On November 21-22 U-M History will continue its public engagement and career diversity work with "U-M History in the Public Service: A Vision for the Humanities PhD in the 21st Century," a national conference that will help chart a new path for humanities PhDs. 

Over the past three years, U-M History has partnered with ProQuest for embedded, semester-long PhD student internships; developed innovative course designs like HistoryLabs; and created a database of U-M History PhD alumni stretching back to the 1970s.

This conference is a debut for these programs, but also an opportunity to talk with PhD alumni and colleagues about how to expand, improve, and implement our goals.

Featuring PhD alumni who currently operate in non-academic contexts—media companies and museums, journalism and publishing, government jobs and policy centers, foundations and non-profits—and those who work on public-facing projects in academic settings, the conference will explore the array of career possibilities for humanities doctorates.

We invite faculty, graduate students, PhD alumni, and administrators to join us on campus in November. And we look forward to reconnecting with many more of our remarkable U-M History graduates in the weeks and months to come. This conference is just a starting point as we leverage our greatest resource: our alumni network.

Conference Panelists

(pictured above, left to right, from top row)

Jacqueline Antonovich
Jacqueline Antonovich is an assistant professor at Muhlenberg College where she specializes in the history of medicine, health, and politics in the United States. She is also the co-founder and executive editor of Nursing Clio, a peer-reviewed blog project that ties historical scholarship to present-day issues related to gender, health, and medicine.

Adrian Burgos, Jr.
Adrian Burgos, Jr. is a professor of history and the interim director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on US Latino history, African American history, urban history, and sports history. He has also been centrally involved in multiple film documentaries and electronic publications related to the cultures of Latin American/Latinx baseball.

Tamar Carroll
Tamar Carroll is associate professor and chair, Department of History, Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the author of Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism, co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election, and co-curator of “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”: New York City, 1980-2000.

N.D.B. Connolly
N.D.B. Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on racism, capitalism, politics, cities, and migration in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to writing op-eds for the New York Times and Washington Post, he is one of three executive producers for BackStory, a nationally syndicated podcast and radio program.

Jamie Hart
Jamie Hart is the executive director of the Coalition to Expand Contraceptive Access (CECA). Hart has a long history as a leader in multiple health sectors. She specializes in health equity, reproductive health/family planning, maternal and child heath, HIV/AIDS, behavioral health, homelessness, and co-occurring disorders.

Emil Kerenji
Emil Kerenji is a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has authored and co-authored several Holocaust source volumes published by the museum, and designed, with Leah Wolfson, Experiencing History, a digital tool offering primary sources for college-level instruction.

Jon Kingsdale
Trained at the University of Michigan as a historian, Dr. Kingsdale has spent most of his career in healthcare finance and public policy before recently returning to academia as a professor (part-time) in public health. Over five decades, he has worked as a journalist, health insurance executive, consultant and public official—specifically, as the founding director of the Massachusetts state health insurance marketplace that was the model for “Obamacare.”  

Earl Lewis
Earl Lewis is the founding director of the University of Michigan Center for Social Solutions and the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of history, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Public Policy. He is president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Tracye A. Matthews
Tracye A. Matthews is a historian, curator, and filmmaker working within and between the realms of academia, public history, museums and documentary film. She is currently executive director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. She was centrally involved in designing major exhibitions on African American life in Chicago, as well as the African presence in Mexico. 

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is associate professor of science, technology, and society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the prominent historians of Africa engaged in a variety of public-facing projects. He is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe.

Amanda Moniz
Amanda Moniz is the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2008 and subsequently held a Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University.

Minayo Nasiali
Minayo Nasiali is a historian of modern Europe and empire and an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is working on her second book, Black Markets, which is a trans-imperial history of shipping and racial capitalism in the twentieth century.

Rebekah E. Pite
Rebekah E. Pite is associate professor of history at Lafayette College. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in History and Women’s Studies in 2007. Her research focuses on histories of gender, food, consumption, and labor in Argentina and southern South America. 

Parna Sengupta
Parna Sengupta is a senior associate director with Stanford Introductory Studies, working primarily with the Thinking Matters program and the Thinking Matters fellowship. She arrived at Stanford in 2008 from Carleton College, where she was an associate professor in South Asian history.

Susan L. Ziadeh
Ambassador Susan L. Ziadeh is a Middle East strategic advisor based in Washington, DC, following a twenty-three-year career with the US Department of State. She was most recently the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and the US ambassador to the State of Qatar.  She is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.