URSINUS COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
Because their numbers are moderate (five faculty and around 40 majors), history students and professors get to know each other well. Upper-level courses tend to be small and intimate (often under a dozen students), allowing for substantial discussion. The faculty meet frequently with their advisees throughout the year to counsel them on academic work and career plans. Owing to the familiarity built in the classroom and faculty offices, contacts between students and faculty are friendly and casual. Occasional department get-togethers are very popular, and a good number of students keep in touch long after graduation.
The Faculty
Hugh R. Clark, (Professor of History & East Asian Studies) received his Ph.D. in middle period Chinese history from the University of Pennsylvania (1981) and has been a member of the Ursinus faculty since 1982. His courses focus on the history of China and Japan, and in addition to surveys of their respective histories includes focused courses on religion, thought, and women in East Asia. Professor Clark has published two books (Community, Trade and Networks: Southern Fujian from the Third to the Thirteenth Centuries [Cambridge University Press, 1991] and Portrait of Community: Society, Culture, and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River Valley (Fujian) from the late Tang through the Song [Chinese University Press, 2006]) as well as numerous articles and reviews. He is currently working on an “anthropology of religion” in southeast China.
S. Ross Doughty, Department Chair, (BA Ursinus College; MA & PhD Harvard University) has reinvented himself as a historian several times. Trained as a British historian, he has developed teaching expertise in world history, German history, early modern European history and military history, as well. His courses “Nazi Germany and the Holocaust,” “Warfare and Society,” and “The Devil in Europe” have become student favorites. He has written both print and online versions of the study guide for Howard Spodek’s textbook The World’s History and was co-editor of the World History Bulletin for five years. He has taught in Japan and Germany, and in 2003 and 2005 was assistant director of the Ursinus College in Tübingen (Germany) Program. Professor Doughty also advises History majors seeking secondary school teaching certification in Social Studies. He is currently developing a new course – “Three Conquerors: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon Bonaparte” -- a comparative world history course that will be offered for the first time in the fall of 2006.
Walter D. Greason, Assistant Professor of History (Ph.D., Temple University), examines the United States after 1865, emphasizing race relations in suburbs and cities. He has received several awards including Temple University's Future Faculty Fellowship and Villanova University's Presidential Scholarship. Honored by the Philadelphia Daily News as a contemporary "Black History Maker" and the New Jersey Historical Commission as a Samuel Smith Fellow, he is just returning from a symposium on American slavery at Columbia University.
C. Dallett Hemphill, Professor of History and American Studies (Ph.D. Brandeis University), is a Philadelphia native who studied history at Princeton and Brandeis before coming to Ursinus in 1988. Her book, Bowing to Necessities, focuses on the importance of manners and social customs in the revolutionary United States. She teaches courses in Early American history (from the era of European settlement through the Civil War), women’s and family history, and the history of Philadelphia. Her first book examined class, age and gender relations in Early America through the lens of manners. She is now writing a book on the history of sibling relations. She has recently enjoyed teaching family and urban history in France with the Ursinus in Paris program.
Richard D. King, Associate Professor of History (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), a specialist in Russian, Middle Eastern, and East European history and the author of "Sergei Kirov and the Struggle for Soviet Power in the Terek Region, 1917-1918" and several recent papers on the history of late Tsarist Russia. In 1990 and 1994 he was selected to participate in a research seminar in Russia under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities.