I am an Assistant Professor of African History and an affiliate faculty member of the Africana Studies Centre at Oklahoma State University. Prior to joining OSU, I was a Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in African and African Diaspora History at the University of Toronto, where I obtained my PhD as a Carmen Brock Fellow in sub-Saharan African History, Vanier/SSHRC Scholar, and a Professor Emeritus Martin Klein Fellow in African History. My research and teaching interests encompass gender and women's history, war and society, violence and conflict studies, the history of crime, law, and punishment, Black and diaspora studies, genocide, human rights, and humanitarian histories, as well as global and transnational history.

My forthcoming book, Inventing Order: Crime, Law, and Punishment in Nigeria and the Diaspora (University of Rochester Press), adopts a multidisciplinary approach to examine the evolution of crimes (armed robbery, immigration fraud, financial fraud, drug trafficking) in Nigeria and their local and global implications. Inventing Order demonstrates how crimes orchestrated by Nigerians shaped the societies of the United States, India, and the United Kingdom, as well as the legal, diplomatic, technological, and social investments and responses of the American, Indian and British governments to the menace, particularly in the twentieth century. My second book will be published by Ohio University Press. Entitled Soldiers on Rampage: Gender, Violence and Resistance in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970, the book examines the impact of the wartime violence between the Nigerian and Biafran soldiers on Biafran women and their families, and the women's responses to wartime atrocities. Adopting a global approach, the book also explores the roles of the Cold War powers (Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union) in the conflict and the implications of their interventions on Biafran women. The book demonstrates how food was central to the constant violence unleashed on women in the heartland of Biafra. 

I am working on several book projects, including an exploration of how Nigeria's transnational diplomacy shaped and sustained the armed resistance of the African liberation guerrillas, wartime refugees' resettlement and experiences in Africa, and the efforts of American organizations in decolonization, anti-imperialism, and deracialization processes in Africa throughout the twentieth century. 

I have published extensively on the above themes in specialist, multidisciplinary, and area studies journals, including War and Society, The International History Review, the Journal of World History, Gender & History,  Africa Today, Journal of Globalization Studies, War in History, The Journal of Global South Studies, The Canadian Historical Review, and Journal of History. 

In 2025, I received an Honourable Mention from the Canadian Association of African Studies for the Pius Adesanmi Early Career Research Excellence Award. My research has been supported by grants from the Society for Military History (SMH), the Royal Historical Society (RHS), Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Library & Archives Scholar Research Support, and Northwestern University’s Melville J. Herskovits Library Research Grant.  

I serve on the Editorial Review Boards of the African Studies Association journal, History in Africa, published by Cambridge University Press; and the Canadian Association of African Studies journal, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, published by Taylor & Francis. I have recently been invited by the International Institute of Genocide and Human Rights Studies to serve as a founding editor of Scholar’s Corner, a subsidiary blog of the journal, Genocide Studies International, published by University of Toronto Press. 

I am the current President of the African Military Studies Association (AMSA), a coordinate organization of the African Studies Association. I am a fellow of the Society for Military History (SMH) and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS). 

Richard Boles specializes in early American and United States history, particularly African American and Native American history from the colonial era to the middle of the nineteenth century, and American religious history. Boles researches race relations in early American churches. His first book, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North, was published by New York University Press in December 2020. This work examines the transition from racially diverse churches during the early eighteenth century to separate American Indian and African American congregations by the early nineteenth century in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions. Boles shows that a significant portion of northern Protestants worshiped in interracial churches between 1730 and 1820. He has begun new research about religious interactions among Native Americans and African Americans in early America.

Boles was appointed Interim Director of the Religious Studies Program in February 2024.

Research Interests:

Colonial and Revolutionary America; Native American History; African American History; American Religious History

Merle Eisenberg is a historian of late antiquity and the early middle ages. His work examines the impact of great moments of historical change, such as the end of the Roman Empire and the Justinianic Plague (c. 541-750 C.E.), on individuals and communities.

He co-authored the 2023 Edinburgh UP book, Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies, which discusses how the depiction of diseases in movies has changed over the last century and what these changes reveal about American culture. Diseased Cinema analyzes how American movies about infectious diseases have reflected and driven dominant cultural narratives during the past century.

He has several other disease projects underway. The first is a book project, Pandemic and History: Disease, Myth, and the End of Antiquity, which tracks the development of the Justinianic Plague. It analyzes the plague’s differential impact based on local conditions and investigates how a plague pandemic as a catastrophic myth was created along with its continuing use to the present day, including during Covid. The book received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaboration grant for nearly $250,000 that is matched by a $180,000 grant from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation. 

He is also working with colleagues at Oklahoma State University on the project, “Using socioeconomic, behavioral and environmental data to understand disease dynamics: exploring COVID-19 outcomes in Oklahoma,��� which received a 3 year National Science Foundation Grant for 2024-2026. As part of this project, he is investigating the impact of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic on populations in Oklahoma to understand the comparative impact of disease on minority populations.

His second book project, Building Little Romes: Christianity, Identity, and the Formation of the Medieval West, argues that it was subjective memory of Romans, who clung to their identities in new little Romes after the political fragmentation of the Roman Empire, that changed how individuals, communities, and states conceptualized their place in the world and ushered in the Middle Ages.

He has published articles on a variety of topics and disciplinary journals including the American Historical Review, Past & Present, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Speculum, Early Medieval Europe, and The Journal of Late Antiquity. He hosts the podcast Infectious Historians on the history of disease, pandemics and medicine, which has run for over 4 years and has now released over 140 episodes.

He is currently the Chair of the University Faculty Council Budget Committee and serves on the Faculty Council as an elected member.

Research Interests:

Medieval Europe, Ancient History, Diseases & Pandemics, Environmental History

I am a historian of modern Latin America, with a focus on Central America. I am interested in approaches to history that examine how non-elite people shaped and engaged with large scale phenomena, such as development projects and international diplomacy. 

Research Interests:

My research focuses on borders and territorial disputes, histories of development, Indigeneity, and international diplomacy in modern Central America. My current book project, A Line in the Jungle: Everyday Diplomacy in the Belizean Borderlands, examines the history of the Anglo-Guatemala-Belizean territorial conflict, a case which currently sits on the docket of the International Court of Justice. My research approaches this conflict from a borderlands perspective, centering the histories of communities who daily live this reality. Using archives in Guatemala, Belize, and the U.K., I examine how borderland residents--the farmers, fishermen, merchants, local politicians, chicleros, smugglers, and loggers--shape this territorial conflict, thus placing their histories into conversation with those of Guatemalan, Belizean, British, and Maya leaderes whose diplomatic lives also shaped the contours of this issue. This research has been funded by an OSU Humanities, Arts, and Design-Based Disciplines Research Grant ($10,000) an, Oklahoma Humanities Council Grant ($3,000), and an OSU Office of the Vice President Research jumpstart/Acceleration Grant ($10,000).

I also direct the ongoing Latino Oklahoma Oral History Project, a public history initiative done in collaboration with the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program and Spanish in Rural Oklahoma Project, respectively. At the end of 2025, the LOOHP contains approximately 60 oral histories from rural and urban communities across the state and has supported multiple undergraduate and graduate student research projects. I have presented research based on this collection at the International Oral History Association meetings in 2023 and 2025, and I am finalizing a co-written manuscript (with Jorge Chavez) as a part of an invited submission as a special dossier on the Latinx Midwest to The Public Historian.

Current article projects feature a forthcoming journal article that presents an environmental history of Guatemala's 1976 earthquake and relief efforts in Chinautla, a Poqomam Maya community on the outskirts of Guatemala City (forthcoming 2026 in Hispanic American Historical Review) and an analysis of internal and international migration in Guatemala (forthcoming in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2026). I also have an article about the Philippine-based Movement for Rural Reconstruction's pilot project in Jalapa, Guatemala, under review as a part of a special issue on Genealogies of Development in Latin America, with Humanity. 

My first book, On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala (UNC Press, 2022), focuses on the ways that Guatemalan interacted with, and often appropriated Cold War-era development projects. I focus not only on the actions and motivations of policymakers but also emphasize the ways that Indigenous people actively participated in these processes, creating alternate versions of development and Indigenous citizenship. I have also published chapters in two edited volumes, Latin America and the Global Cold War (UNC Press, 2020) and Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala (U. Texas Press, 2020). I also co-edited a special journal issue for the Journal of Social History titled "Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: Rumor, Forgery, and Denunciation in Latin America." My article which appeared in the issue, "Rumors of Insurgency and Assassination in the Ixcán, Guatemala" won the 2021 Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies. 

Emily E. Graham is a historian of the Middle Ages, specializing in the intersection of religious and political history.

Research Interests:

Dr. Graham's research interests include sanctity, monastic orders, religious reform and heretical movements, and papal politics. She has published on Franciscan reformers, their patronage and networks. Most recently, she wrote and filmed Surprising Lives of Christian Saints for The Great Courses, winner of a bronze Telly Award. Her current projects place saints within their historical context, and examine the Cardinal Protectors of the Franciscan Order. She is currently the Associate Department Head for the Department of History, and has served terms as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the department, and in faculty governance as Vice-Chair and Chair of the Faculty Council for the College of Arts & Sciences.

My publications to date trace the efforts of employers, managers, and their allies to sell American workers on the rewards of work since 1900 within broader historical contexts, especially management crusades against labor unions and the New Deal. I chart this history in my 2020 book, Work Better, Live Better: Motivation, Labor, and Management Ideology (University of Massachusetts Press). My current research projects center on punk, post-punk, and cultural memory in spaces such as podcasting, museums, and memoirs.

Research Interests:

Work & Society; Management Ideologies; Workplace Propaganda; Punk, Post-Punk and Cultural Memory

My scholarship focuses on European cultural history in the 20th century, particularly in a transnational context.  Trained in history, French Studies, and museum studies, I approach my work with an interdisciplinary framework.

My first book is a history of cultural heritage work in the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, which was created at the end of World War I. Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate is a wide-ranging study of how multiple communities used historical religious objects--Sumerian votives, Roman temples, medieval mosaics in Damascus, and more--to navigate the new Middle East and Europe after 1918, which were both irrevocably changed by WWI. By zooming in on this particular story, my research underscores the use of religious cultural objects to affect international politics and shape colonial regimes. Broadly the book shows how cultural heritage was used to justify the contentious terms of late colonialism, and to resist it.

That research is part of my specific scholarly agenda on European heritage politics across the twentieth century, as evidenced by my next two major projects: a history of the transatlantic preservation of fascist objects that date back to the 1930s-1940s and a history of a spike in art crime in Europe in the 1960s-1970s. Both projects are interdisciplinary, with the former influenced by material culture theory and the latter by colonial studies. All my projects are guided by my belief in the humanities: that it is intrinsically worthwhile to study the human condition as humanists do, and that our work is useful--especially now.

Dr. Kaplan's research and teaching operate at intersections between the biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities. She specializes in the history of animal disease and public health. Her major project is a book on brucellosis in the United States that employs cross disciplinary research to examine human management of environments and non-human animals in the context of controlling human health and disease.

History of health sciences
History of agriculture

Multi-specie histories of infectious diseases 
Animal studies
Epidemiology

One Health

Holly M. Karibo is an Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the history of vice, labor, and sexuality in transnational urban spaces from the late-19th century to the present. Karibo is the author of the award-winning book Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland (The University of North Carolina Press 2015) and Rehab on the Range: Addiction and Incarceration in the American West (University of Texas Press 2024). She is also the co-editor of Border Policing: A History of Enforcement and Evasion in North America (University of Texas Press 2020).  Her research has also appeared in numerous journals, including Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Journal of the Southwest, Social History of Medicine, Left History, Histoire sociale/Social History, American Review of Canadian Studies, and Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Karibo is the recipient of over thirty fellowships, grants, and awards, and was appointed as a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in North American Studies (2024-2025) and the Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Simon Fraser University (2020-2021).

Research Interests: War and American Culture, Disabled Veterans, Zoos and War, American Studies, Modern US History, Disability Studies, Zoo Studies, Bodies and War

I am a historian of war and society in 20th-century America, with a special interest in the effects of war on American bodies, institutions, and ideas. 

To date, my research has led down two distinct, yet overlapping paths. 

The first path traces the history of disabled veterans in modern American society. In 2015, I published Paying With Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press), which examines changing attitudes toward disabled veterans in the decades surrounding World War I. In 2022, I co-edited the anthology Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (University of Massachusetts Press), and I continue to write and lecture widely on disabled veterans in the United States, both past and present. 

The second path examines how zoos —both in the United States and around the globe—have been transformed during periods of military conflict. 

I've visited zoos and archives in New York, London, Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, San Diego, Honolulu, Wroclaw (Poland), Prague, Chicago, and Berlin. This research culminated in my book World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. 

Going forward, I remain committed to researching war and society in American history. My most recent project, They Are Dead, And Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in February 2026. It is co-edited with Civil War historian Jennifer M. Murray. 

I am currently working on three book projects. 

The first is a book on alligators for Reaktion Books' "Animal" Series. 

The second is a true crime history about the intersection of murder, psychopathy, and deviance in World War II Mississippi.

And the third is a co-edited volume (with OSU faculty member Matthew Schauer) on animal trade and American empire in modern history. 

I am a historian of Native America and Early America who specializes in women's history, families, and education. I arrived at Oklahoma State University in 2020 and have been finushing my book manuscript, The Education of Mary Peters: Stockbridge Mohican Women and Community Survivance in Early America, which will be published in The University of Nebraska Press's award-winning Indigenous Education series in Spring 2027. I teach and mentor at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

My research has taken me from small-town archives in rural New York to major institutions like the New York Historical Society, National Archives, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, among others. I have a deep appreciation for the archivists and people in various communities I've met along the way who have shown interest in my project and taught me much about their past and present. I especially want to thank the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Historic Preservation and Cultural Affairs departments for their assistance and collaboration over the years. 

Jason Lavery is Regents Professor of History at Oklahoma State University and Adjunct Professor (Docent) of Church History of Finland and Scandinavia at Helsinki University. He is also a corresponding member of the Finnish Literature Society and a research member of the Finnish Historical Association. He has published three books and tens of articles on the history of Finland, Scandinavia, Germany, and the Baltic Sea Region. His most recent book is Reforming Finland: The Diocese of Turku in the Age of Gustav Vasa 1523-1560 (2017).  He is currently working on a book on the Reformation in Finland 1560-1611.

I am an associate professor of Native American and United States History at Oklahoma State University and I was previously a research fellow at Southern Methodist University's Clements Center for Southwest Studies. My first book, Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century (UNC, 2019), discusses the dynamic and consequential experiences Native American people shared throughout the twentieth century when moving to major cities for work, education, and social opportunities.

My second book, Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis (Liveright/W.W. Norton & Company, 2024), tells the extraordinary story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Kiowa/Comanche musician from Oklahoma City who played with Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Taj Mahal, and over one hundred more major artists before an untimely death. Davis amplified Indigenous peoples' important place in both the history of North American music and the transatlantic crosscurrents of popular music in the late twentieth century.

My third book, also under contract with Liveright/Norton, will be a comprehensive history of Native American peoples and incarceration from the colonial period to the present.

Alongside US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, I am co-curator of Natural Anthem: Jesse Ed Davis, which opened at the Bob Dylan Center (Tulsa, OK) in November 2024. This is the first ever museum exhibit dedicated to the important Indigenous musician from Oklahoma.

Additionally, I am co-producer of Jesse Ed Davis, Tomorrow May Not Be Your Day, an archival 2LP set of seventeen unissued Jesse Ed Davis songs released by Warner Music/Rhino/Real Gone Music in November 2024.

I have also published on the subjects of Indigenous Dallas, Indigenous Chicago, and Indigenous incarceration.

In my personal life, I enjoy time with my family and playing music.

Research Interests:

Native American history, United States history, Music history

Introduction                                                                                                                              

Rev. Dr. Matthew J. Pereira (B.A., University of Washington; M.Div., Fuller Theological Seminary; S.T.M., Union Theological Seminary; M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University) is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University, where he primarily teaches courses in the Religious Studies program. In 2025, he received the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in General Education Teaching Award, recognizing his commitment to innovative and impactful undergraduate teaching. Prior to joining Oklahoma State University in the fall of 2019, Dr. Pereira served as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, CA) from 2013 to 2019.

Research Interests                                                                                                                      

Dr. Pereira is a historian of Christianity specializing in the period from the fourth through the seventh centuries (Late Antiquity). His research focuses on the reception and interpretation of Christian traditions during this formative era. He is currently completing a manuscript that offers a historical and textual analysis of the writings of Abbot Maxentius and the Scythian monks, produced in the first half of the sixth century. More broadly, Dr. Pereira’s scholarship examines major theological debates across both the Latin (Western) and Greek (Eastern) Christian traditions. His published work engages a wide range of figures in the history of Christian thought, including Origen of Alexandria (185–253), Augustine of Hippo (354–436), Prosper of Aquitaine (390–455), Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 376–444), Faustus of Riez (ca. 410–ca. 490), Niketas Stethatos (ca. 1005–1090), John Calvin (1509–1564), and Michael Servetus (d. 1553).

Recent Publications                                                                                                     

“Pelagianism in the Sixth to Eighth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Pelagian Controversy, eds. Anthony Dupont, Giulio Malavasi, and Brian Matz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 473–486.

Book Review of Ionuț Holubeanu, Christianity in Roman Scythia: Ecclesiastical Organization and Monasticism (Fourth to Seventh Centuries), East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450, vol. 90, in Religious Studies Review 51.1 (March 2025): 172–173.

Book Review of Miguel Escobar, The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today, in Religious Studies Review 50.3 (September 2024): 613–614

Works in Progress                                                                                                               

Journal article titled: “Roma locuta, causa finita: Hormisdas and the Scythian Monks,”

Monograph titled Frontier Theologians: The Scythian Monks and the Reshaping of the Christian Tradition.

Service and Outreach                                                                                                                                                          

Dr. Pereira currently serves as Vice President and Scholarship Chair of the Hispanic Latino Faculty and Staff Association (HLFSA) at Oklahoma State University. He is also the founder of the Religious Studies Student Organization, where he continues to serve as co-faculty advisor. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 2016, Dr. Pereira is a Teaching Elder in the Cimarron Presbytery (Oklahoma). He, his wife Malú, and their daugther Julieta are grateful to be part of the beloved community at First Presbyterian Church in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Over the years, Dr. Pereira has regularly preached (pulpit supply) and taught adult education courses in churches in Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles, and now Oklahoma.

Prof. Schauer teaches classes in British, European, and World History. His research focuses on the exchange of imperial knowledge across colonial boundaries in Southeast Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His book project, tentatively titled: Shaping Imperial Subjects: Social Engineering, Exchange, and Ethnology in British Malaya examines how administrators in British Malaya used amateur ethnological knowledge and policy models from adjacent colonies to inform their imperial educational policies. These educational systems were used in Malaya as part of larger programs of social engineering that the British hoped would help the colony achieve increased economic growth and political stability. His project covers topics such as: colonial museums, Western domestic education for Malay girls, imperial ideas concerning public health and nutrition, linguistic training, agricultural education, and conceptions of "native heritage" in handiworks education.

Beyond his book project, he is working on a project examining American natural specimen collectors/animal trappers in Southeast Asia and the marketing of popular American and British explorers in the early 20th century such as Roy Chapman Andrews, Carveth Wells, and Martin and Osa Johnson. 

Research Interests:

Imperialism, Southeast Asia, England, British History, British Empire, History of Museums, History of Anthropology, History of Exploration and Travel, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines

Prof. Schauer received the Regents' Distinguished Teaching Award in 2023.

My work focuses on the history of Early Mesopotamia in the late third millennium B.C., particularly on cuneiform tablets from a period called the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004 B.C.). I have written books on taxation and women in religion, as well as a number of articles on various topics, such as economic history, diplomacy and religion.

Research Interests:

The Ancient Near East
Assyriology
Sumerology
Economic History
Women in History
Taxation

Salinity and Water Problems in Antiquity
Ancient Calendars