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History Faculty

by | Aug 18, 2023

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History Faculty

JAMES M. CARTER, DEPARTMENT CHAIR
Professor, History

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Biography:

I am currently professor of U.S. history at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. I teach a broad range of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. I specialize in U.S. foreign policy, the Vietnam War, the U.S. since World War II and the Sixties. My first book, Inventing Vietnam, is an analysis of the failed nation building effort undertaken by the United States in Vietnam and how that failure led to the war. In related research, I have also written on privatization of war and war profiteering, using the invasion of Iraq as a case study.

My more recent research focuses on the Sixties in the U.S. and specifically the counterculture and advent of rock music culture, with a particular emphasis on the role of the college campus.  Based on that research, I published an article, “Campus Rock: Rock Music Culture on the College Campus during the Counterculture Sixties, 1967-8,” The Journal of Popular Music Studies 32, issue 3 (September 2020): 51-72. Additional details can be found in “research tidbits.”

Because the story was much more expansive and national in scope, I expanded this research while also highlighting two case studies: Stonybrook (Long Island, NY) and Drew Universities (Madison, NJ).  The resulting book, Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower: Rock Music on Campus in the Sixties is now available from Rutgers University Press.

For more about me, my website is: jmarloncarter.com.

KAREN PECHILIS
Professor, History Department and Program in the Study of Religion

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Biography

Professor Pechilis is an historian of religions who specializes in the study of India and South Asia. She teaches courses in world history, gender and history, and religion and spirituality in late modernity. She has served as Director of the Humanities Program in the College and Director of Arts & Letters in Drew’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies. Her recent publications in the history of religions that engage translation, history, gender studies and ethnography include the monograph, Interpreting Devotion: The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India (2012), the co-edited volume Re-Figuring the Body: Embodiment in South Asian Religions (2017), and a journal special issue, “Contemporary Images of Hindu Bhakti: Identity and Visuality,” in the Journal of Hindu Studies (2019). Current research includes a volume on devotional visualities. For more information, please go to kpechilis.net.

JONATHAN ROSE
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History
Drew University Scholar-Teacher of the Year (2001)
Presidential Award for Career Scholarship (2006)

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Jonathan Rose (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is the William R. Kenan Professor of History. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history, and the history of the book. He served as the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and as the president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize, and the British Council Prize. He has also published A Companion to the History of the Book (2007), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001), The Revised Orwell (1992), British Literary Publishing Houses 1820-1965 (1991), and The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (1986). He was a founding coeditor of the journal Book History, which won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for the Best New Journal of 1999. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University, and he reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement and the Wall Street Journal. His most recent books are The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale UP, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize; Readers’ Liberation (Oxford UP, 2018); and The Edinburgh History of Reading (4 vols., Edinburgh UP, 2020).

Education: B.A. in History cum laude (1974), Princeton University. M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1981) in History, University of Pennsylvania.

Areas of specialization: British history and history of the book.

Current research: Playboy’s female readers.

Publications:

  • Coeditor (withMary Hammond), The Edinburgh History of Reading (4 vols, Edinburgh UP, 2020).
  • Coeditor (with Simon Eliot), A Companion to the History of the Book (Blackwell, 2007).
  • Reinventing Graduate Education in History,” Perspectives on History (February 2009)
  • “Arriving at a History of Reading,” Historically Speaking (January 2004).
  • The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale UP, 2001). Winner of the Longman-History Today Historical Book of the Year Prize, the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, the British Council Prize, the SHARP Book History Prize, the Bela Kornitzer Prize, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize. Named a Book of the Year by the Economist magazine.
  • Editor, The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (U Massachusetts P, 2001).
  • Editor, The Revised Orwell (Michigan State UP, 1992).
  • Coeditor, British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1965 (Gale, 1991).
  • The Edwardian Temperament 1895-1919 (Ohio UP, 1986).
  • “The Horizon of a New Discipline: Inventing Book Studies,” Publishing Research Quarterly (Spring 2003).
  • “Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel (Blackwell, 2002).
  • “The History of Books: Revised and Enlarged,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 359 (1998).
  • “How Historians Study Reading,” in Literature in the Marketplace, eds. John O. Jordan and Robert Patten (Cambridge UP, 1995).
  • “Working-Class Journals,” in Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, eds. Rosemary VanArsdel and J. Don Vann (U Toronto P, 1994).
  • “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences,” Journal of the History of Ideas, January-March 1992.
  • Contributor, The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP).
  • Readers’ Liberation (Oxford UP, 2018)
  • The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (Yale UP, 2014), which won the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Prize

Professional Activities:

  • Founding President, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (1991-97).
  • Past President, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (1989-92).
  • Coeditor, Book History (1999-2019).
GRANT STANTON
Assistant Professor, History and Africana Studies

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Grant’s research interests range widely across the landscape of early American (pre-1865) and Atlantic history, with a focus on the contributions Black actors made to the creation of the modern world. His work has been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed, popular, and digital outlets, including Early American Studies, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Slavery, Law, and Power Project, Early American Studies Miscellany, and the Magazine of Early American Datasets. Grant’s work has also been supported through fellowships offered by the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities with Philadelphia’s Christ Church, among others.

Grant’s book manuscript studies the birth of formal Black politics in the American Revolution, including the central role Black colonists in Massachusetts played in leading the first organized, interracial, and successful abolition movement in American history. Outside of this project, Grant is also investigating the establishment, politicization, demise and revival of Black education programs in early America, and a third project which uses insults as an entry point for understanding the enfolded racial, sexual, classist, and religious prejudices that structured early American moral culture.

Education:

PhD in History, University of Pennsylvania, 2024

MA in the Social Sciences, University of Chicago, 2017

BA in History (Honors) and Political Science (Honors), 2016

Research Interests:

Early America; African American History; Race and Slavery; Law and Politics; Intellectual History; American Revolution; Atlantic World

Selected Publications:

“Somerset’s Boston, Boston’s Somerset,” in Somerset@250: Facts, Interpretations, Legacies, eds. Matthew Mason and David Waldstreicher (forthcoming)

“The Freedom Petitions: Black Patriotism, Black Politics, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts, 1773-1783,” Early American Studies, vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2024): 262-304. https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2024.a927906.

Co-author with John C. van Horne, “The Philadelphia Bray Schools: A Story of Black Education in Early America, 1758–1845,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 147, no. 3 (2023): 75-104. https://doi.org/10.1353/pmh.2023.a920378.

Editor, “Transcripts from the ‘Freedom Petitioners’’ Campaign,” Early American Studies Miscellany, https://web.sas.upenn.edu/earlyamericanstudies/2024/05/23/language-of-liberty/

Editor, “Petitioner Appeals in The Massachusetts Spy,” Slavery, Law, and Power in the British Empire and Early America, https://slaverylawpower.org/massachusetts-memorial-and-petition-for-freedom-1774/

Co-editor with John C. van Horne, “Bray School Enrollments for Free and Enslaved Black Children, 1758-1845,” Magazine of Early American Datasets, https://repository.upenn.edu/mead/57/

“Schools for Black American children predated the Revolution,” Washington Post, February 27, 2023

“The Unsung Black Patriots of Revolutionary Boston,” The Boston Globe, July 3, 2022

“Before July 4, American colonists celebrated Pope’s Day — an anti-Catholic rallying cry,” The Washington Post, July 2, 2021