History

Dr. Brett Bebber specializes in modern British history and the history of the British empire. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which the decline of the Empire and the surge in migration to postwar Britain reshaped national identity and social relationships in the metropole. He has written on the intersections of race, gender, and violence in postwar Britain, and studied the cultural implications of social control, working-class violence and political racisms in modern British culture. He is also interested in analyzing the cultural struggles that emerge in sport and leisure in Britain, and has analyzed how forms of leisure mediated and catalyzed broader social conflicts. His newest research threads include a study of migrant integration and black civil rights activism in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, and an examination of how civil liberties and anti-racist organizations made transatlantic connections with American and Canadian civil rights groups. He regularly teaches courses on modern British history, the history of the British Empire, European imperialism, transatlantic history, and sport and leisure.

Dr. Qiu Jin is the Director of the ODU China Center. She is also an Associate Professor of History and International Studies and the Director of the Institute of Asian Studies at Old Dominion University. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Hawaii in 1995. In 1995-1996 she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She specializes in Chinese history and specifically in the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Jin is the author of The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution (Stanford University Press, 1999), the editor of the two-two volumes of Difficult Years: A Memoir of General Wu Faxian (in Chinese), and the co-editor of A Modern and Contemporary History of China, Volume I-II, trans. (Beijing: People's Education Press, 2003-04). She also published book chapters and peer-reviewed articles in the journals such as Pacific Review, the Historiography: East and West, Journal of Chinese Political Science, and Modern China Studies.

Russian empire, Sino-Soviet relations, Socialist bloc exchange

Dr. Nutzman's research sits at a busy crossroads: the ancient Mediterranean world intersects the Near East, Christianity diverges from Judaism and Greco-Roman religions, and history meets archaeology. Her primary area of research is in ancient religion, particularly the ways in rituals were formed and transformed in a multicultural milieu. She is currently working on a monograph entitled, From Asclepius to Elijah: Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine, which looks the sites, people, objects, and performances that facilitated divine cures for disease and injury.

Dr. Miller S. Wright specializes in the Native American slave trade in North America and Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is interested in how Native captivity practices and the Native slave trade influenced conceptions of race, bondage, and indigeneity in the Atlantic slave trade. Some of Dr. Wright’s previous work focuses on how Creek matrilineages and women developed their own understandings of racialized slavery and property traditions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He teaches courses on Native America, Cultural Change, Colonial America, and US History.