The Chair’s Message: History at Binghamton Spring 2026

For more than half a century, our department has enjoyed the privilege of mentoring dynamic students in history and boasting of their many, many lifetime accomplishments as alumni. We want to seize upon this moment to thank you for becoming our colleagues as historians and sharing the value of historical knowledge with your loved ones, coworkers and the broader public. An academic discipline without dedicated alumni is nothing. You make history the vibrant field that it is.

But we still have much work to do. We live in an era of grave threats to democracy and public support for education, of violence and inequity that reverberate on a global scale. In this context, political players often find it useful to refashion historical knowledge for their own agendas or to negate it altogether. We are now starting to feel the serious reverberations of cuts in federal funding. Meanwhile undergraduate students confront many misconceptions about the professional pathways that degrees in history can illuminate. In their uncertainty, they fear limitations and migrate from the discipline whose moral value and purpose they recognize. As university administrations shift focus to the natural sciences and professional schools, history departments struggle to support opportunities for students of color, who are often first-generation college students.

Our faculty members have been devoted to meeting these challenges in our teaching, our mentoring and our research. The History Department is co-sponsoring a lecture by Pulitzer-winning Edda Fields-Black organized by Anne Bailey and the Harriet Tubman Center for Freedom and Equity. Dina Danon continues to co-teach (with Bryan Kirschen, Romance Languages) a research-intensive cycle of courses on Routes and Routes: Sephardic Studies for the university’s Source Project. Eliyana Adler is now offering an introductory course on the history of the Holocaust, one long awaited by Harpur College students. But we still have much more work to do.

In our last newsletter, we welcomed the publication of Other Voices in Soviet History: Collected for a Devil’s Advocate, co-edited by Heather DeHaan. In this letter, we now celebrate the achievements of some of our distinguished faculty, students, and alumni. Elisa Camiscioli’s Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations has won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies for the year 2025. Jonathan Jones, a Binghamton History PhD, has published Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis. A work with many contemporary resonances, it is a finalist for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. But we still have much more work to do.

A discipline without dedicated alumni is nothing, and today our students and future alumni need your support more than ever. This support can take many different forms. Is there a type of historical work that you would like to help facilitate? You can contribute to our general fund or to whatever purpose you define, including student scholarships, high-impact learning experiences, faculty and student research, or projects in public or digital history. Would you like to mentor our future alumni by contributing time and energy? You can offer to host student interns at your professional workplace, lead a workshop on career pathways, or serve as a career mentor to a major or a potential major. Do you have any ideas or personal updates to share with our community? We warmly welcome them and hope to see you at future alumni events, whether in person or remotely.

But above all, we thank you for being our colleagues and for your dedication to the discipline of history. It would not exist without you.

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