European Forum on US History

Emma Long joined American Studies at UEA in January 2013 having taken her undergraduate degree (American Studies) and PhD (History) at the University of Kent. She has two areas of research interests. The first is the history of the US Constitution and the Supreme Court. Although interested in all aspects of this history, her particular focus is on the period since 1945 and on the rights contained in the Bill of Rights, especially matters relating to religion and to the debate about gun ownership. Emma also has an interest in the interaction of religion and politics in American history, particularly issues related to the idea of the “separation of church and state” that emerge from the First Amendment.

Second, Emma has an interest in white American evangelicalism, particularly its engagement with American politics since the 1940s. She was the holder of the 2018-2020 AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship, “An (Evangelical) Voice in the Wilderness: The Modern Roots of Evangelical Engagement with American Politics” which explored evangelical politcs in the 1940s and 1950s. Out of this project comes her forthcoming book, Lobbying for the Lord: The National Association of Evangelicals and the Growth of Post-war Evangelical Political Activism and an edited collection, Minority Religions in American History and Society.  

Jay Sexton is the Rich and Nancy Kinder Chair of Constitutional Democracy, Professor of History, and Director of the Kinder Institute.

A native of Salina, Kansas, Sexton returned to the Midwest to the University of Missouri in 2016 after spending the better part of two decades at Oxford University in England. He started in Oxford as a grad student Marshall Scholar and worked his way up to being Director of the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) and, upon his departure, being elected a Distinguished Fellow of the RAI and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Sexton specializes in the political and economic history of the nineteenth century. His research situates the United States in its international context, particularly as it related to the dominant global structure of the era, the British Empire. His most recent book, A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic Books, 2018), argues that international forces have shaped the course of US history during its greatest moments of transformative change.

His other books include Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford, 2005; 2^nd ed. 2014) and The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2011). He also has published four major collaborative projects: The Global Lincoln (co-edited with Richard Carwardine, Oxford, 2011); Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding to the Age of Terrorism (co-edited with Ian Tyrrell, Cornell, 2015); Crossing Empires: Taking US History into Transimperial Terrain (co-edited with Kristin Hoganson, Duke, 2020); and, also co-edited with Kristin Hoganson, The Cambridge History of America in the World: Vol. 2, 1820-1900.

Currently, Sexton is at work on a book that explores how steam infrastructure conditioned the connections and relations between the United States and the wider world in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Mario Del Pero holds a PhD in International History at the University of Milan (1999) and previously Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, he has also taught at Columbia University, New York University, Dickinson College, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University.

He teaches undergraduate courses on international History, US History, History of Transatlantic Relations, and Modern World History, and graduate courses and seminars on US Diplomatic Histoy, Historiography of the United States in the World, and post-1989 US Foreign Relations.

He is Research Fellow at the Istituto per gli Studi politica Internazionale (ISPI) of Milan and member of the scientific council of the Foundation "Giangiacomo Feltrinelli" of Milan, of the board of the doctoral program of the Scuola Normale of Pisa and of the Standing Committee of the School of International Studies of the University of Trento.

José Antonio Gurpegui is Full Professor of American Studies at the Modern Philology Department of the Universidad de Alcalá. He holds a PhD in English Philology from the Universidad Complutense and a PhD in Law from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, both located in Madrid. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University from 1994 to 1996 and a fellow member of the Matthiessen Room of that same university.

He was the Director of Instituto Franklin de la Universidad de Alcalá from 2003 to 2013, and 2022 to 2025. He is the President of HispaUSA (Spanish Association for the dialogue and study of Hispanic communities in the United States), Honorary Rector of the UNADE (Universidad Americana de Europa) and member the Board of Editorial Advisors of the “Recovery Project” of the US Hispanic Literary Heritage from Houston University.

He has published and edited over thirty books, and he is the author of the novels Dejar de recorder no puedo (Huerga y Fierro, 2018), Ninguna mujer llorará por mí (Ediciones B, 2021), and Tiempo de sangres (Universo de Letras, 2023).

Beth Wilson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow who is working on her first book project, Testimonies of Emotion: Enslaved People’s Emotional Lives in the US South. This book focuses attention on enslaved people’s testimony from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to consider how enslaved people created their own gendered emotional ideologies, practices, and modes of emotional expression in the antebellum US South. She has published related articles on gender, slavery, and emotions in American Nineteenth Century History and Slavery and Abolition, and recently co-edited a special issue of Slavery and Abolition, with Emily West, on ‘Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World.’

Beth has previously worked at University of Reading, University of Nottingham, and University of Liverpool, where she taught broadly on the history of race, gender, and resistance in the United States and Atlantic World, specialising in the history of US slavery, gendered experiences of enslavement, and the history of emotions. Beth has also worked extensively with young people, including in collaboration with university widening participation departments and an anti-poverty charity.

Francisco Rodríguez Jiménez holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the Universidad de Salamanca (extraordinary award) and was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard (WCFIA, 2012-2013) and a Fulbright Fellow at George Washington University (2010-2012). He is currently a professor at the Universidad de Extremadura. He has co-edited the books Salazarist Portugal versus Democracy; American Public Diplomacy and Democratization in Spain; Cultural Diplomacy Strategies in an Interpolar World; and University Women in Spain and Latin America; and wrote the book Antidote to Anti-Americanism?: American Studies in Spain (2010).

He is also the author of numerous contributions to national and international journals (including Contemporary European History, Historia y Política, Hispania, and Historia Agraria). He has evaluated international projects for the European Research Agency (Horizon 2020 and Marie Curie Actions), the Fulbright Commission (in Madrid and Washington), and Trinity College Dublin.

Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska is a historian and Associate Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She specializes in twentieth century social and cultural history of the United States and Poland and transnational history. Her areas of research include: women’s and gender history, transnational history of reproduction and public health, history of social movements, and history of immigration. She has been a recipient of several research grants and stipends (Fulbright Senior Award, Kosciuszko Foundation fellowship, National Science Center OPUS grant, National Program for the Development of Humanities grant). Currently Professor Kuźma is pursuing research on the transnational history of the Polish anti-abortion movement (1970s-1990s).

Tom Meinderts joined Sciences Po in 2020 as a PhD candidate at the Center for History.

His thesis is concerned with the political influence of the Christian Right on US foreign policy during the Reagan administration (1981-1989). His research shows that Christian Right leaders had a significant impact on the formulation of US foreign policy under Reagan on issues such as abortion, AIDS, and apartheid.

Tom holds an MA in North American Studies and an MA in International Relations, both from Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research focuses on US foreign policy, particularly during the Reagan administration (1981-1989).

Roberta Ferrari has a PhD in History of Political Thought. She is research fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. Her research focuses on socialist thought in England and Ireland and on the concept of plan and planning in Europe, the USSR and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and in the 1950s and 1960s. She also works on feminist theory, Karl Marx's theory and contemporary migration theory. She has published Beatrice Potter e il capitalismo senza civiltà (Roma, Viella, 2017) and, with Michele Cento, Il socialismo ai margini. Classe e nazione nel Sud Italia e in Irlanda (Soveria Mannelli, Rubettino, 2018).

David E. Nye is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the author or editor of 25 books. Two of his books have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the only person who has won all three of the higest awards given by the Society for the History of Technology: The Dexter Book Prize (1993), The Sally Hacker Book Prize (2009), and the Leonard da Vinci Medal (2005).  

Olivier Burtin is a historian of the modern United States, with a particular interest in state and society, war & society, and the U.S. in the world. His current research focuses on the role of fascism in US society.

He is an Associate Professor of US History and Civilization at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France.