is currently engaged in researching/writing a biography of Henry Field, an Iowa-based entrepreneur who sold everything from wall paper to wedding rings, seed corn to spotted hogs , and garden seed to gasoline. Along the way, he started one of the first privately held radio stations west of the Mississippi River, unsuccessfully ran for Congress, and urged Americans to thoughtfully consider what was being lost with the urbanization of their nation.

In spare moments, she enjoys gardening and photography.

 

Dr. Cynthia Culver Prescott’s work focuses on gender in the American West. She combines social history and material culture methods to study the intersections of gender, social class, and historical memory. Her book, Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (University of Arizona, 2007), traced changing gender roles and ideology among early white settlers in Oregon between 1845 and 1900. Her current research project examines portrayals of frontier women and families in pioneer monuments erected throughout the twentieth century. She is also interested in quilting, particularly examining quilts as a reflection of women’s work roles and social class status.

A member of the History Department since 2007, Dr. Prescott teaches several courses that are closely related to her research interests, including American women and gender, the American West, and material culture methodology, as well as the United States Since 1877 survey course. While her academic training is in social history, she has also worked in several areas of public history: museum curatorship, collections management, archival and rare book cataloging, and historic preservation. She is affiliated with UND’s Women Studies program, and is the faculty adviser for our Phi Alpha Theta history honor society chapter. Beyond UND, she is active in several international historical societies and serves as an Associate Fellow at the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.

 

Ty M. Reese (Department Chair) is the department’s Atlantic World Historian. He teaches under-graduate and graduate courses related to Africa and World History, British North America and the Atlantic World. His current research project explores the consequences of the cross-cultural trade and interaction upon the peoples of Cape Coast [Ghana], and Cape Coast Castle, during the 18th century. This work seeks to better understand, utilizing a micro-history, the structures of the coastal Atlantic trade and the consequences of this trade, especially in slaves, upon a defined community. He has published articles in Itinerario, The William and Mary Quarterly, Slavery & Abolition, the Journal of Religion in Africa, and in several edited collections, and co-edited with Vincent Carretta The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque: The First African-Anglican Missionary. He currently serves as the department’s chairperson.