History

Dr. Elizabeth "Scout" Blum's main areas of research involve the intersections of gender, age, and environmental attitudes over time. Dr. Blum is currently working on a project about environmental messages presented to American children since World War I. This project evolved from her first book, entitled Love Canal Revisited (University Press of Kansas, 2008). She is also a proponent of using board, video, and role-playing games in the classroom, and currently teaches a class entitled History Through Games. In that class, students work through various games to investigate depictions of historical events and themes, and end the class by designing their own game.

Dr. Buckner teaches courses on Colonial America, The American Revolution, The Old South, and various others when he gets new ideas. He has published in several essays on race and slavery in the United States and is co-editor of Fathers, Preachers, Rebels, Men: Black Masculinity in US History and Literature 1820-1945 (Ohio State University Press, 2011).

Dr. Gnoinska is a Fulbright Scholar and Boren NSEP Fellow. She has published, as well as presented, her research in the United States and around the world. She traveled extensively throughout East and Southeast Asia, including Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam, for both research and pleasure. She also spent much time traveling in Europe, especially former Eastern Europe, and in Russia. She speaks Polish, Russian, Japanese, and Spanish. She is currently working on revising her dissertation into two books: one on Poland's peacekeeping efforts during the Vietnam War and another on Sino-Polish relations during the Cold War with a specific focus on the role of the Sino-Soviet split and the U.S.-China opening.

Dr. Medeiros' areas for research include rural education, teacher preparation, and History and Social Studies education. Her dissertation, “Rural Teacher Preparation in the State of Alabama” examined the intentional efforts of teacher preparation programs to prepare teachers to teach in rural settings. Dr. Medeiros is the content advisor for both History and Social Science Education students as well as the university supervisor for History and Social Science Education Interns.

Dr. Allen Jones is the chair of the history and philosophy department. He has published several works about antiquities. In August 2020 Jones published Death and Afterlife in the Pages of Gregory of Tours: Religion and Society in Late Antique Gaul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Bishop Gregory of Tours was a prolific writer of hagiography and author of a ten-book history popularly called the History of the Franks. In 2009 Jones published Social Mobility in Late Antique Gaul: Strategies and Opportunities for the Non-Elite (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; reprinted in paperback, 2014). The work investigates the extent to which people who were not part of the power structures of Gaul impacted society as they pursued their own goals.