History Faculty
Senior Lecturer
2024–5 ACLS Fellow
Email: almohsen@grinnell.edu
I study the history of intellectual networks, ideas, critique, and print culture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the late eighteenth century to the present. My research and teaching interests include: modern MENA history, politics, and cultures; intellectual and literary histories of...
Professor
Emeritus
Email: brownv@grinnell.edu
Professor Brown has been a member of the Â鶹´«Ã½ History Department since the fall of 1989. She has chaired the History Department and the Gender and Women's Studies concentration, been an active participant in the Center for Prairie Studies, and served as chair of the Social Studies Division...
Professor
Director
Email: cohned@grinnell.edu
Edward Cohn is a scholar of Soviet and Eastern European history, with a specialty in the history of policing, surveillance, and the often-blurry line between public and private life in the Communist world. A 1999 graduate of Swarthmore College, he worked for a year as a political journalist and came...
Associate Professor
Email: cumminsm@grinnell.edu
Monessa Cummins received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on Greek epinician poetry, a type of lyric poetry composed in praise of victors at ancient athletic games. In particular she studies this poetry within its historical and archaeological context. In...
Professor
Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Email: elfenbei@grinnell.edu
I am a Professor of History and Religious Studies at Â鶹´«Ã½ College, where I am also Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I graduated from Vassar College with a degree in political science, an education that still informs my work and my life. I have a...
Associate Professor
Department chair of Science, Medicine, and Society
Email: guenthmb@grinnell.edu
Mike Guenther began teaching at Â鶹´«Ã½ College in 2007, having received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, and his M.A. & Ph.D from Northwestern University. A historian of science, technology and the environment, he is currently finishing a book project (tentatively entitled, Science and...
Associate Professor
Email: lewiscar@grinnell.edu
Carolyn Herbst Lewis is Associate Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and History. She joined the faculty at Â鶹´«Ã½ College in 2013. Professor Lewis is a specialist in the fields of American women’s history and the histories of sex, sexuality, and medicine in the United States...
Professor
Emeritus
Email: hsieh@grinnell.edu
Before joining the Â鶹´«Ã½ faculty in 1978, Andrew Hsieh received his education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Kyoto University (Japan), and Yale University. He has currently entered Senior Faculty Status. He taught Chinese and Japanese history classes at the college, and also held...
Professor
Emeritus
Email: kaiser@grinnell.edu
Kaiser has taught at Â鶹´«Ã½ since 1979, and in 2008, entered senior faculty status. A specialist in medieval and early modern Russia, Mr. Kaiser has studied legal, social, and demographic history. He is the author of The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton University Press, 1980), and...
Associate Professor
Email: lacson@grinnell.edu
Assistant Professor Albert Lacson teaches courses that focus on race and ethnicity in US history, including Native American and African American history, race in early America, comparative slavery, and European-Indian relations in colonial North America. In his research, he seeks to illuminate the...
Associate Professor
Email: maynardk@grinnell.edu
Kelly Maynard joined the faculty at Â鶹´«Ã½ in 2009 after teaching in the history and art history departments at Scripps College. Her current project, entitled Hearing Wagner in France at the Fin-de-Siècle: Music and the Interior World, is an interdisciplinary monograph building upon her doctoral...
Professor
Email: prevoste@grinnell.edu
Elizabeth Prevost, Frederick L. Baumann Professor of History, is a historian of modern Britain and the Empire/Commonwealth; colonial Africa; global Christianity; women and gender; and reading, publishing, and literary celebrity. She is the author of The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in...
Assistant Professor
Email: sabaelia@grinnell.edu
Elias G. Saba received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. He was awarded the British Association of Islamic Studies – De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World 2018 for his dissertation. His first monograph, Harmonizing...
Associate Professor
Email: silvajp@grinnell.edu
Mr. Silva came to Â鶹´«Ã½ from the University of Chicago where he wrote a dissertation on Chilean middle-class unions. Mr. Silva's work examines how the middle class contributed to the rise of powerful leftist parties in Chile. These research interests show up in the courses he teaches on U.S...