Leadership and Faculty
Gregory A. Daddis, Ph.D.
Center for War and Society Director, USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History, and Professor
Office: AL 528
Email: [email protected]
Gregory A. Daddis joined SDSU after directing the M.A. program in War and Society Studies at Chapman University. Prior, he served as the Chief of the American History Division in the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point. A retired U.S. Army colonel, he deployed to both Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. Daddis specializes in the history of the Vietnam Wars and the Cold War era and has authored five books, including Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines (2020) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (2017). He has also published numerous journal articles and several op-ed pieces commenting on current military affairs, to include writings in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Interest magazine.
Pierre Asselin, Ph.D.
Dwight E. Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations and Professor
Office: AL 568
Email: [email protected]
Pierre Asselin is originally from Quebec City in Canada. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Glendon College (Canada), a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His area of primary expertise is the history of American foreign relations, with a focus on East and Southeast Asia and the larger Cold War context. He is a leading authority on the Vietnam War. Asselin is particularly interested in the decision-making of Vietnamese communist authorities in the period 1954-75. He speaks Vietnamese and regularly travels to Vietnam for research.
Pablo Ben, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Office: AL 584 | Phone: (619) 594-2557
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.
David P. Cline, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Center for Public and Oral History Director
Office: AL 513 | Phone: (619) 594-0476
Email: [email protected]
David P. Cline is an historian specializing in 20th and 21st century U.S. social movements, oral history, the digital humanities, and public history. Since 2013 he has also been a Lead Interviewer and Research Scholar for the Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. His public and digital history projects have included an augmented and virtual reality experience of a World War I battlefield site in Vauquois, France; an augmented reality iPad-accessible application that helps teach African American history and the skills of historic inquiry; major national oral history projects and local projects focusing on African American, university, and LGBTQ history; and museum and historic site exhibits. He is currently finishing Twice Forgotten, a book that uses oral histories to delve into the African American experience of the Korean War and to connect these to the civil rights movement.
Raechel Dumas, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Office: AL 561
Email: [email protected]
Raechel Dumas (Ph.D. in Japanese, University of Colorado at Boulder) is a specialist in modern Japan, with emphasis in the histories of literature and visual culture. She is interested in how contemporary Japanese pop culture engages with traumatic histories and presents, including the vicissitudes of violence and haunting aftermaths of the Asia-Pacific War. She is author of The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her current book project, Serial Affects, examines recent English-language detective fiction television series that take up gendered forms of traumatic experience, memory, and expression as driving themes.
Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Ph.D.
Professor
Office: AL 538 | Phone: (619) 594-6985
Email: [email protected]
Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley is Professor of Late Imperial and Modern Chinese History. 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, gender and sexuality, comparative responses to trauma and disaster, and recent Sino-Japanese and Sino-US relations. Her current book project maps changes and continuities in Chinese responses to calamity by employing case studies of major famines and floods that struck North China under governments with markedly different ideological foundations. Over the past several years Professor Edgerton-Tarpley conducted extensive archival research on a pair of major Republican-era disasters, and wrote a series of articles on them. At present Professor Edgerton-Tarpley is putting a Mao-era catastrophe, China’s Great Leap Famine of 1958-62, in dialogue with late imperial and Republican-era case studies.
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.
Annika Frieberg, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
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.
Maia Nichols, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Office: AL 586
Email: [email protected]
Maia Nichols holds a Ph.D. in art history criticism and theory from the University of California San Diego specializing in 20th century French and North African visual and material culture and postcolonial theory. Her dissertation, researched in France with support from a four-year Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, engages art historical visual and material culture methods and archival evidence to consider the institutional history of French colonial North Africa’s progression to independence during the social psychiatry movement. She holds degrees in psychology and visual art from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a master's in Aesthetics and Politics from the California Institute of the Arts. She engages in art practice and has taught studio art drawing at UC San Diego and has taught Media Studies at Bennington College. Her work has been published and exhibited internationally.
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 and International Security and Conflict Resolution Director
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.