Faculty

Katrina Olds is Professor and Chair of History at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches undergraduates a broad range of topics in history and the humanities. Her first monograph, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (Yale, 2015) analyzed the intellectual, cultural, and political effects of a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit’s forged historical texts, and was recognized by the American Catholic Historical Association with its John Gilmary Shea Prize. Her...

Melissa S. Dale has served as Executive Director of the Center for Asia Pacific Studies since August 2012.

Prior to joining the faculty and staff at USF, she served as Associate Director of International Relations at the University of California, Berkeley (Nov. 2011 – Aug. 2012) where she worked in the areas of international relations and development for the entire campus with a particular focus on prospect development and stewardship for leadership and major gifts from the Asia-Pacific...

Candice Harrison joined the department in Fall 2008 after completing her PhD at Emory University. Her teaching interests span the eras of colonial and nineteenth century U.S. history, and include the subjects of economic and labor history, African American history, American popular culture, and comparative race and slavery in the Atlantic World.

Recently, Dr. Harrison received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to support her current book manuscript entitled "Democratizing the Market...

Heather Hoag, PhD, specializes in African environmental history with an emphasis in river history, hydropower development, and development planning. Her teaching interests include African history (with a specialization in the colonial period), history of South Africa, environmental history, and food history.

Professor Hoag's research has focused on the changing values of African rivers. Her book, Developing the Rivers of East and West Africa: An Environmental History, examines from a...

Julio Moreno is a professor of history and affiliated engineering faculty at the University of San Francisco. Born in the Salvadoran countryside, Professor Moreno fled his country's civil war at the age of fourteen and navigated the US educational system as an undocumented immigrant. He is the recipient of distinguished awards that include research fellowships on the globalization of U.S. business, technology, and diplomacy at the Library of Congress and the Institute for Historical Studies at...

Elliot Neaman received a BA in sociology from the University of British Columbia in 1979, an MA in history and philosophy from the Freie Universität in Berlin in 1985, and his PhD in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. His areas of specialization are Modern Germany, The Holocaust, Late Modern Intellectual History, post 1945 Global History, European Diplomatic & Economic History, and theory and methodology of the historical sciences. His first book on the German writer...

Michael Edward Stanfield, PhD 1992, is an historian of modern Latin America, focusing on topics in the social and cultural history of various South American nations. A Spanish translation of his first book, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933 (UNM Press, 1998), was published by Ediciones Abya-Yala, titled Caucho, conflicto, y cultura en la Amazonía Noroeste: Colombia, Ecuador, y Perú en el Putumayo, Caquetá, Napo, 1850-1933, in 2009. The...

Taymiya R. Zaman joined the University of San Francisco in 2007. Her area of research expertise is Mughal India and her current research interests include historical memory in South Asia, the interconnectedness of life writing and history, and the transition from subjects to citizens in the Islamicate world. She has designed the History Department's "Islamic World" emphasis and teaches courses on the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires and the making of modern South Asia and the Middle East...

James Zarsadiaz is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. He specializes in United States history, particularly urban and suburban history and Asian American history. James currently sits on the board of the Association for Asian American Studies. Prof. Zarsadiaz was a fellow at both the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and Asian Pacific American Center. Prior to entering academia, James worked in the U.S. House of...

Dr. Benjamin Daniels area of expertise is comparative research on the history, archaeology, and cultures of Early China, Pharaonic Egypt, and ancient Rome.  He especially is interested in the blurring of real and imagined traditions in early historiography, and how stories and myths from early China are reworked and deployed in later imperial and modern texts. He is currently writing a book-length history of the pre-Qin “barbarian” (non-Zhou) kingdoms of Wu and Yue (6th-4th centuries BCE).

Jackson earned a BA in Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures Production at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an MA in Gender in History from San Francisco State University, and, most recently, in December 2022, a PhD in US History, with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies, from UC Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, "Twenty-Four Hour Party People: A Transnational History of Communist Bodies, 1919-1943," focuses on the radical body in early 20th-century United States and Great...

Devin Leigh is a historian of the Atlantic World who studies connections between the Caribbean, West Africa, and Great Britain in the eighteenth century. His research has appeared in a number of academic journals, including Atlantic Studies, the Journal of Caribbean History, and History in Africa. In addition to teaching at USF, he teaches Global Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sohini is a specialist of South Asian History, World History, and Comparative Migration History. She received her PhD in history from University of Illinois at Chicago in 2023. She has completed her MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India (2014), MA in history from University of Calcutta (2010), Kolkata, and BA from Presidency College (2008), Kolkata, India. Along with presenting her research at multiple conferences, such as the Annual Conference on South Asia at...

Chris O'Sullivan received his BA from UC Berkeley and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, University of London. He is the recipient of the 2013 Innovations in Teaching Award and the 2011 Distinguished Teaching Award and has been a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Jordan. He is the author of several books including the forthcoming Agent of Manifest Destiny: Thomas Oliver Larkin and American Conquest of California and others including Harry Hopkins: FDR's Envoy to...

Bernard von Bothmer received a BA with honors from Brown University, an MA from Stanford University, and a PhD from Indiana University. He received USF's 2010 Distinguished Lecturer Award for Excellence in Teaching and USF's 2016 Distinguished Adjunct Teaching Award. He has reviewed books for The Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Civil War History, The Journal of Southern History, History News Network, and Civil War Book Review, and many others. He is the author of Framing...

Anthony D. (Tony) Fels, Professor Emeritus of History, is a social and religious historian of the United States. At USF he taught US history, historical methods, US religious history, US racial and ethnic history, Native American history, American Revolution, Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. He chaired the History Department in 1997-2000 and 2003-2006, retiring from teaching in 2018. His book on the Salem witch hunt came out in 2018, and he has recently returned to the subject...

Andrew Heinze was Professor of American History and Director of the Swig Judaic Studies program at USF. A recipient of the Ignatian Faculty Service Award, he loved teaching and he published extensively. Andy authored the books Adapting to Abundance and Jews and the American Soul, which was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Publishers Weekly choice for “Best Books of 2004.” For his expertise in the history of race, immigration, ethnicity and popular culture, he was selected as...

Kathryn Nasstrom teaches in the U.S. field and specializes in civil rights history, women’s history, oral history, and memory & narrative studies. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993 and has been at USF since 1994.

She is the author of Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Cornell University Press, 2000), and she has published in the Journal of American History and the Oral History...

M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. is the Director and Associate Professor at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History. He is also Fellow of East Asian Studies at Campion Hall, at the University of Oxford. He teaches courses in both early modern Japanese and global history, including topics in East Asian and European thought. His main research and teaching interests include topics in Japanese samurai history, the era of European maritime empires and expansion into Asia (15^th-18^th centuri...