Richard A. Bailey, PhD
Much of Richard’s scholarship, such as his book, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (Oxford University Press, 2011), has focused on the intersections of religious convictions and racial constructions in early America. In this vein, he has contributed an essay to the recently-released Oxford Handbook on Race and Religion in American History edited by Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey. While one current major project continues to focus on this time and space, Richard has recently spent a great deal of his research and writing focusing on the life and the writings of the Kentucky author, farmer, and activist Wendell Berry.
David Devereux, PhD
Dr. Devereux’s scholarship concerns the relationship between the process of decolonization and the Cold War. His book, entitled The Formulation of British Defense Policy Towards the Middle East 1948-1956, was published by Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press in 1990. He has published numerous articles in many journals on topics such as British civil aviation, the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and Britain in the Far East. He is currently working on the British withdrawal from East of Suez in the 1960s. He has presented at dozens of conferences over the years and is an ongoing member of the New York State Association of European Historians (for which he served a term as president) and the Trans-Atlantic Studies Association.
Bruce Dierenfield, PhD
Dierenfield has published many scholarly articles and five books. His subjects have addressed the civil rights movement, church & state issues, the U.S. Supreme Court, national politics, energy policy, and school prayer. His latest book is A History of African-American Leadership, which contains chapters on W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama. He is currently conducting research for two books—the 1955 murder of a African-American minister leading a voting rights campaign in the Mississippi Delta and a U.S. Supreme Court case involving a deaf student attending a Catholic school in Arizona.
Julie Gibert, PhD
Julie Gibert holds an AB from Davidson College and MA and PhD degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches courses on European history with particular focus on Britain and Ireland. Recent courses include “The British Monarchy,” “Britain’s Global Empire,” “Episodes in Everyday Life,” and “The History of Food.” She has published and presented papers on a variety of topics including women’s education, the changing role of domestic service in British home life, and the depiction of British society in film and television. Her current research uses the papers of writer Vera Brittain to study life in interwar Britain. She is also working on an examination of how history students develop skills in oral communication. Dr. Gibert was a member of the American Historical Association’s Tuning Project, in which faculty members from throughout the US cooperated to articulate the core goals of historical study and to define the skills students develop through completing a degree in history.
René de la Pedraja, PhD
René De la Pedraja, PhD has been at Canisius University since 1989. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1977. Throughout his life he has been passionately concerned with Latin America and its many problems. He has spent over two decades living in Latin America, primarily in Colombia and Cuba. Although his research requires considerable travel, he always looks forward to visiting many interesting places in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. He is particularly fond of large cities with their culture and rich history. He loves to explore the vast collections of famous museums. Whether traveling or at home, he appreciates architecture and likes to visit historic houses. Hollywood has been very effective in diminishing his earlier interest in movies.
Reading books and unpublished documents remain his favorite pursuits. He still has not exhausted the trove of diplomatic reports in Wikileaks. He is a prolific writer who has published 11 books and many articles. His most recent book is The United States and the Armed Forces of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, 2000-2014. Students in his courses will read some of his books, in particular his trilogy on Wars of Latin America 1899-2013 (3 volumes).
Nancy J. Rosenbloom, PhD
Dr. Rosenbloom has published a number of articles on American film during the first decades of the twentieth century, including “Between Reform and Regulation: The Struggle over Film Censorship in Progressive America, 1909-1922,” Film History: An International Journal (December, 1987), and most recently “From Greenwich Village to Hollywood: The Literary Apprenticeship of Sonya Levien,” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era (January, 2015). She is also the author of Women in American History Since 1880, A Documentary Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, February 2010). She is currently writing an article on George Eastman and housing reform in Rochester in the 1910s.