History Faculty

David Gedalecia - Michael O. Fisher Professor of History
(330) 263-2446 | dgedalecia@wooster.edu

B.A. Queens 1965; M.A., Ph.D. Harvard 1967, 1971.

David Gedalecia is the Michael O. Fisher Professor of History at The College of Wooster, where he joined the faculty in 1971. His primary areas of expertise are Chinese history and philosophy in the early modern period (Sung through Ming), Neo-Confucian interpretations of the Chinese classics, and Confucian scholarship during the Yüan dynasty. He teaches courses in these areas and in modern Japanese history and U.S.-China relations.

A 1965 graduate of Queens College (City University of New York; cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Gedalecia received his M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1971) from Harvard University in Chinese intellectual history. He is the author of The Philosophy of Wu Ch'eng (Indiana) and Solitary Crane in a Spring Grove (Wiesbaden). He has also written chapters on intellectual history during the Mongol period in books published by Columbia and Princeton and essays on traditional and modern Chinese history for Philosophy East and West, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Bulletin of Sung and Yüan Studies, and Prologue: Quarterly of The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. He has also contributed chapters for the Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge, 2003) and the Encyclopedia of Confucianism (Routledge-Curzon, 2003).

Gedalecia was a National Defense Foreign Language Fellow in Chinese at Columbia University and at Harvard University, where he was also a Teaching Fellow in General Education. He was the recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for an International Philosophers’ Conference at the University of Hawaii (1982) and an Institute of Asian Studies grant for a conference on modern China in Beijing (1995). He has also presented papers and chaired panels at meetings of the American Oriental Society (1971 and 1975) and the Association for Asian Studies (1977 and 2002), as well as at conferences at Nanjing University (1986) and Princeton University (2001). He was a tour leader for Oberlin and Wooster alumni tours to China (1979 and 2001) and has traveled extensively in East Asia.

Marc C. Goulding - Gillespie Visiting Instructor in History
(330) 263-2025 / mgoulding@wooster.edu

B.A. New York 1999; New York.

Marc Goulding is the Gillespie Visiting Instructor in History at The College of Wooster, where he joined the faculty in 2007.

Goulding is a doctoral candidate at New York University, where he also earned his undergraduate degree.

He has presented work regarding his thesis, “Vanguards of the New Africa: Black Radical Networks, Communism, and Anti-Imperialism in the 1930s,” at Yale University and the University of Memphis. He has also served as the managing editor of a peer-reviewed academic journal, the Radical History Review.

Madonna Hettinger - Lawrence Stanley Professor of Medieval History
(330) 263-2439 / mhettinger@wooster.edu

A.B. St. Francis 1977; M.A., Ph.D. Indiana 1979, 1986.

Madonna J. Hettinger holds the Lawrence Stanley Professorship of Medieval History at The College of Wooster, where she joined the faculty in 1989. She also directs Wooster’s Summer in Tuscany program, a four-week study abroad experience based in the medieval city of Siena, Italy.

A social and cultural historian of medieval Europe, Hettinger’s research explores the human response to the biological traumas of the fourteenth century: famine and epidemic disease. She is particularly interested in the stories of medieval “survivors.” For example, she has examined the ways English peasants took advantage of the new demand for their labor after the Black Death by reconfiguring the meanings of work and freedom in their daily lives. Her current research investigates the impact of the Black Death on urban and rural communities in Tuscany. She is particularly interested in how epidemic disease disrupted relationships within networks of affection, kinship, and citizenship.

Hettinger teaches courses in “Medieval Europe,” Renaissance Europe,” “Laws and Outlaws,” “Plague in the Towns of Tuscany,” and “Mystics, Popes, and Pilgrims.”

Katherine Holt, Assistant Professor in History
(330) 263-2528 / kholt@wooster.edu

B.A. George Washington 1995; M.A. New York 1999; M.A. Princeton 2001; Princeton 2005.

Katie Holt is an assistant professor of history at The College of Wooster and a member of the faculty since 2005. She teaches courses in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research interests include Brazilian history, comparative slave societies, material culture, and the history of gender and the family.

Holt earned her B.A. in international relations from George Washington University (1995), after which she spent eight months backpacking in Central and South America. She then earned her M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University (1999) where she researched monumental architecture as a reflection of the construction of race and national identity in the 20th century Dominican Republic. She earned another M.A. (2001) and then a Ph.D at Princeton University (2005), where she explored the formation of intimate relationships between people across racial, gender, and free/slave boundaries in two regions of 19th century Brazil.

Shannon King - Assistant Professor of History
(330) 263-2519 / sking@wooster.edu

B.A., M.A. North Carolina Central 1996, 1998; Ph.D. Binghamton 2006.

Shannon King is an assistant professor of history at The College of Wooster, where he joined the faculty in 2007.

King earned his B.A. (1996) and M.A. (1998) from North Carolina Central University and Ph.D. (2006) from Binghamton University.

Prior to Wooster, he was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Oregon. He also taught at Binghamton University, where he received his Ph.D. degree, and was a minority scholar at College Misericordia, in Dallas, Pennsylvania.

M. Susan Murnane - Visiting Assistant Professor of History
(330) 263-2622 / mmurnane@wooster.edu

B.A., Carleton College, 1972; J.D., University of Minnesota, 1977; LL.M., Georgetown University, 1984; Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, 2006.

Susan Murnane is a visiting assistant professor of History at The College of Wooster, where she joined the faculty in 2007. Her principal interest lies at the intersection of law and society during the transition to industrial capitalism in the United States.

Murnane earned her B.A. from Carleton College (1972), her J.D. from University of Minnesota Law School (1977) and her Master of Law in Taxation from Georgetown University Law School (1984) before receiving her Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University (2006).

Prior to joining Wooster’s faculty, Murnane taught at the University of Detroit/Mercy College of Law and the University of Toledo College of Law. She practiced law with the Tax Division of the United States Department of Justice, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, and in private practice before attending graduate school.

In April of 2006, she presented her paper on “The Political Economy of the Saturday Evening Post” at the 10th annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought in Porto, Portugal. Currently, she is researching the influence of popular magazines on the economic thought and attitudes of middles class Americans in the 1920s.

Peter Pozefsky - Associate Professor of History
(330) 263-2395 / ppozefsky@wooster.edu

A.B. Harvard 1984; M.A., Ph.D. UCLA 1986, 1993.

Peter C. Pozefsky is an associate professor of history and chair of the department at The College of Wooster and a member of the faculty since 1994. He specializes in Russian history, Contemporary Russia, European thought, and cultural history.

Pozefsky was a Fellow at the Russian State Humanities University in 1993-94 and at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1991-92. He is the author of several articles on Russian literature and radical politics in the mid-19th century. His book on that subject, The Nihilist Imagination, was published in 2003. His current research focuses on representations of Russian history in film.

In addition to his teaching and research interests, Pozefsky is a member of the American Historical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

Jeff Roche - Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for the Class of 2010
(330) 263-2450 / jroche@wooster.edu

B.A., M.A. Georgia State University, 1992, 1995; Ph.D. University of New Mexico, 2001.

Jeff Roche is an associate professor of history and associate dean for the class of 2010 at The College of Wooster, where he joined the faculty in 2001. He specializes in 20th century U.S. political history, western American history, conservatism, and the decade of the ‘60s.

Roche received both his B.A. summa cum laude (1992) and his M.A. (1995) at Georgia State University. He earned a Ph.D. from The University of New Mexico (2000) where he was an L. Dudley Philips Dissertation Fellow and a Regents’ Endowed Fellow.

Roche is the author of Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia, which examines the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on Georgia’s political culture. He also wrote Cowboy Conservatism, and co-edited The Conservative Sixties and The New Western Politics, which will be published this spring. His research has been published in The Columbia Companion to America in the 1960s, Mid-America: A Historical Review, and The Southern Albatross: Race and Ethnicity in the American South.

Roche is affiliated with the Organization of American Historians, the Western History Association, and the Southern Historical Association. He is also a member of Phi Alpha Theta and Phi Kappa Phi.

Hayden Schilling - Robert Critchfield Professor of English History
(330) 263-2452 / hschilling@wooster.edu

B.A. Southern Methodist University 1959; M.A., Ph.D. Vanderbilt 1961, 1970.

William Albert Hayden Schilling is the Robert Critchfield Professor of English History at The College of Wooster and a member of the faculty since 1964. He is also former dean of admissions, former acting vice president for academic affairs, and current head men’s tennis coach. He is an expert in Tudor-Stuart England, early modern Europe, and modern Britain.

A 1958 graduate of Southern Methodist University, Schilling holds an M.A. (1961) and Ph.D. (1970) from Vanderbilt University. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of London in 1962 and 1963 and was named the Robert Critchfield Professor of English History at Wooster in 1982. Most recently, he was named Outstanding Baccalaureate College Professor of the Year for 2005 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

Schilling directs Wooster’s Advanced Placement Institute for secondary school teachers as well as the Wooster-Youngstown Early Intervention Program for high school students at Wooster each summer.

Greg Shaya - Assistant Professor of History
http://www.wooster.edu/history/gshaya/
(330) 263-2169 / gshaya@wooster.edu

B.A. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 1988; M.A., Ph.D. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 1993, 2000.

Gregory K. Shaya is an assistant professor of history at The College of Wooster, where he joined the faculty in 2001. The central focus of his research is French culture and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. His teaching interests include European history, as well as newspapers and public opinion, historical approaches to crime and punishment, the history of the modern city, anarchism and terrorism in Europe, and the detective novel.

Shaya received his B.A. in English and Philosophy (with highest honors and highest distinction) from the University of Michigan (1988). After studies at the Scuola Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence and the University of California at Berkeley, Shaya earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan (2000). The recipient of a number of major fellowships and grants, Shaya was most recently an external fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Shaya is a member of the American Historical Association, the Society for French Historical Studies, the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

Karen Taylor - Associate Professor of History
(330) 263-2451 / ktaylor@wooster.edu

B.A. Utah 1980; M.A. Clark 1982; Ph.D. Duke 1988.

Karen J. Taylor is an associate professor of history at The College of Wooster and a member of the faculty since 1986. She specializes in gender history and cultural studies as well as Native American and immigration history. She also studies American and Australian history.

Taylor received her B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Utah (1980). She then earned her M.A. from Clark University (1982) and her Ph.D. from Duke University (1988). Taylor has authored a number of scholarly articles and book reviews, including most recently “Sex and Colonialism" in the Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism.

A member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, the International Psychohistory Association and the Ohio Academy of History, Taylor is currently working on a book titled, Manifest Destinies, which is a comparative study of the way patriarchy shaped men's lives between 1848 and 1920 in Boston, Savannah, and Denver.