History Faculty

David Kenley

Professor of History, Department Chair 

kenleyd@etown.edu | 717-361-1238 | Faculty Website

Dr. David Kenley (Ph.D. University of Hawaii) has been at Elizabethtown College since 2004. His research focuses on the history of Asia, particularly modern China. He is the author of New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore (Routledge Press), Modern Chinese History (Key Issues in Asian Studies), and Contested Communities: Identities, Spaces, and Hierarchies of the Chinese in the Cuban Republic (co-authored with Miriam Herrera Jerez and Mario Castillo Santana and published by Brill).  In addition to these, he has published dozens of scholarly articles, chapters, and reviews focused on Chinese intellectual history and diasporas in world history.  Fluent in Chinese, he enjoys taking students to study in Beijing each year.

Brian Newsome

Professor of History, College Registrar, and Dean of Curriculum and Assessment
newsomewb@etown.edu | 717-361-1251 | Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Brian Newsome is Professor of History, College Registrar, and Dean for Curriculum and Assessment. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina and teaches modern European, Middle Eastern, and North African history. Dr. Newsome specializes in the urban and religious history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. His dissertation led to articles in French Historical Studies and French Politics, Culture and Society, among others, as well as his book on French Urban Planning, 1940-1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). More recently, Dr. Newsome has been analyzing French Catholic organizations, leading to articles in Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques (which he serves as co-editor) and in Transaction Publishers’ series Religion and Public Life. His latest project, which McGill-Queen's University Press published in 2016, is a new translation and annotated edition of Invasion 14, Catholic novelist Maxence Van der Meersch's account of the German occupation of northern France during World War I. In 2014 Dr. Newsome won the New York State Association of European Historians’ Triennial Charles R. Bailey Memorial Prize for best journal article. He received the award for “The Women of the Pavillons: A Case Study,” which appeared in Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques in the Winter of 2012. Dr. Newsome is also the recipient of several grants, including a Fulbright Grant, as well as numerous awards for outstanding teaching and service.

Steve Nolt

Professor of History and Anabaptist Studies
Senior Scholar, Young Center
(717) 361-1459 | nolts@etown.edu | website

The author or coauthor of fourteen books on Amish, Mennonite, and Pennsylvania German history and contemporary life, Steve Nolt is widely recognized for his scholarship on Anabaptist groups across North America. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Notre Dame. He also serves as series editor for Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chelsea Schields

Assistant Professor of History
(717) 361-1370 | schieldsc@etown.edu | website

Chelsea Schields is a historian of modern Europe specializing in the interconnected histories of colonialism, decolonization, gender and sexuality.  Her current book project, Closer Ties: Sex and Sovereignty in the Dutch Antilles, 1942-2012, asks why the dessolution of the Dutch empire sparked tense debates on sexual politics and links these discussions to the forging of a post-colonial commonwealth state spanning Europe and the Caribbean. She has published pieces of this research in edited volumes and an article in the New West Indian Guide, and was assistant editor of The Political Thought of African Independence: An Anthology of Sources (with editor Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, Hackett). She holds a Ph.D. in history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

Carl J. Strikwerda

President, Professor of History
strikwerdac@etown.edu

Carl J. Strikwerda is professor of history and president of Elizabethtown College and teaches a course every fall on “Peace and War in a Global World”. He previously served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at the College of William and Mary and Associate Dean at the University of Kansas. He received a B.A. from Calvin College and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, both in history. Besides articles in the American Historical Review, Journal of Social History, and many other journals and edited volumes, he has published books on Belgian labor history, international migration, and consumer cooperation around the world. His most recent publication is “Imagining a Global World: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Tragedy of Great Power Politics In the First Era of Globalization, 1870-1914,” which appeared in Cosmopolitanism and the Global Polity, ed. Gabriel Ricci, Volume 5 in the series Culture and Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2012). A new article, “World War I in the History of Globalization,” is forthcoming in the journal Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques. President Strikwerda has served as a historical consultant to the National World War One Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Lancaster County Economic Development Company, public radio and television station WITF in Harrisburg, and the Presidents’ Trust of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. When not serving as president or being a historian, he bicycles on the Conewago Trail.