Bridget Ford (2006)
Professor and Department Chair
B.A., Barnard College, Columbia University, Ph.D., University of California, Davis
Professor Ford's research brings the insights of cultural history to the study of the Civil War era in the United States. Her book, Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2016. Recently, she has extensively researched how college students learn history. In collaboration with history faculty from Cal State LA, San Jose State, and Fresno State, she published an article in the Journal of American History in 2020 entitled "Beyond Big Data: Teaching Introductory U.S. History in the Age of Student Success." She continues to research in this area with colleagues from across the California State University.
Professor Ford has a forthcoming (2021) preface to her mother's feminist scholarship and discussion of her family's unusual dedication to the study of history and practice of law in California Legal History, a publication of the California Supreme Court Historical Society. She has also published scholarship in the Journal of Southern History. Professor Ford currently teaches a range of BA and MA courses on the Civil War era and historical writing and research.
Anna Rose Alexander (2016)
Associate Professor
B.A., California State University, Chico, M.A. and Ph.D., University of Arizona
Professor Alexander specializes in Latin American, public, and environmental history with thematic interests in the histories of technology, science, and medicine. She initially became interested in Latin America while earning her B.A. from Chico State, and later went on to receive her M.A. in Latin American Studies and Ph.D. in History from the University of Arizona. In 2016 the University of Pittsburgh Press published her first book, entitled City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910. She has published articles in Urban History and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and is currently working on a second book about a petroleum explosion that occurred outside of Mexico City in 1984. In addition, she is the co-editor of Problems in Modern Latin American History, 5th ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Professor Alexander teaches courses in the fields of Latin American history, the history of sustainability, and public history. She is also a founder and lead faculty advisor for the student journal East Bay Historia . In 2021, Professor Alexander won the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences Faculty Excellence Award.
Roger Baldwin (1995)
Lecturer
B.A., University of Texas, Austin; M.A., University of California, Berkeley
- Email: roger.baldwin@csueastbay.edu
Professor Roger Baldwin is an experienced lecturer at Cal State East Bay, regularly teaching many sections of our introductory U.S. history courses to incoming first-year students. He is a favorite professor among students, who appreciate his clarity and professionalism. Professor Baldwin's instructional success is due in no small measure to the passion he brings to his courses. As one student recently attested, Professor Baldwin "loves the subject he teaches, which means he gets very into the lectures, which makes it fun to learn from him." He is an avid reader of new scholarship, which he regularly introduces into his teaching. Professor Baldwin's 8AM in-person classes always have waitlists.
Gregory Brueck (2011)
Lecturer
B.A., Reed College, M.A., San Francisco State University, Ph.D., University of California, Davis
A specialist in conflicting Indigenous and settler land uses in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, Professor Brueck earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis in 2012, completing a dissertation entitled "Breaking the Plains: Indians, Settlers, and Reformers in the Oklahoma Land Rush." He has taught a range of courses at Cal State East Bay, both in our major degree and General Education programs. He is now focused on modern US history, with our introductory courses satisfying the CSU American Institutions requirement, and HIST 388, "US and California Environmental History." HIST 388 is now part of Cal State East Bay's new General Education Minor in Sustainability.
Professor Brueck has participated extensively in the design and support of our BA program in history, most recently serving on our Faculty Teaching Collaborative, where we reconceptualized our program learning outcomes. He has also participated in a number of significant professional development programs at East Bay, including in online and hybrid course development and support for first-generation students.
Edward (Ted) Sortwell Clement, Jr. (2021)
Lecturer
B.A., University of Vermont, and J.D., Vermont Law School
- Email: ted.clement@csueastbay.edu
Since 2015, Professor Ted Clement has served as the executive director of Save Mount Diablo, a land trust dedicated to preserving the Mount Diablo region, an irreplaceable natural resource of the San Francisco Bay Area and of California. As part of Save Mount Diablo's most recent Strategic Plan, Professor Clement created a Climate Action Plan for carbon footprint reduction, education, and advocacy. He also collaborates with many state and local park and open space agencies, and has been deeply involved in a number of educational and advocacy efforts. Save Mount Diablo won the California Nonprofit of the Year Award in 2016 for Assembly District 16. Today, more than 50 parks and preserves surround Mount Diablo, conserving natural lands and wildlife habitats.
At Cal State East Bay, Professor Clement will teach a career-focused lab course to assist History majors in understanding the history of land conservation as a dynamic process of needed change over time, while connecting the original native stewards of the land to present and future stewards across time. He will especially assist our Department in providing career pathways for History majors in our Sustainability and Modernization concentration.
Jason Daniels (2020)
Associate Professor (on sabbatical in Fall 2024)
B.A. and M.A., University of Florida; Ph.D., University of Warwick (U.K.)
- Email: jason.daniels@csueastbay.edu
Professor Daniels holds the Ph.D. in History from the University of Warwick, where he studied with Dr. Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation. Professor Daniels' scholarship upends conventional understandings of early America as a remote colonial outpost of Great Britain; rather, in his telling, early America is a dynamic, fluid zone of interaction between indigenous peoples and diverse free and unfree groups from across the Atlantic world. Professor Daniels asks historians to “imagine a grittier and more organic Atlantic world constructed from the strands of individual lives and the repercussions of their actions rather than an Atlantic world engineered from above.” He has published articles in the Journal of Caribbean History, Florida Historical Quarterly, and Pennsylvania History. A forthcoming study, Early American Captivity: Jonathan Dickinson's Journal and God's Protecting Providence, is co-authored with Amy Turner Bushnell.
At Cal State East Bay, Professor Daniels' classes invite students "to engage with less standard narratives and viewpoints" and "to appreciate, consider, and debate how historians of the past (and present) conceived of the methods that shape the discipline." He teaches courses in early America and the Caribbean in both the BA and MA programs. In the last year, he has helped us reconceive our historiography requirement for History majors. In 2022-2023, Professor Daniels will serve as the Department of History Scholarship Committee Chair.
Benjamin Feldman (2020)
Lecturer
B.A., Kenyon College, Single Subject Credential in Social Science (CLAAD), Sonoma State University, M.A. and Ph.D., Georgetown University
A specialist in modern U.S. history and the global 1960s, Professor Feldman completed his dissertation, "Liberation from the Affluent Society: The Role of the Third World in Post-War American Political Thought," under the direction of Michael Kazin at Georgetown University. He has several forthcoming articles in the Encyclopedia of the American Left, 3rd ed. His scholarship has also appeared in Critical Historical Studies and Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology. To complete his dissertation, Professor Feldman won several research fellowships to work at Harvard University's Houghton Library, the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison Libraries.
At Cal State East Bay, he teaches introductory U.S. history and courses on Modern American Thought and Writing California Political Histories. As a credentialed middle and high school teacher, Professor Feldman also teaches HIST 404, our Introduction to Teaching History course. Along with Professor Ford and other CSU faculty, he is currently researching the student learning experience in introductory US history courses.
Vahid Fozdar (2005)
Associate Professor
B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Professor Fozdar is a historian of modern South Asia and colonialism. He completed his doctoral work on the role of Freemasons in the British Empire in India and in the Indian nationalist movement. Professor Fozdar's article, "Imperial Brothers, Imperial Partners: Indian Freemasons, Race, Kinship, and Networking in the British Empire and Beyond," was published as a chapter in the anthology, Decentering Empire: Britain, India, and the Transcolonial World (Orient Longman Press, 2006). Another article, "That Grand Primeval and Fundamental Religion: The Transformation of Freemasonry into an Imperial Cult," appeared in the Journal of World History. He recently presented his work-in-progress, “Crafting the Great Game: Freemasonry as a Mask of Conquest?” at the 2019 meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association Conference.
Professor Fozdar is also working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, "The Lodge in the Raj: Freemasonry, Empire, and Nationalism in India, 1840-1925." Professor Fozdar's other areas of scholarly interest include the history of the Islamic world, world history, and comparative religions. He is currently teaching the department's courses in the history of South Asia, the Middle East, and the modern world.
Samantha Francois (2000)
Lecturer
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., University of California, Davis
Professor Francois is a specialist in twentieth-century US history. Her dissertation, completed at UC Davis with renowned historians Ruth Rosen, Kathy Olmsted, and Kathy Peiss, is entitled, "Girls with Influence: Selling Consumerism to Teenage Girls, 1940-1960." Professor Francois regularly teaches the introductory US history survey course, fulfilling the CSU American Institutions requirement, and courses in modern US history and gender studies. She also teaches a challenging course on historical writing for our majors. A member of our Faculty Teaching Collaborative, Professor Francois has helped to define our major degree program goals for a new era. She has participated in CSU-wide professional development programs related to course design, online teaching, and team-based learning, and has shared the results of her thinking about pedagogy at conferences. She is an active member of the Western Association of Women Historians.
Mary Ann Irwin (1996)
Lecturer
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, M.A., San Francisco State University
- Email: maryann.irwin@csueastbay.edu
Since 2020, Professor Irwin has served as the editor of California History, the leading journal of historical writing about California, published by the University of California Press. Along with Richard Rice, William Bullough, Richard Orsi, Michael Magliari, and Cecilia Tsu, she is the author of The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, 5th ed. (2020). She has two forthcoming articles on the history of women in nineteenth-century San Francisco, one of which will appear in the Pacific Historical Review. Professor Irwin also contributes to leading professional organizations. She is currently the Public History Representative to the Council of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and serves on the Committee on the Status of Women in the Historical Profession, within the Organization of American Historians.
At Cal State East Bay, she has participated extensively in recent anti-racist faculty training efforts, including a Faculty Learning Community devoted to "Culturally Responsive & Anti-Racist Teaching." While teaching the California history courses at Cal State East Bay, Professor Irwin actively mentors a number of M.A. students and has connected students to curators, archivists, and historians working in cultural organizations and institutions across the state.
Linda L. Ivey (2006)
Professor (currently serving as Interim Associate Dean, College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences)
B.A., Trinity College (CT), Ph.D., Georgetown University
Professor Ivey specializes in ethnicity, immigration and environmental U.S. history, with an emphasis on California. In 2020, Professor Ivey published an article, “Watsonville Riots of 1930” in Political Violence in America: Historical Flashpoints and Modern-Day Trends (ABC-CLIO, 2020), and a primary source reader, Documents of Japanese American Internment: Eyewitness to History, with Kevin W. Kaatz (ABC-CLIO, 2020). She is also the co-author of Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps with Kevin Kaatz (Praeger, 2017). Additional publications include “Ethnicity in the Land: Lost Stories in California Agriculture” in Agricultural History (2007); “Apples and Experts: Evolving Notions of Sustainable Agriculture” in Global Environment (2014); “Protecting the People’s Mountain: Hiking and the Roots of Environmentalism in Marin County” in Sports in the Bay Area: Golden Gate Athletics, Recreation and Community (University of Arkansas Press, 2017); and “Riotous Environments: Filipino Immigrants in the Fields of California” in An Environmental History of Modern Migrations (Routledge Press, 2017).
Professor Ivey teaches courses in the history of California and the West, as well as in environmental, immigration, and public history. Through her career at East Bay, she has been a faculty leader in the Academic Senate, chairing the Faculty Affairs Committee and serving on the Executive Committee. In 2023-2024, Professor Ivey serves as the Interim Associate Dean for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences.
Kevin Kaatz (2014)
Professor (Director of General Education, 2022-2025)
B.S. and B.A., University of Michigan, M.A. Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley and Ph.D. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Professor Kaatz specializes in Roman history and digital humanities, and in particular, early Christianity. He is interested in how and why people convert and how theology is created. He completed his Ph.D. in Ancient History at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, where he wrote a dissertation examining Augustine's writings. Most recently, Professor Kaatz has co-edited and co-written studies with Cal State East Bay colleagues and students, including Documents of Japanese American Internment: Eyewitness to History (ABC-CLIO, 2020) with Professor Linda Ivey; The Roman World: Republic to Empire (Cognella, 2019), with MA degree candidate Randy Utz. Also with Professor Linda Ivey, Professor Kaatz published Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in WWII Internment Camps (Praeger, 2017). This study was selected as "Top Academic Title" by Choice in 2017. In addition, Professor Kaatz's Documents of the Rise of Christianity: Eyewitness to History (ABC-CLIO), appeared in 2018.
Professor Kaatz has received many awards and grants for his teaching and is a national expert in online teaching. He teaches a wide range of courses in the history of the ancient world, digital history, and sustainability. He has working knowledge of Classical Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Coptic, Latin, and Syriac languages. In Fall 2022, Professor Kaatz began a term as the Director of the General Education program at Cal State East Bay. He will serve in this capacity until 2025.
Benjamin Klein (2006)
Lecturer
B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz, A.M. and Ph.D., Brown University
Professor Klein is a cultural historian with broad geographical, disciplinary, and temporal interests. With support from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young and the New Mexico Council on Photography, he edited and contributed to Irwin Klein and the New Settlers: Photographs of Counterculture in New Mexico (2016), which received the Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association. He has published articles in British and American history. At Cal State East Bay, Professor Klein teaches courses in European and world history. In a popular course entitled “Baseball in the United States and the Caribbean," Professor Klein emphasize diversity and intersectionality. He has organized campus events, including a lecture by the novelist Michael David Lukas, a conversation with journalist Jason Turbow, a roundtable discussion to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the A’s in Oakland, featuring Vida Blue, who received the Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Award in the American League in 1971, and screenings of the documentary “Ghost Town to Havana.”
Professor Klein has participated in faculty learning communities designed to support first-generation students. He has earned two commendations for exceptional levels of service to Cal State East Bay students. In 2020, the University Faculty awarded Professor Klein the Outstanding Lecturer award.
Elizabeth McGuire (2015)
Associate Professor and Single Subject Matter Preparation Program Advisor
A.B., Harvard University; M.A., Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Study; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Professor McGuire is a historian of global communism, focusing on cross-cultural human experiences and networks that arose in connection with the Soviet-backed transnational communist movement. Her first book, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution, was published in 2017 by Oxford University Press. It’s about personal relationships between Russian and Chinese revolutionaries, against the dramatic backdrop of shifting geopolitics.
She is now writing a second book, Communist Neverland: History of an International Children’s Home, 1933-2013, and learning Farsi in preparation for a third, The Afghan Next Door. Before coming to East Bay, she was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She loves literature and speaks Russian, French, and Chinese.
Kim Nalley (2021)
Lecturer
B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
- Email: kim.nalley@csueastbay.edu
A specialist in US history and Late Modern Europe, with an emphasis on cultural, transnational, globalization, civil rights, women’s and Black history, Professor Nalley completed her dissertation in 2021 under renowned scholars Waldo Martin and Tyler Stovall. Entitled, "GI Jazz: African Americans as Occupiers and Artists in Post-World War II Germany," Professor Nalley's study draws extensively upon oral history and musical/musicological analyses to investigate the differing ideas of freedom and democracy among African American GIs and German audiences. Nalley's dissertation reveals a previously unresearched circuit of clubs on and around military bases, and a Black jazz scene comparable to the Black expatriate jazz scene that grew in France after World War I. She has presented her scholarship on US history and jazz and music history throughout the Bay Area, including at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, the California Jazz Conservatory, and Google.
Professor Nalley published a guide to thinking about Nina Simone, "The Show Must Go On: Kim Nalley on Nina Simone & Mississippi Goddamn," in 2020. Her paper "Losing Its Grease: Black Cultural Politics and the Globalization of Jazz'' was published in Democracy and Difference and she delivered a Keynote "I, Too, Sing America: Freedom and Democracy in Jazz" for the 21st AISNA Conference in Trento, Italy.
Professor Nalley is also a professional jazz singer. At Cal State East Bay, she will be teaching US and California history through "material [that] strives to be inclusive of underrepresented voices in history."
Joseph Nejad-Duong (2014)
Lecturer
B.A., Gonzaga University, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, and Single Subject Credential in Social Science, Loyola Marymount University
- Email: joseph.duong@csueastbay.edu
Professor Duong specializes in the history of California and cultural history. Under the direction of Waldo Martin, at Berkeley, Professor Duong completed his dissertation, entitled "California Hard Core: A History of the California Pornographic Film Industry, 1967-1978." A lecturer at Cal State East Bay from 2014, Professor Duong regularly teaches HIST 382, "California and the World," which he subtitles, "From the Ghost of Ishi to the New Right." Inviting students to consider California "as a place and a process," he focuses on three themes in this course: California as a Garden of Eden; California as a multi-ethno-racial frontier; and California as a bellwether for the nation.
Currently a tenured faculty member at Fremont High School, in the Oakland Unified School District, Professor Duong has been instrumental in establishing our History Department's first teaching internship for prospective middle and high school history teachers. Launching in Fall 2021, a Cal State East Bay History major will work one day per week in two of Professor Duong's 11th grade history classes, facilitating and leading discussion and activities.
Nancy Park (2007)
Lecturer
B.A., Georgetown University, M.A. and Ph.D., Harvard University
- Email: nancy.park@csueastbay.edu
A specialist in imperial Chinese legal history, Professor Park teaches a range of courses on China, Japan and Korea. Her research focuses on corruption, judicial torture, and official wrongdoing, drawing on original legal case records from central archives in China. Recent publications include “Officials and Imperial Chinese Justice: Public and Private Wrongdoing in Qing Law,” T’oung Pao 106 (2020), 661-713; “The Qing Dynasty (post-1800),” Routledge Handbook of Imperial Chinese History, edited by Victor Cunrui Xiong and Kenneth Hammond (Routledge, 2018); and “Unofficial Perspectives on Torture in Ming and Qing China,” Late Imperial China 37.1 (2016), 17-54. She is a major contributor to the recently-published Ricci Dictionary of Chinese Law, Chinese-English, French/Dictionnaire Ricci du droit chinois, chinois-anglais, français, edited by Hubert Bazin (Leiden: Brill, 2020) and Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography, edited by Pierre-Étienne Will (Leiden: Brill, 2020). She serves on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Chinese Legal History and the Legalizing Space in China project team and has presented her research at the Chinese People's University and Beijing University (in Chinese), the Association for Asian Studies, the University of Chicago, Yale University, École des Hautes Études Science Sociales (Paris), and Institut d'Asie Orientale (IAO, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon). Professor Park has participated in four faculty learning communities at Cal State East Bay, and her courses enjoy certification for quality online teaching.
Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda (2022)
Assistant Professor of History
Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda is an Ethnic Studies-trained historian who specializes in the study of comparative/relational racialization, and anti-racist and decolonial social movements. The political and intellectual questions Michael asks were nurtured during his time as a participant and later co-facilitator of the Tyree Scott Freedom School, a week-long political education program for Seattle youth. Michael draws upon his past experiences as a youth organizer to develop a research and teaching agenda that examines how racialized subjects of U.S. Empire have both questioned and crossed racial boundaries. As a new faculty member in CSUEB’s Department of History, Michael will be completing his current book manuscript, No Separate Peace: Black and Filipinx Workers and the Labor of Solidarity in the Pacific Northwest, under contract with the University of Washington Press. This study examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Filipinx cannery workers in Alaska and Black construction workers in Seattle between the 1970s and the early 2000s. Additionally, Michael looks forward to developing curriculum at CSUEB that places the concerns of social movements, from prison and border abolitionists to grassroots organizers building local solidarity economies, at the center of the study of U.S. and global history.
Darryl Stallworth (2021)
Lecturer
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, and J.D., School of Law, University of California, Davis
An Alameda County Deputy District Attorney for 15 years between 1992 and 2007, Professor Stallworth is currently in private practice focusing on criminal defense. During his time as a prosecutor he tried over 60 cases, conducted over 100 law & motion hearings, 250 preliminary hearings and resolved over 10,000 cases. He has lectured in Brazil, Malaysia, India, & Turkey on effective case resolution. He is a member of a number of professional associations, including the California Association of Black Lawyers. He belongs to the Alameda County Bar Association, the Charles Houston Bar Association, and state and national bar associations. In 2014, he was named the Distinguished Lawyer of the Year in Oakland. Professor Stallworth also serves as a mentor to the Black Pre-Law Society at UC Berkeley. At Cal State East Bay, Professor Stallworth will teach career-focused lab courses on careers in law for History majors. He will especially assist our Department in providing career pathways for History majors in our Social Justice and Citizenships concentration.
Casey Sullivan (2018)
Lecturer
B.A., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, M.A., School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D., University of California, Davis
Professor Sullivan is an expert in the history of modern political conservatism. His dissertation, completed at UC Davis, is entitled, "Against the Tendencies of the Times: The Republican Party and the Roots of Modern Conservatism, 1900-1930." He has an article published in the Journal of Policy History on the origins of the modern Republican Party in California. In 2022, Bloomsbury Press will publish A History of the Early Modern World, 1450-1750, which Professor Sullivan co-authored with John C. Corbally. Professor Sullivan has been an analyst and researcher for consulting firms, particularly on the subject of U.S. and China bilateral trade.
At Cal State East Bay, he teaches HIST 382, California and the World, and HIST 479, World War II: Global Warfront, Local Homefront. In Fall 2021, Professor Sullivan's HIST 479 students are working on public history exhibits examining the Pacific War and the East Bay region's wartime experiences at the Concord Campus. He has also taught in the M.A. program, drawing on his expertise in modern political history and the Cold War.
Jessica Weiss (1999)
Professor
B.A., M.A., and PhD., University of California, Berkeley
Professor Weiss served as Director of the Office of Faculty Development/Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching from 2013 to 2021. In the Department of History, she teaches courses in the history of women in America, the history of the American family, and Cold War America. Her book, To Have and To Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2000 and received the 2001 Sierra Prize for best book from the Western Association of Women Historians. Her article, “’Don’t Knock Motherhood': Attitudes Toward Domesticity and Feminism in Responses to Friedan’s Fraud of Femininity” was published in Kathleen Donohue’s edited collection, Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America (2012) and excerpted in the Norton critical edition of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (2013). Her current research explores responses to the modern feminist movement from the 1950s to the 1980s and California women's history, as well as topics in family history.