Nathan Sowry first began his doctoral studies in AU’s History Department in Fall 2015, working under the tutelage of Profs. Dan Kerr, Kate Haulman, and Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska. Just one decade later—a quick turnaround time in this field—the fascinating results of his research have been published in a new book: Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). In this intriguing study, Sowry examines the lives of some ten little-known Native American figures who were forced into the assimilationist boarding school system of early twentieth-century America, only to emerge later as key informants for some of the first anthropological treatments of their Indigenous cultures. “All of them faced racism and abuse in Indian boarding schools that taught them to abandon their cultures,” Sowry said. “Then later all of them to varying degrees of success attempted to embrace and popularize the beauty of their cultures but were written out of the literature. I wanted to do what I could to tell their stories, which haven’t been told before.”

Like many students, Sowry viewed AU as an attractive place to pursue his studies due to its stellar faculty and close proximity to many of the nation’s premier museums and archives. Sowry has long enjoyed working in the world of museums and archives, first at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art on the National Mall and now in the archives of the National Museum of the American Indian in Suitland, Maryland. As a reference archivist, Sowry works mostly behind the scenes helping to identify, preserve, and facilitate access to objects in the collection. “I thought that archives would involve working in a dusty basement full of cobwebs everywhere, and that’s sort of what I was hoping it would be,” he says. “But my job is much more public-facing than I thought it would be, and I’ve really come to enjoy that aspect of the work.” In addition to working with researchers who visit the archives, Sowry also helps Native American visitors who come to the facility to interact with the cultural belongings of their ancestors. “I thought I was an introvert and wanted to hide from everyone, but the public liaison part of my job has turned out to be really rewarding.” 

Sowry’s own research has provided new and valuable perspectives on the lives of Native American intermediaries in the early twentieth century who found themselves caught between two worlds. One particularly intriguing profile that Sowry analyzes in Turning the Power focuses on Florence and Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit couple from Alaska. “I think Florence represents a really unique case because there were so few female Native anthropologists,” he says, “and there were so few opportunities that existed for Native peoples off of reservations.” In order to advocate for their community and preserve what remained of their culture, Florence and her husband made the difficult decision to dress up in Plains Indian clothing during public engagement sessions in Pennsylvania and Los Angeles—not what Alaska Natives wore, but rather what the general public expected “real Indians” to wear. “It’s almost bittersweet to get their perspectives on how they had to portray Native peoples just to get an audience and be able to get out there and talk about their culture, for better or worse.”

Editor’s Note: In this fascinating post, AU History Professor Andrew Demshuk discusses his recent experiences conducting research on the environmental history of so-called “lost cities” in Germany.

This academic year I am enjoying a twelve-month fellowship from the Heinrich-Hertz-Foundation, which fosters scholarship in the humanities that is related to the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia. It is exciting to be in Cologne: an ancient and fascinating city! My research actually concerns an area just west of Cologne, where enormous craters (as deep as 450 meters) are getting carved out by dinosaur-sized machines so that the industrial economy has access to brown coal. This has been going on for decades, in particular to fuel a chemical industry that has polluted some of the streams, notably a little creek called the Duffesbach. 

This is a “zombie creek,” as we might call it, because since the 1960s it has been canalized and hidden, even though it was the only waterway to go through Cologne’s city walls and power medieval mills in the old town before going into the Rhine. Bicycling along the former route of the creek was somewhat depressing. There is just cement in the city. Then in the first suburbs, you start to see a biologically dead canal here and there, until it ends at a chemical plant. The village next to that chemical plant—called Knapsack—disappeared in the early 1970s. It was torn down and evacuated, because the pollution was so bad. I had the chance in recent years to talk to many of the industrial workers and last surviving residents who knew what that place was like. The former village cemetery is still hidden behind some warehouses on old village land, because no one wanted to pay to move the graves. It’s a peaceful and somewhat surreal “lost place.” 

Knapsack turned into a case study that I compared with a village south of Leipzig in East Germany that was also slated for destruction because of the same industries. Why did the West German village get destroyed? Why did the East German one survive? What does this tell us about the relationship between citizens and the state in each place? Between the local, the national, and the global? I’m honored that the Journal of Modern History wants to move ahead with my article. Most recently, I have been commuting by train up to the state archive in Duisburg to see troves of files. I’ve also visited county archives, city archives, and materials people have stowed in their attics. The history I am writing about the creation of these coal pits, the devastation of villages, the attempts to recultivate brave new landscapes, the fraught memory cultures, and evolving protest movements against coal devastation are all juxtaposed against the story in former East Germany south of Leipzig: a devastated cultural landscape I know intimately well after twenty years of research there on various projects, and where the same dirty fuel was excavated with the same technologies from a moonscape of coal pits. 

Indeed, simultaneous to this enormous environmental history project on the politics of coal pits in East and West Germany, I’m also writing a new history of the 1989 Revolution and “Wende” transformations of the 1990s from the perspective of Leipzig—the “capital” of the Peaceful Revolution before the Fall of the Wall—with emphases on environmental movements and the restoration of devastated urban spaces. This story of urban patriotism and revolution needs to get completed this year so that it can come out with an academic press in time for 2029—the 40^th anniversary of the revolution—and 80 years after the founding of East Germany. After experiencing the outbreak of revolutions in Tbilisi in Fall 2024 and watching the rise and fall of revolutions elsewhere against tyranny, the historical context, progression, and outcome of 1989 looms large, as does the historical “uses” of it, often by those who spin 1989 and the 1990s as something of a tragedy today, rather than an overcoming of repression. To that end, a great deal of my research is exploring the 1990s and 2000s. The time is ripe to study these decades, because the witnesses are retiring, even dying out, and their materials are seldom going into archives, even though especially in post-communist states this was the era I which the “world we live in now” was being made. 

This was an experience I also appreciated when I researched my book The Filthiest Village in Europe: Grassroots Ecology and the Collapse of East Germany, which just came out with Cornell University Press! As an outsider exploring these eras and having a chance to interact with witnesses who have never been questioned before, I was able to gather unique materials for that project that broke down stereotypes to show how East Germans and West Germany creatively worked together to build a better world after 1989. Ordinary people in often obscure retirement places often have remarkable materials, and I feel deeply grateful for this time to immerse. Right now I’m off to Berlin for two days to meet colleagues and enter the home of a retired architect who has 86 binders of photos, blueprints, and photos about a failed project to create the ecological urban garden of tomorrow in immediate post-1989 Leipzig. He was a West German. His partners were East German. The story narrates much about what was possible but also sometimes risky in the 1990s, based on the ambitions and sometimes frailties of complicated human beings. History gets messy at the biographical level. But it really comes to life too!

Lovers of history will be delighted to learn about a new scholarly journal run almost entirely by a dedicated group of AU undergraduate students: The Khaldun Journal of Historical Studies. Originally founded by AU history major Riley Wells in 2024 as the William H. Carney Historical Review, the journal has since been renamed after Ibn Khaldun, a prominent 14^th-century Arab and Muslim scholar and philosopher. According to AU junior Sri Vellakkat, who currently serves as editor-in-chief of Khaldun, “he represents a global-minded perspective that is appropriate for a global-minded school, and it is important to pay homage to those who came before us, especially those who have not been truly acknowledged in popular culture.” 

Though grounded in history, Khaldun boasts a diverse editorial staff with a wide range of intellectual interests, as is evident from the fact that Vellakkat himself is an SIS major who studies American foreign policy and national security. “CAS and SIS should be interconnected much more than they are,” Vellakkat says, “since there is so much overlap with history that people in both disciplines need to be aware of. Not only that, but they work together in brilliant ways.” Apart from Vellakkat, many of the journal’s lead editors are history majors, such as Martha Garcia, who currently serves as business editor. “I’ve always been a really curious person,” Garcia says, “and I like to get out of my sphere of knowledge to get new perspectives on topics I hadn’t thought about before. Just being in a space with other people who enjoy history, regardless of their background, is really nice.”

The editors of Khaldun welcome submissions from any AU student with a passion for history—March 22 is the deadline for Spring 2026 submissions. Each submission undergoes a rigorous process of review, led by a lead editor and a small group of 3-4 staff members. The editor-in-chief assigns each group a submission to review, along with a preferred timeline. “Each member of the group will then read the submission and discuss what sort of suggestions, comments, and edits we want to send back to the author,” says Garcia. “This process eventually enables us to determine which articles we want to move forward with.” The number of submissions has begun to grow in recent months, which Vellakkat sees as a promising sign of the journal’s visibility. “This upcoming issue will be the first in which we will publish articles by students that none of the editors know personally,” he says. 

Most of the editorial work of producing the journal is done asynchronously, which allows for greater flexibility with everyone’s busy schedules. Vellakkat estimates that he typically spends about 1-2 hours on the journal per week, but this can spike dramatically during the production crunch, reaching anywhere between 10-20 hours. Among the many tasks that have to be handled by Khaldun’s editorial staff are page layout and graphics, copyediting, and communication with the printer in downtown D.C. When all is said and done, about 125 copies of the print journal are distributed for free throughout campus. Issues are also available in electronic format on the journal’s website. 

In addition to the many students who bring each issue of Khaldun to fruition, Prof. Anton Fedyashin in the History Department serves as faculty advisor. “Dr. Fedyashin has been incredible to work with and always has time to meet with me and answer my questions,” Vellakkat says. As faculty advisor, Dr. Fedyashin has been a sounding board about strategic decisions at the journal. “I meet with Sri regularly and a lot of the staff have either been or are currently in my classes,” Fedyashin says. “But the students do everything by themselves, and the journal is entirely their achievement. The latest issue is so beautifully done that we have been handing out copies to prospective AU students and their parents during New Eagle events—that’s how proud the Department is of the students’ accomplishment.”

Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area surrounded by many of the world’s premier museums, AU graduating senior Annalise Vezina always knew that she wanted to study history one day. “I went into college already knowing that I wanted to major in history,” she says. “There are just so many things to learn about, and the deeper you go you realize there is even more to learn.” Fluent in French, Vezina developed a passion for European history and the history of the Holocaust, which eventually led to a fascinating internship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “There are so few Holocaust survivors nowadays,” Vezina says. “You get to know them in a different way than you would just listening to testimony and writing papers about it.” Since June 2024, Vezina has worked as an intern for both the museum’s Youth and Community Programs and its Social Team. In this dual capacity, she leads weekend classes for high school students while also helping to create content for the museum’s social media platforms, among other responsibilities. 

One of her favorite programs is called “Bringing the Lessons Home,” in which she teaches high school students how to give a two-hour tour of the museum’s Permanent Exhibition, the same program she went through in ninth grade. “You can’t just inundate them with information, which can be very depressing,” Vezina says. “You have to be able to make a personal connection with them and find a way to get to the emotion of the topic at hand. Otherwise you will lose your audience.” The more she learns about the Holocaust, the harder it is to fit everything she wants to say into a two-hour tour. “Every year my tour of the Permanent Exhibition gets longer and longer because I learn more stories and contextualizing details that I want to tell. Then suddenly my tour was three hours long!”

Vezina’s duties with the Social Team include researching and writing content for the Museum’s social media accounts, such as Instagram and Facebook. “I love this type of work because it is very historically grounded and every piece of content goes through multiple rounds of review,” she says. The impact of her work can feel very different depending on the audience. With the museum’s social media accounts, Vezina’s work can reach a global audience. “The museum has about three million followers across all platforms,” she says, “so three million people or more will read whatever you’re posting.” In the classroom, however, Vezina works with approximately fifty high school students, spending five hours per day once a week over the course of fourteen weeks. Though her audience is smaller, the impact is more personal. “You can see the reactions of the students firsthand and watch them grow.” 

Laura Beers, a professor of modern British history in AU’s History Department, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025, one of many prestigious awards that her work has garnered in recent years. The Guggenheim Fellowship, which is highly selective, is intended to provide accomplished mid-career professionals with the financial support and freedom to work on projects that are meaningful to them. This is certainly the case with Prof. Beers, who is using her time as a Guggenheim fellow to work on her next book on the politics of assisted reproduction and surrogacy since the birth of the world’s first in-vitro fertilization (IVF) baby in Oldham, Britain in July 1978. Prof. Beers has written about her own personal experience with IVF and is widely sought out in media circles as an expert commentator on public debates about assisted reproductive technology, abortion, and perceptions of womanhood. 

The visibility of these issues and importance of Prof. Beers’ research on the history of public debates over IVF procedures has only grown in recent years. In 2023, it was estimated that twelve million children had been born via IVF worldwide, with nearly two percent of all live births in the United States the result of IVF and other artificial reproductive technologies. IVF is particularly common here in Washington, DC, where 1 in 15 babies born are conceived via IVF. Yet, as Beers notes, “policymakers have failed to come to terms with the ethical and social implications of assisted reproduction. The prominence of debates over IVF funding and the status of unborn embryos in recent years underscores the ongoing uncertainty about what role technologies like IVF, surrogacy, egg freezing and genetic testing should play in 21^st century society.”

Prof. Beers’ Guggenheim Fellowship joins a long list of honors and recognitions that has been garnered by her groundbreaking work. Her latest book, Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (WW Norton), won the 45^th Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and was also named as one of the New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2024.” It was inspired in part by Prof. Beers’ own experience in the classroom with AU undergraduate students in her course HIST 235: “The West in Crisis, 1900–1945,” where Orwell’s texts and ideas constituted a major portion of intellectual debate and discussion. Orwell’s Ghosts is Prof. Beers’ third book, which follows up on the success of Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Harvard University Press, 2016), which received the Stansky Award for best book published in field of modern British history. 

Sophia Moody, a second-year student in the Public History MA program at AU, has curated three fascinating exhibits during her time as an Outreach Fellow for the University Library’s Archives and Special Collections. Visitors to the first floor of Bender Library can take in 100 Years of Undergrad, which documents various aspects of AU student life during the first year of undergraduate classes in 1925–26. During the course of her research, Moody discovered that the first graduating class of undergrads a century ago consisted of just six students, who paid two hundred dollars a year for tuition. 

The exhibit she assembled for display includes precious mementos of their era, including an “Instructor’s Class Card,” an admissions application, and the original “Marshal’s Mace” used in the graduation ceremonies. Besides these fascinating artifacts, during the course of her research Moody also discovered a series of letters which revealed that AU’s chancellor had initially opposed admitting African-American students to the new undergraduate program. Through this research, she had to learn “how to present difficult aspects of an institution’s history,” Moody said. “I believe it is essential to present history in its full complexity—even when it reflects uncomfortable truths about an institution’s past.”

The exhibit also reveals what some members of the Class of 1926 did after graduation: Claude Hunter became an engineer with the Maryland State Roads Commission, Dorothea McDowell became the Executive Director of the YWCA in Syria and Lebanon, and Dorothy Quincy Smith became an avid world traveler. “I have truly enjoyed working as an Outreach Fellow,” Moody said. “I believe that I have learned a great deal about how to research and design an exhibit. I am passionate about making history accessible to the public and have learned much about how to use thematic design to bring an era or narrative to life for the visitor.”

Those who spend time in the Spring Valley Building can also catch Moody’s second exhibit, Reading During a Revolution: A Look at 18^th Century Literature, which was developed around the theme of the nation’s 250-year anniversary. By examining the books held in AU’s archives that were originally published between 1770 to 1780, Moody provides an analytical snapshot of American reading tastes two and a half centuries ago. “My first exhibit used an array of textual documents presented in a traditional case,” Moody said, “but my next exhibit was solely focused on books, and I had to learn how to properly display these artifacts so as not to damage the covers.” 

Most recently, Moody has also curated a digitally forward exhibit, Broadcasting Live, which details the long history of student-run radio and television at AU. By exploring the various student-run radio and television stations on campus, Moody’s third exhibit will soon be displayed in Bender Library to highlight the dedication of past students to pursuing campus-based broadcasting media as an extracurricular activity or as a step towards a future career. The exhibit was built around audio-visual material. Therefore, Moody was “challenged to present the materials in yet another format and ultimately decided to display clips from the students’ original television shows in the 1980s.” She is now beginning research for a new exhibit on AU’s archives in conjunction with the university’s events for the nation’s 250^th anniversary.

Looking ahead, Moody has recently started an internship with the National Museum of American History, where she assists several curators in the Office of Curatorial Affairs with updating their collection records in the database. Having made the most of these invaluable opportunities to put her public history studies into practice, Moody hopes to work in museums in the D.C. area after graduation. “I had never independently created an exhibit before,” she said, “but after completing my first exhibit I was so proud and excited that I knew for certain that I had chosen the right career for me. I am very grateful to AU for the opportunities to learn how to design and curate exhibits and am devoted to continuing to promote the university’s archives throughout the remainder of my fellowship.”

The first time Anna Salton Eisen ever heard her father speak about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp was in an AU history class. In the early 1980s, Eisen took a course taught by retired professor Richard Breitman on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. “That was the beginning of a personal journey of discovery that has continued to the present day,” Eisen said. When she told Prof. Breitman her father was a Holocaust survivor, Breitman invited him to come and speak to the class. “I had never heard my father speak about the Holocaust before,” she said. “It always seemed like something forbidden to talk about in my childhood. But I think he was waiting to be asked.”

After she graduated from AU in 1984 with a degree in public communications and a minor in history, Eisen moved to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and quickly became a pioneer in the field of Holocaust public education. In the nearly four decades since taking Prof. Breitman’s course, Eisen has found her voice as the child of a Holocaust survivor. “There aren’t many Holocaust survivors left anymore,” she said. “So we in the second generation, as the children of survivors, are trying to figure out what our responsibility is to educate and inform the public.” In 2002, Eisen helped her father write The 23^rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir (2002), which has just been reissued in a 20^th anniversary edition. She is currently producing a documentary, In My Father’s Words, which also draws from her most recent book, Pillar of Salt: A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, released in May 2022.

Working to maintain awareness of the experiences of Holocaust survivors forces Eisen to confront a disturbing set of challenges. In the course of public speaking engagements at schools, commemorative events, and in the media, Eisen often has to endure personal threats to both her own safety and that of her family and friends. In January 2022, an Islamist terrorist took hostage four members of the Congregation Beth Israel, which Eisen helped found. Though the crisis was resolved without injury to the hostages, it serves as a constant reminder of anti-Semitism and its devastating consequences. “This used to be history, but now it is current events,” she said. With the re-emergence of anti-Semitist beliefs into popular media discourse, peddled by a small number of influential celebrities and other social media influencers, Eisen’s work is even more urgent than before. “I don’t know if what we’re doing is working or not,” she says, “but bullying not confronted becomes empowered.”

On March 24, 2022, AU graduate student Andrew Sperling gave a much anticipated talk to a rapt virtual audience at the University of Kentucky. The talk was based upon a paper that Sperling completed in Prof. Kate Haulman’s research seminar the previous year: “‘Living on a Sort of Island’: Jewish Refugee Farmers in the American South.” It follows the unique experiences of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who came to the United States during the rise of the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. But there was a catch: these particular refugees, who had once made their living as doctors, lawyers, and businessmen in dense European cities, would now be settled in rural communities and taught to farm the land.

Drawing upon a wide range of diaries, memoirs, and other correspondence, Sperling analyzed their struggle to adapt to these new circumstances and their determination to succeed in an unfamiliar occupation. “So much of the scholarly literature on Jewish refugees has focused on government policy,” Sperling said. “But we know less about the actual lived experiences of these refugees once they get into the country. I wanted to find personal testimonies and highlight the human drama behind government policy.” In recognition of his groundbreaking work, the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Kentucky honored Sperling by awarding his paper its annual Mark and Ruth Luckens International Prize in Jewish Thought and Culture. The award, given to “the best unpublished original essay” written by a graduate student or recent Ph.D., comes with a $500 prize and opportunity to give a keynote talk on his research.

Sperling is now starting to undertake research for his dissertation under the tutelage of Prof. Pamela Nadell, who serves as his advisor. “I really wanted to work with Prof. Nadell,” Sperling said. “She is one of the best scholars in American Jewish history, and the program felt like a good fit for me.” Living in Washington, D.C. is also invaluable, with easy access to institutions such as the Holocaust Museum. For his dissertation, Sperling is researching American Jewish responses to anti-Semitism espoused by extremist groups such as the KKK and American Nazi Party during the middle decades of the twentieth century. “So much has been written about antisemitism,” he says, “but there is much less research about the extremist angle. I want to assess Jewish perceptions of these groups.” Once he completes his Ph.D. at AU, Sperling hopes to pursue a career in academia.

Last month the Jewish Book Council announced the winners of their National Jewish Book Awards. Among the winning books was AU alum Wendy Lower’s The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed (Mariner Books, 2021), which was awarded the top prize in the category of Holocaust Studies. Dr. Lower received her Ph.D. from the AU History Department in 1999 while studying under Richard Breitman and is now John K. Roth Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. In Spring 2021, AU’s Jewish Studies Program and the Center for Israel Studies brought Dr. Lower to AU (virtually, of course!) to give a talk on her book.

Before she earned her Ph.D. in history, AU alum Rebecca DeWolf poured her time and energy into politics. Prior to pursuing on a master’s degree in early modern European History at George Washington University, DeWolf worked on several political campaigns, including then Senator Hillary Clinton’s re-election bid to the Senate in 2005–6. But it was a desire to gain a better understanding of the origins and development of major political issues that inspired her to pursue a Ph.D. at AU.

In her first year as a graduate student, DeWolf discovered her passion for research and teaching. “I had the great luck of being a teaching and research assistant for Dr. Allan Lichtman,” she said. “He taught me great techniques in how to teach history and how to give great lectures.” Outside of the classroom, DeWolf was able to gain valuable research experience by accompanying Prof. Lichtman to the manuscript room in the Library of Congress. “What he showed me was how to do archival work from a historian’s point of view,” DeWolf recalls. “He showed me how to go through massive amounts of collections and how to take notes, organize them, and develop an analysis. It was because of him that I came to the ERA.”

The ERA is the Equal Rights Amendment. First introduced to Congress in 1923, the ERA was intended to eliminate legal distinctions between men and women in many areas of daily life, including employment, divorce, property rights, and other matters. DeWolf first became interested in the history of ERA political debates when Dr. Lichtman asked her to give a guest lecture on the topic to his undergraduate students. She was surprised to learn that many students did not seem to be aware of the implications of the amendment or its relevance to their daily lives.

As a result, she decided to write a dissertation on the complex history of political opposition and support for the ERA. She then revised her dissertation in a book, Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963, which was published in 2021 by University of Nebraska Press. It has already been met with rave reviews, with DeWolf in high demand for media interviews. “Media depictions of the ERA debate often portray it as if it was some sort of catfight among women,” DeWolf said. “But the political coalitions were once much more diverse on both sides than they are now, and the role of men is all too often written out of the narrative.”

DeWolf hopes that her book will educate people of all political persuasions about the nuanced history of the ERA and its prospects for the future. “I didn’t write this book to necessarily push people to support the ERA,” she said, “but rather to help people understand the political and gendered implications of their arguments, why people think the way that they do, and why things played out the way they did.” In addition to her research on the ERA, DeWolf is also active as a public media figure, maintaining an online blog (Out of the Tower) and frequently offering her perspective on current political issues related to women’s rights. She still resides in the Washington, D.C. area and is currently formulating a second research project on Elsie Hill, a leading suffragist in the twentieth century who played a vital role in the drafting of the ERA in 1921.