People
Director of Center: Dr. John Cox, Associate professor, Department of Global Studies; affiliated to Africana Studies, History, and Latin American Studies
Research and teaching interests: Genocide; Racism, fascism, and imperialism; Working-class & labor history; Resistance and social movements. Cox’s Ph.D. is in History (UNC-Chapel Hill, 2006). Cox’s co-edited collection on genocide-denial was published in 2022 and a 2nd edition of his To KIll a People: Genocide in the 20th Century (OUP, 2017) will be published in 2025, adding a chapter on Bosnia. John is also completing a co-authored book, Genocide: A Thematic Approach, and a co-edited volume, Routledge Handbook of Genocide Studies. His earlier works include a book on leftist and Jewish resistance inside Nazi Germany, Circles of Resistance (2009).
Contact: jcox73@uncc.edu
Center for HGHR Studies steering committee
Dr. Emek Ergun, WGST (Womens’s & Gender Studies) and Global Studies
Dr. Ergun’s research focuses on the political role of translation in disrupting local heteropatriarchal economies of knowledge and connecting feminist activists, texts, and movements across borders, particularly between the US and Turkey. Emek’s monograph Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation was published in 2023, and she is co-editor of The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (also 2023). Dr. Ergun also recently co-edited Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2017) and is also a co-editor of Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (Routledge, 5th ed., 2021). She is an activist feminist translator and her most recent translation is of Octavia E. Butler’s classic science-fiction novel, Kindred, published in Turkey in March 2019.
Dr. Ella Fratantuono, History
Dr. Fratantuono’s research focuses on migration, settlement, governmentality, and state-building in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Her current book project explores the emergence and development of a centralized migrant and refugee regime in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, and is published this year (2024): Governing Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh University Press). Her articles include “Producing Ottomans: Internal Colonization and Social Engineering in Ottoman Immigrant Settlement” (Journal of Genocide Research January 2019) and “Useful Refugees in Ottoman and Turkish Politics” (Border Criminologies, May 2023).
Dr. Willie J. Griffin, History
Dr. Griffin served as the Chief Historian at the Levine Museum of the New South before joining our faculty in 2022. His research and teaching interests include 20th Century African American Public and Intellectual History; Civil Rights Movement and Black Print Culture History; African American Military and Labor History; African American Biography; and Black Charlotte History. Dr. Griffin is completing his book, Come Out Fighting”: Trezzvant W. Anderson, the Black Press, and the Twentieth Century Black Struggle for Freedom in the “New South” (under Contract with Vanderbilt University Press).
Dr. Gregory Mixon, Professor, Department of History
Research and teaching interests: Black Southern State Militia Companies, 1865-1910; Racial Violence 1865-1930; Race Relations; Black, Southern, and United States Urban History; Progressive era; Comparative History, especially United States South and Latin American during the nineteenth century. Dr. Mixon is the author of numerous articles and of two well-received books, The Atlanta Riot: Race, Class, and Violence in a New South City (University Press of Florida, 2005) and Show Thyself a Man: Georgia State Troops, Colored, 1865-1905 (University Press of Florida, 2016).
Dr. Caitlin Schroering, Global Studies
Her research coalesces around multiple areas of social inquiry, including environmental sociology, resource conflicts, the human right to water, political economy, and transnational social movements, using feminist and anti-colonial research methodologies. Her primary line of research is based on extensive fieldwork with two movements fighting against water privatization, one in Brazil and one in the United States. Dr. Schroering joined UNC Charlotte in 2022 and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh, a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida, and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from Denison University.
Dr. Tina Shull, History; Director of Public History.
Research and teaching interests: “I (she/her) am a public historian of race, empire, immigration enforcement, and climate migration in the modern US and the World. Trained in interdisciplinary archival, oral history, digital humanities, social science, and participatory research methods, I hold a PhD in History from UC Irvine, a Master’s in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU, and a BA in History from UCLA. My first book was published in 2022 by UNC Press, Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance. It explores the rise of migrant detention in the early 1980s as a form of counterinsurgency. I am the creator of the digital history projects IMM Print, Climate Refugee Stories, and Climate Inequality CLT, and lead curator of the Climates of Inequality: Charlotte museum exhibit.”
Dr. Martin Shuster, Philosophy; Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies
Research and teaching interests: theories of the state (esp. around violence, homogenization, and genocide); theories of modernity in relation to genocide (Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, Marxism, critical theory); moral psychology (esp. of perpetrators); structural and institutional inputs and precursors to genocide; and racism, colonialism, imperialism, and fascism. In addition to articles and book chapters, Shuster is the author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World (Routledge, 2020). He is currently working on a book called Genocide and the State: An Alternative History of Modern Political Philosophy.
Affiliate Faculty of Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies
Members of the Steering Committee, above, are also Affiliate Faculty.
Dr. Chris Cameron, History
Research and teaching interests: Early American History; African American Religion; Slavery and Abolition; American Religious and Intellectual History; African American Freethought
Dr. Oscar de la Torre, Africana Studies
Research and teaching interests: African Diaspora in Latin America (slavery; maroons, or runaway slaves; post-emancipation period; oral history); History of Brazil, Amazonia, and Cuba (19th and 20thcentury); Environmental Studies (commodity history, labor and environment); Atlantic World History (slavery, revolution)
Dr. Catherine Fuentes, Anthropology
Research and teaching interests: Health and well-being of incarcerated women, domestic violence, violence cross-culturally, medical anthropology
Dr. Susanne Gomoluch, Languages and Culture Studies
Research and teaching interests: 18th- and 19th-century German literature and thought; Literature and Science, in particular psychology and medicine; Discourses on the creative imagination (Einbildungskraft) in literature, science, and philosophy; Travel Literature; Translation; Language Teaching and Pedagogy; The Holocaust in literature and film
Dr. Eric Hoenes, Religious Studies
Research and teaching interests: Religion and culture; ethnography of religion; language and communication
Dr. Charles Houck, Global Studies
Research and teaching interests: Globalization & resistance; Precolumbian states of Mesoamerica; settlement patterns in Yucatan, Mexico, and the political, economic and ecological factors that shaped this and other Maya polities; indigenous resistance to colonialism
Dr. Oscar Lansen, History
Research and teaching interests: Social History of War and Conflict; The Holocaust; History and Honors Methodology; History Pedagogy
Dr. Janaka Lewis, Director, WGST (Womens’s & Gender Studies) and English
Research and teaching interests: 19th century African American literature, African American women writers, black feminist theory
Dr. Jill Massino, History
Research and teaching interests: Romania, Eastern Europe, Modern Europe, The Cold War, Gender, the Global South, Cultural History, Memory, Socialism and postsocialism
Prof. Bianca Potrykus, Languages and Culture Studies
Research and teaching interests: Second Language Acquisition, Multilingualism, Globalisation and Superdiversity, Critical Discourse Analysis, (Im)politenessTheory, German modern history and migrations, Language and Film of the Holocaust
Dr. Ritika Prasad, History
Research and teaching interests: South Asian history; history of technology; technology and society; colonial and imperial history, nationalism and decolonization; Subaltern history; postcolonial theory
Dr. Kristina Shull, History
Research and teaching interests: Immigration History, Mass Incarceration, US Foreign Relations, Social Movements, Climate Migration, Cold War, Public History
Dr. Carmen Soliz, History and Latin American Studies
Research and teaching interests: Social history of Latin America, especially Bolivia and the Andes; peasant politics, agrarian reform, rural state formation, nation building, citizenship and social movements in Latin America
Dr. Barbara Thiede, Religious Studies
Research and teaching interests: Hebrew Bible, Jewish history and spirituality, the history of European antisemitism, and Jewish magic
Dr. Beth Whitaker, Political Science and Public Administration
Research and teaching interests: African Politics, African International Relations, US-African Relations, Africa and the “War on Terror.” Refugee Policy
Contact HGHR Studies
Director
John Cox, Ph.D.
Macy 108C
jcox73@uncc.edu
Contact Global Studies
UNC Charlotte
Department of Global Studies
Macy 103
9201 University City Boulevard
Charlotte, NC 28223-0001
704-687-5181
704-687-1684
yslmaste@uncc.edu
Department Chair
Dale L. Smith, Ph.D.
Macy 103
704-687-5181
dale.l.smith@uncc.edu
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Charles Houck, Ph.D.
Macy 104
704-687-5184
cwhouck@uncc.edu
Department Advisor
Y. Shonta Le Master, M.Ed.
Macy 103C
704-687-0061
yslmaste@uncc.edu
