News & Events

Learn what's new with our students, faculty, upcoming events and our department's impact on the community.

Zombek Delivers Robert Bloom Lecture

Angie Zombek, associate professor of history, delivered the Robert Bloom Lecture at Gettysburg College's Civil War Institute Summer Conference in June. The lecture honors the legacy of Robert L. Bloom, a distinguished professor at Gettysburg College. Zombek's lecture, "Stronghold of the Union: Key West in the Civil War", is based off of her forthcoming book of the same title.

Read about the conference

Graduate Fellowship Launches for Jewish History Research

First year History M.A. student Alec Ott will be studying history of the Holocaust in Slovakia as the inaugural recipient of the Block Graduate Fellowship in Jewish History. Awarded annually with a renewable $10,000 stipend, the Block Fellowship supports graduate students in pursuing research and writing a master’s thesis on a topic related to Jewish history and culture. The fellowship was made possible through the generosity of donors from the Wilmington Jewish community, who also endowed the distinguished professorship in Jewish History, currently held by Jarrod Tanny.

image of building for history department

Tanny Publishes Co-Edited Volume

Jarrod Tanny's co-edited volume with Jennifer Caplan and Avionoam Patt, Wit Happens: Global Jewish Humor, was published on February 17, 2026 with Wayne State U Press. Most of the essays are based on presentations that were given at the 2020 Jewish History Conference held at UNCW.

Houpt Receives UNCW Teaching Award

David Houpt was named as recipient of 2026 Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award. Congratulations!

Sherman Emerging Scholar Lecture Series

This annual lecture series was established to honor two lifelong learners and friends of the department, Virginia and Derrick Sherman. It is one of the History Department's premier events each year.

Learn More About the Sherman Lecture

Other News

Gradute Student Skylar Holland was awarded a Strong Fellowship. which allows her to spend June 2026 at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. She will be doing research for her M.A. thesis, "Playing with Pleasant Company: Domesticity in the American Girl Doll Collection."

Dr. Kim Sherman was invited by the African Studies Center at UNC-Chapel Hill to speak on slavery and the save trade in early North Carolina for their annual K-12 teacher's retreat.

Dr. Michael Seidman gave a radio interview on Spanish National Radio and Television to Siliva Tarragona's De nit (in the Night) on his new book, "Esclavos en la Europa del siglo XX, 1914-1945."

Dr. Yixin Chen is the author of When Food Became Scarce: How Chinese Peasants Survived the Great Leap Forward Famine, which was the subject of a H-Environment Roundtable.

Michael Seidman, professor of history, has announced publication of his new book, "Esclavos en la Europa del siglo XX, 1914-1945." It offers a reinterpretation of the period of the world wars by examining the reinvention of labor compulsion on the European continent wherein nationalists, communists and fascists revived the militarism, torture, and mass murder that characterized previous slave societies in Africa, the Islamic world, and the Americas. Seidman spoke about his book on Spanish National Radio and Television, sitting for an interview in Spanish and Catalan.

The cover of Michael Seidman's book "Esclavos en la Europa del siglo XX (1914-1945)" depicting a black-and-white photograph of a barbed wire fence

On Oct. 17, Dr. David La Vere received the 2025 Edmonds-Gavins Award by the Historical Society of North Carolina for the Best Article in the North Carolina Historical Review for 2024 for the article “Making War on the Deer: Deer Hunting and Deerskins in Colonial North Carolina.” He received a nice certificate and a small cash prize.

Student Sarah Creel's essay on "The Williams Family of Historic Wilmington" was published in the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society Bulletin in June 2025. Sarah's research on this began when she was an intern at the Latimer House.

On October 23, 2025, Dr. Yixin Chen gave a talk at UC Berkeley on "Famine and Rebellion: the Counterrevolutionary Case of the Chinese People's Life-Saving Army in the Western Stream Villages, 1919-1960." He previously gave a talk on this topic at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University in March 2025.

Dr. Jarrod Tanny recently self-published a new book on Amazon: Tales of a Yid in Dixieland: Bible Jokes, Southern Folks, and the Woke Who Shame the Jews.

Recent MA Graduate, Matthew Parker, has accepted an adjunct professorship at Methodist University.

Recent MA Graduate, Chandler Hicks, has accepted a position as a Social Studies Teacher at RJ Reynolds High School in Winston, NC.

Dr. Michael Seidman authored the chapter, “The Spanish Civil War,” in Ian Ona Johnson and Robert Clemm's edition of A Violent Peace: A Global Military History of the Interwar Period, (University of Kansas Press, 2025), pp. 260-285. Contributors to the book focused on wars erupting on four continents during the first half of the twentieth century,

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