Faculty

Anna Adams, aadams@muhlenberg.edu, Associate Professor of History, Ph.D. Temple University, Latin America

The major focus of my research has been the growth of Protestant churches in Latin America. My Ph.D. dissertation was a history of the Moravian missions in Nicaraqua and more recently I have published several articles on Pentecostal movements among Latinos in the United States. In 2000 I completed a bilingual history of the Latino community of Allentown, Hidden From History

I teach courses in colonial and modern Latin America and on Latinos in the United States. In most of my classes I invite students to put themselves into history by creating their own historical documents based on the term's scholarly readings, first person narrations, class discussions and lectures. In the Latinos class, students study the city of Allentown whose population is 25% Latino as a living laboratory.

Susan Clemens, clemens@muhlenberg.edu, Instructor of History, Ph.D. Candidate, Lehigh University, Twentieth Century Intellectual and Cultural History

Research and teaching interests: U. S. labor history, urban history, oral history, popular culture and media

Thomas Cragin, cragin@muhlenberg.edu, Associate Professor of History, Ph.D. Indiana University, Modern Continental Europe

My research is focused on cultural history.  I am completing a book on the popular press in nineteenth-century France and starting a new book project on Italian and French film representations of World War II.

Robert Croskey, croskey@muhlenberg.edu Associate Professor of History, Ph.D. University of Washington, Russia, East Asia

Judith A. Ridner, ridner@muhlenberg.edu, Associate Professor of History, Ph.D. William & Mary, colonial and revolutionary America

Because I was trained as a social and cultural historian of Colonial and Revolutionary America, and worked for several years as an historical archaeologist with Colonial Williamsburg, my primary teaching and research interests focus on the ways various peoples of our past (white and non-white, wealthy and poor, women as well as men) lived their lives and interacted with each other on a daily basis

In my courses, which all emphasize discussion and writing, students read many first-person narratives, journals, and travel writings, as well as examine the spaces people inhabited and the goods they owned as ways to understand better how the many peoples of America's past experienced their worlds.

In my research, which currently focuses on the completion of a book-length manuscript on eighteenth-century Carlisle, Pennsylvania, I seek to explore the way geography, ethnicity, and several competing economic worldviews shaped a small frontier village into a pivotal place of trade and cultural contact in the Pennsylvania interior.

Mark L. Stein, stein@muhlenberg.edu, Assistant Professor of History, Ph.D. University of Chicago, Middle East History

My training as an historian was in the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, and my Ph.D. dissertation was a study of seventeenth-century Ottoman administration of that empire's frontier with the Habsburgs in Hungary. My current research builds on that topic, to consider more widely the social, economic, political, and military aspects of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier. I am also interested in the broader questions of frontier history, particularly when placed in a comparative framework.

The classes I teach fall generally within the field of Middle East history. Course topics include the Ottoman Empire, the Mongols, the Islamic city, the Arab-Israel conflict, Mediterranean trade, frontiers, travelers, and Central Asia. In all my courses we will explore the diverse consequences of encounters between states, peoples, and cultures.

William J. Tighe, tighe@muhlenberg.edu, Associate Professor of History, Ph.D. Cambridge University Renaissance and Reformation, 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century Europe

A 1974 graduate of Georgetown University with a B.A. in History summa cum laude, William J. Tighe was subsequently a graduate student at Yale University, where he studied under J. H. Hexter and from which he received the degrees of M.A. in 1975 and M. Phil. in 1977, and at Cambridge University under Sir Geoffrey Elton, Regius Professor of History, where he took the Ph.D. degree in 1984. After a period as University Research fellow in history at the University College of North Wales, he became a member of the Muhlenberg College History Department in 1986.

Although he has described himself betimes as an ecclesiastical historian manque, Tighe's field of research specialization is the political, religious and social history of Tudor and Stuart Britain (c. 1460 to c. 1715). His Ph.D. work focused on a corps of men known as the Gentlemen Pensioners at the court of Queen Elizabeth I and over the past decade he has embarked on a wide-ranging study of that group of the most initmate servants of that queen known collectively as the Privy Chamber. Among his publications are "A Nottinghamshire Gentleman in Court and in Country: the Career of Thomas Markham of Ollerton (1530-1607)", Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire (1986); "The Gentlemen Pensioners, the Duke of Northumberland and the Attempted Coup of July 1553", Albion (1987); "Courtiers and Politics in Elizabethan Herefordshire: Sir James Croft, His Friends and His Foes", Historical Journal(1989); "'To Run with the Time': Archbishop Whitgift, the Lambeth Articles and the Politics of Theological Ambiguity in late Elizabeth England", Sixteenth Century Journal(1992); and "Country into Court, Court into Country: John Scudamore of Holme Lacy and his Circles" in Tudor Political Culture, ed. D. E. Hoak (Cambridge,1995). His teaching interests include the whole of British History, Europe in the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and a range of introductory courses, first-year seminars and other departmental offerings.

Daniel J. Wilson, dwilson@muhlenberg.edu, Professor of History, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, American social, cultural and intellectual, 19th and 20th centuries

My historical interests are focused on the cultural and social history of the United States. I am interested in the development of American culture from the formative years to the present. The courses I teach focus on various aspects of cultural and social history including the histories of women, African Americans, the environment, disease and medicine, and American intellectual life. In all my classes I try to introduce students to original voices from the past and the best of current historical scholarship. All of my classes emphasize discussion and writing.

My historical research and scholarship embraces the history of American philosophy and, more recently, a cultural history of the polio epidemics in the United States.