History and Classics

Passionate faculty. Incredible students. 

These are essential ingredients for the best history and classics departments — just like ours. Our faculty members know their way around the world, from the Americas and Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. They’re also experts in their fields, specializing in everything from the Harlem Renaissance and the Reformation, slavery and samurais, women and gender in antiquity​, and much more.

Both inside and outside of the classroom, our students are dedicated to the study of the events and cultures​​​ that have shaped our world, from the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era to the decolonization and rise of nationalism in 20th-century Africa. They have gone on to become educators, lawyers, CEOs, community organizers, diplomats, and peacemakers.

Away from the classroom, internships and our history club bring history lessons to life. Our annual Maymester course, which has taken students to Germany, Poland, Hungary, England, Ireland, and Japan in the past three years, offers the opportunity for students to be fully immersed in the materials they study. So, whether you want to learn about the world from our lecture halls or experience it firsthand, we want you to take your journey with us.

Recent Faculty Accomplishments

• Dr. Constance M. Rousseau has published an article entitled “Pope Innocent III’s Justice and Pastoral Care Concerning Extramarital Sexual Activity,” Mediaeval Studies 84 (2022), 273-316.
• Dr. Jennifer Illuzzi had her chapter “The Genocide of the Romani People in Europe” published in the Cambridge World History of Genocide, Volume 3 in summer 2023.
• Dr. Jeff Johnson received a Silas Palmer Fellowship at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University. His latest essay, “‘Raise a Little Hell’: The South Dakota Radical Tradition,” appeared in Old Trails and New Roads in South Dakota History (Center for Western Studies, 2023).
• Dr. Sharon Ann Murphy recently published her book Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States, which explores how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.
• Dr. Osama Siddiqui received an American Council of Learned Societies Awards 2023 Project Development Grant for his project “A Science of Society: Indian Economic Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire.”
• Dr. Adrian Weimer recently published her second book A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire on the resistance movements of the 1660s, when puritan colonists creatively worked to protect local institutions from the demands of the newly restored Stuart monarchy.
• Dr. Guolin Yi won the 2022 Research Award at the Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences in the United States (ACPSS) conference for his 2020 book “The Media and Sino-American Rapprochement, 1963-1972”.
• Dr. Margaret Manchester‘s latest article “‘And Now for the Rest of the Story’: The ITT/Vogeler Case Revisited” was published in the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 28 (1).
• Dr. Alyssa Lopez‘s article “The Dangers and Pleasures of Moviegoing: Black Girls in Harlem’s Movie Theaters before World War II” was published in the summer 2022 edition of the Journal of African American History.
• Dr. Steven Smith had an article entitled “Politics in the Margins: Elkanah Watson, DeWitt Clinton, and the History of the Erie Canal in the Early American Republic” published in the summer 2022 edition of the New York History Journal.
• Dr. Alex Orquiza recently published his book Taste of Control: Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality under American Rule. The books tells what happened when American colonizers began to influence what Filipinos ate, how they cooked, and how they perceived their national cuisine, discussing how changing the food of the Philippines was part of a war on culture led by Americans as they attempted to shape the islands into a reflection of their home country.

Check out our Faculty page to learn more about what we’ve been doing.

What’s New?

• The Department of History and Classics has received a generous gift from the family of Andrea Traietti ’21, allowing us to offer mini research grants to our students for Honors Thesis Research ​and other Special Projects.
• We are pleased to announce Dr. Sharon Ann Murphy, professor of history, as the new department chair for the History and Classics Department (2021).
• Dr. Raymond Sickinger was awarded the 2021 Service to Education Award by the Providence College National Alumni Association.
• Dr. Robin Greene was awarded the 2020-21 Joseph R. Accinno Faculty Teaching Award.