Institute K-12 & University Faculty and Speakers
Eric Beckman has more than 34 years of experience teaching history in high school classrooms. He currently offers courses in world history at Anoka High School in Minnesota, operates a tutoring service, and regularly contributes to professional development programs for educators. He participated in the 2023 AHA Online Teacher Institute in World History.
Dr. James K. Blackwell Jr. (co-editor of the online source collection) is assistant professor of history at Winston-Salem State University. A historian of labor, entrepreneurship, migration, and resistance within Africa and the African Diaspora, Dr. Blackwell earned his PhD at Michigan State University. His book manuscript explores the migration of Igbo into British Cameroon.
Dr. Judith Byfield has written or edited several books and monographs on social and economic history of women in Nigeria and beyond, including most recently Africa and World War II (2015), Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century (2017), and The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Post-War Nigeria (2022). She is professor of history at Cornell University.
Dr. David Eaton is associate professor of world and African history at Grand Valley State University. He received his PhD from Dalhousie University in 2008 and co-hosts On Top of the World: A World History Podcast. His doctoral research focused on the history of cattle raiding along the Kenya-Uganda border, and he has published articles in several journals including Nomadic Peoples, World History Connected, and African Affairs.
Dr. Trevor R. Getz is professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. His work focuses on history education, especially in the field of world history, as well as the social history of Africa. He is the author or co-author of 11 volumes, including Abina and the Important Men, winner of the 2014 James Harvey Robinson Prize, and he has also written and produced a number of documentaries and historical films that have garnered festival prizes. He is the recipient of the AHA’s 2020 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award.
Dr. Sandra Greene, Anbinder Professor of African History at Cornell University, has researched and published across a range of fields over the past 40 years, from the study of gender and ethnic relations in West Africa to the role that religious beliefs, warfare, and the experience of slavery have played in the lives of individuals and communities in 18th- and 19th-century Ghana. She currently serves on the AHA Council.
Dr. Jennifer Hart (co-editor of the online source collection) is professor of history at Virginia Tech. A historian of mobility, technology, infrastructure, and urban space in Ghana and West Africa, Hart is the author of Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (2016), Making an African City (2024), and articles in a variety of leading venues. She is the director of Accra Wala, a spatially embedded, community-generated archive of urban life in Accra, Ghana. She is also the North American President for the International Society for the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning in History.
Dr. Stephen Jackson is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Kansas who specializes in imperial and colonial studies, focusing on the history of the British Empire and the relationship between education and imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Previously, Jackson spent 10 years in the history department at the University of Sioux Falls, earning tenure in 2019.
Dr. Laura Mitchell is associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches African and world history. Throughout her career she has sought innovative ways to bring the early modern period, both in Africa and globally, to life for readers and students. Her first book, Belongings, was a born-digital project supported by the NEH, ACLS, and the AHA’s Gutenberg-e prize that explains deep connections between natural resource use and cultural formation in colonial South Africa. She co-authored a groundbreaking world history textbook, served as president of the World History Association, and will edit the Journal of World History starting in 2025.
Dr. John Terry is an award-winning world history teacher with 15 years experience in college and high school classrooms. He currently teaches world history (9th grade survey) and Medieval Africa and the World (upper-level seminar) at The Paideia School in Atlanta, Georgia. His published work includes peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern History and New Chaucer Studies. Terry has consulted with organizations such as the National Humanities Center and the Medieval Academy of America to produce accessible curriculum and lesson plans for teaching the global middle ages.
Dr. Sarah Weicksel is the AHA’s director of research and publications. She is the project director of the NEH-funded project “Teaching Things: Material Culture in the History Classroom.” In addition to her work at the AHA, she is a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Principal Project Personnel
Dr. Brendan Gillis (project director) is an associate professor of history (on leave) at Lamar University, as well as the AHA’s director of teaching and learning. His research and teaching focus on the cultural, legal, and political history of Britain and the British Empire, and he has experience teaching world history at the college level. In 2023, Gillis organized and convened the first AHA Online Teacher Institute in World History. Gillis will work with distinguished scholars of African and world history to coordinate the historical content and structure of the institute.
Dr. Whitney E. Barringer (replacement director and K–12 education specialist) is data and program analyst, teaching and learning, at the AHA. From 2022–24, she was a researcher for the AHA’s Mapping the Landscape of Secondary US History Education project, which produced a landmark analysis of published content standards, district curricula, surveys of educators, and interviews with state- and district-level administrators. Before joining the AHA, she taught for five years at the University of Central Arkansas. Barringer will coordinate the practical components of this institute.