Leadership and Faculty 

Annika Frieberg, Ph.D.

Director, Center for War and Society and Associate Professor, History

Office: AL 576 
Email: [email protected]

Originally from Sweden, Annika Frieberg studied Modern and Central European History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She teaches courses in 19th and 20th century European and East European history. Her research and teaching interests center on war and genocide, gender, conflict resolution, media, national, and transnational questions in Central Europe. She has published several articles, including “Reconciliation Remembered. Early Activists and the Polish-German Relations” in Re-Mapping Polish-German Memory, which was published by Indiana University Press in 2011. She is also the co-editor of Reconciliing with the Past: Resources and Obstacles in a Global Perspective published by Routledge in 2017. Dr. Frieberg is the author of Peace at All Costs: Transnational Networks and Media in post-war Polish-German Relations, published by Berghahn Books in 2019. She currently researches humanitarianism and human rights through Swedish grassroots support and humanitarian initiatives for Polish Solidarity families affected by martial law in the 1980s.

 

Pierre Asselin, Ph.D.

Dwight E. Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations and Professor, History

Office: AL 568
Email: [email protected]

Hailing from Quebec City, Canada, Pierre Asselin earned his Bachelor’s degree from Glendon College, a Master’s from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His primary expertise lies in the history of American foreign relations, with a particular focus on East and Southeast Asia in the Cold War context. He is a leading authority on the Vietnam War. Asselin is particularly focused on the decision-making of Vietnamese communist authorities from 1945 to 1975 and has conducted extensive research in Vietnam, where he speaks the language.

He is the author of notable books including A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (2002), which won the Kenneth W. Baldridge Prize, and Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2013), recipient of the Arthur Goodzeit Book Award. His 2018 work, Vietnam’s American War: A History, has become a core text in Vietnam War courses. A revised edition will be published in 2024, alongside his editorial work on The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, Volume III: Endings.

Pablo Ben, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, History

Office: AL 584
Email: [email protected]

Pablo Ben holds his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and comes to San Diego State from the University of Northern Iowa, where he was an assistant professor. His research focuses on the history of sexuality and urban social history, and his dissertation was a study of male same-sex sexual relationships in the city of Buenos Aires from 1880 to 1955. This was a period of massive European immigration to Argentina, bringing significant demographic change that impacted family life and sexual relations in Buenos Aires particularly as Argentina sought to pursue modernizing policies. Dr. Ben will teach courses in modern Latin American history and the history of the Atlantic world.

Edward J. Blum, Ph.D. 

Co-Director, American Revolution and Constitution History Project and Professor, History

Office: AL 525 
Email: [email protected]

Edward J. Blum is a professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States History in the History Department at San Diego State University.  He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. His research, writing, and teaching involve politics, constitutionalism, war, society, and culture in the United States from the founding of the nation through the era of the Civil War. He has particular interests in how demography, statistics, numeracy, and quantitative information shaped the nation’s growth and development. Blum is also the author and co-author of several books on religion and race in United States history, including War is All Hell: The Nature of Evil and the Civil War (2021), Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005; reissued 2015), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012). He is the winner of numerous awards including the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, and the John T. Hubbell Prize for best article published in Civil War History in 2015.

Abikal Borah, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, History

Office: AL 557
Email: [email protected]

Abikal Borah completed his graduate studies in African history at the University of Texas at Austin and previously served as a Public History Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intersections of violence studies, labor history, and racial tensions among subaltern groups in Durban, South Africa. Viewing Durban as both an African and Indian Ocean city, he is currently revising his book manuscript, Violence of the Wretched: Origins of the Durban Riots of 1949, which draws on extensive archival research across South Africa to trace the social roots of the 1949 violence between Zulus and Indians through histories of migration, land, and labor. At SDSU, he teaches courses in African and global history, integrating themes such as colonialism, violence, memory, racial dynamics, and the methodological challenges of historical research.

David P. Cline, Ph.D.

Director, Center for Public Oral History, Director, Lipinsky Institute, and Professor, History

Office: AL 513
Email: [email protected]

David P. Cline is a Professor of History at SDSU, where he also serves as the Founding Director of the Center for Public and Oral History and the Lipinsky Institute for Jewish Life and Public Engagement. He specializes in U.S. social movements, religion, sports history, oral history, and public history. From 2013-2020, he was a Lead Interviewer for the Civil Rights History Project at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Cline has initiated the Boarder Crossings project, showcasing skateboard art addressing contemporary border issues. He has secured over $3.2 million in grants focused on oral and digital history and is working on ongoing projects with the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency and the California Oral History Project.

He edited Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing (2023) and DIY Democracy (2027) and authored several monographs, including Twice Forgotten: African Americans in the Korean War (2022), which received critical acclaim. His other notable works include From Reconciliation to Revolution (2016) and Creating Choice (2006). Cline is recognized for his contributions to both academia and public engagement in historical discourse.

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Ph.D.

Professor, History

Office: AL 532
Email: [email protected]

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley is Professor of Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History at San Diego State University. Her research focuses on cultural and political responses to major disasters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, while her teaching interests include World History, famine studies, war and memory in modern East Asian history, gender and sexuality, comparative responses to trauma and disaster, and modern Sino-Japanese and Sino-US relations. She is the author of Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China (2008; Chinese translation, 2011). She has also published multiple articles on the Yellow River Flood of 1938–47 and the related Henan Famine of 1942–43, two major disasters deeply intertwined with World War II in China and the Chinese Civil War. Her current NEH-supported book project traces changes and continuities in Chinese responses to calamity through case studies of three major famines that struck North China’s densely populated Henan Province under governments (late-Qing, Nationalist, and Maoist) with markedly different ideological foundations. She is also beginning a new project on the state-ordered dismantling of many of China’s historic city walls during World War II. Professor Edgerton-Tarpley travels to China regularly to conduct research and present her work at conferences on disaster studies. Chinese-language versions of several of her publications have appeared in the PRC. 

Nathan Ellstrand, Ph.D.

DPAA Research Partner Fellow

Office: AL 513
Email: [email protected]

Nathan Ellstrand is a postdoctoral DPAA Research Partner Fellow at San Diego State University, supporting the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Over the course of his career, he has taught classes in public history, US history, and world history.

Nathan holds a Ph.D. in History from Loyola University Chicago. He is interested in twentieth century political and religious history between the United States and Latin American. He is working to convert his dissertation into a book. The project examines the anti-communist, Catholic, and nationalist Mexican Unión Nacional Sinarquista (National Synarchist Union) within the context of the United States during World War II. His work for his Masters in Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego covered women's leadership in the anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party) while the party was in exile in early twentieth century Los Angeles. Nathan has also conducted research and presented on the sanctuary movement of the 1980s. He is a co-founder and co-coordinator of the Historians of Catholic Mexico academic network.

 

Cheryl O'Brien, Ph.D.

Director, International Security and Conflict Resolution Program and Associate Professor, Political Science

Office: NH 107
Email: [email protected]

Cheryl O'Brien, an Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Security and Conflict Resolution (ISCOR) Program, has worked on public policy and human security issues for NGOs in the US, Latin America, and Africa, including in refugee camps. Her research interests include public policy, social movements, international norms, human rights, social justice, and environmental justice. Her academic publications have focused on violence against women and food security, drawing from her fieldwork in multiple countries.  She holds a B.A. in Sociology and English from the University of Notre Dame, a Master of Education from Harvard University, a Graduate Certificate from Towson University, and a Ph.D. from Purdue University.

Arthur Schott Lopes

Assistant Professor, History

Office: AL-561
Email: [email protected]

Arthur Schott Lopes is an assistant professor of Brazilian history and core faculty in the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies. Schott Lopes earned an M.A. in the social sciences and a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in history at Harvard College. He is a political historian of Brazil interested in the nexus between institutional conflict and the violence of everyday life; in histories of politics that go beyond national and state capitals; in borderlands and frontiers; and in the intersection between political, economic, and environmental history.

His first book project is a history of military intervention into land conflict at Brazil’s Triple Border with Argentina and Paraguay during the 20th century. The project reassesses civilian-military relations away from barracks and government palaces, demonstrating how military actors became political players on the ground before Brazil’s military coup of 1964, and how they helped build a rural political economy grounded on environmental and human exploitation well before the military dictatorship’s 1970s Amazonian colonization policies.

Simon J. Smith, Ph.D.

Non-Resident Fellow

Office: AL 513
Email: [email protected]

Simon J. Smith (US/UK) is an Associate Professor of Security and International Relations, a visiting Professor at the College of Europe, and Editor-in-Chief of Defence Studies. His research focuses on the strategic, institutional and operational relationship between the EU and NATO; drivers of European defence transformation and military operations; as well as the implications for UK constitutional matters relating to defence and security.

Simon J. Smith holds a PhD in International Relations from Loughborough University and an MSc in International Conflict and Cooperation from the University of Stirling. He regularly engages with media including the BBC, Real Clear Defence and the European Leadership Network. His research has resulted in invitations to address the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, the European Security and Defence College, The Royal College of Defence Studies and the Advanced Command Staff Course (ACSC) at The Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.

 

Latha Varadarajan, Ph.D.

Professor, Political Science

Office: NH 124 | Phone: (619) 594-3255
Email: [email protected]

Latha Varadarajan joined the SDSU faculty after receiving a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota in January 2005. Her research is located at the intersection of international relations theory, international political economy, and international security. More specifically, her published work has focused on the politics of transnationalism (specifically state-diaspora relations); the connections between neoliberal economic restructuring and national security policies; the meaning and relevance of postcolonial struggles; and the debates surrounding the contemporary manifestations of imperialism.

She is currently working on a book project that brings together her background in international law and international relations to discuss the contemporary development of a legal-humanitarian world order. Varadarajan teaches courses on International Relations, International Political Economy, National Security and Nationalism both at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

 

Top image credit: Busy Hands, Howard Baer. Courtesy of Paintings of Naval Aviation, Naval History and Heritage Command.