Dr. Douglas Bisson, Professor
615-460-6248
I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I earned the B.A. in History from Florida Atlantic University and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from The Ohio State University. A Fulbright Scholarship allowed me to pursue dissertation research in London during 1983-1984. I arrived at Belmont University in 1987. I teach courses on medieval history, early modern England, the history of Ireland, and the history of baseball. I also teach a section of the First Year Seminar titled “Denying the Holocaust: How we know what isn’t so.” I am the author of The Merchant Adventurers of England: The Company and the Crown, 1474-1564 (University of Delaware Press, 1993) and co-author of A history of England, fifth edition, two volumes (Prentice Hall, 2008). In the classroom, I hope my students will see the past as a place where, as G.M. Trevelyan says, there once walked “men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.”
I am married to Dr. Cynthia Bisson, who also began her teaching career at Belmont in 1987. Cindy teaches courses on the history of modern Japan, world history, the French Revolution and Napoleon and the history of modern France. Our son, Richard Bisson, is a sophomore at Vanderbilt majoring in physics and mathematics. The latter regards his father’s ignorance of science as a source of endless amusement. I am a life-long fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Miami Dolphins. Having lived to see the Birds win their tenth World Series in 2006, Dr. Bisson has hopes of seeing the Fins win a third Super Bowl before ”he rests in peace, ‘e’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible….” As the last line suggests, I am also a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Dr. Brenda Jackson-Abernathy, Department Chair and Associate Professor
615-460-6251
A little about myself . . . I am a transplanted Westerner and grew up in Idaho and California. I earned my B.A. and M.A. degrees at San Jose State University in California, and my doctorate at Washington State University in Pullman, under the tutelage of my hero, Sue Armitage, a pioneer in western women’s history. I taught at San Jose State University, Washington State University, the University of Idaho, and Gonzaga University before joining the History faculty at Belmont in the fall of 2003. I teach 18th and 19th century U.S. history courses, as well as courses on Latin American history and Women’s history. I also teach the History Department’s Junior-level research and writing course and, with my friend Darlene Panvini in the Biology Department, teach a linked cohort. In 2005, the University of Nebraska Press published my manuscript, Domesticating the West. The Re-creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class, as well as a new edition of The Wide Northwest, the reminiscences of a 19th-century schoolteacher, with my Introduction.
My husband, Jack, is a native Tennessean, and I have two step-daughters, Sarah and Hannah, 7th and 4th grades, respectively. I am an avid sports fan and grew up watching the Oakland A’s and Raiders during their glory years. I was privileged – though didn’t know it then – to attend both World Series and NFL playoff games in Oakland. My husband is a UT grad and we make the trek to Knoxville to cheer on the Vols (though the Pac-10 will always be first in my heart – GO COUGS!) We are also Nashville Predators’ fans, attend the symphony and theater, and enjoy traveling and visiting historic sites.
I love history – and have since I was a little girl. I love teaching history and helping students understand there is much more to its study than the memorization of names and dates. My goal is for students to understand the world around them – and the best way to do that is to study the history of a particular place or people. “Understanding” doesn’t necessarily mean “agreeing with” – a hard lesson for students to learn, but once they do – the world is their oyster! As the great philosopher Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Think about it – and take a history class!!
Dr. Peter Kuryla, Visiting Assistant Professor
615-460-6694
I am an American, Texas born (to adapt a phrase favored by Augie March). When I was very small, my military family moved around a bit, finally settling in Rantoul, Illinois. I enjoyed an idyllic Midwestern boyhood punctuated by frequent trips to Chicago to visit my large Polish family who, at the time anyway, struck me as an awfully loud group of people. From there I spent my formative years in Wichita Falls, Texas, where I earned my B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from Midwestern State University and where I met my wife Kathy. We moved to Nashville in the Fall of 2000 and I finished my PhD in history at Vanderbilt University in December of 2006. I wrote my dissertation on American intellectuals’ responses to the Civil Rights Movement, which has since transitioned into a more ambitious manuscript that travels under the name “The Imagined Civil Rights Movement: Terrains of Memory.” In it I offer a few answers to the questions of how it is that so many people have come to reference or claim the movement, and why they consider their claims legitimate. Thus far I’ve published several shorter pieces: a book chapter, a journal article, and a slew of encyclopedia articles. I’m also an inveterate giver of conference papers here in the States and in the UK.
I study the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, and I tend to focus on racial thought along with American philosophy and literature after the Civil War. At Belmont I teach courses on the African American Experience, American Thought and Culture after the Civil War, and a course on what others have thought of us called “International Vistas: the US Viewed from Abroad.” In my classes, I try to get my students to think across traditional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. So I encourage a way of looking at the past that cultivates what Lionel Trilling called “the moral obligation to be intelligent,” such that history becomes a tool for purposeful action in whatever field students choose to pursue. Probably in utter defiance of this philosophy, I am a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, which means that I can’t enjoy it when they win. When I’m not consumed by the emotional terrorism that comes with loving the Cubbies, I’m a hack player of music, which reminds of me of a question a philosophy prof of mine once posed to me: “Would you rather be the Boss (by which he meant Bruce Springsteen) or Arnold Toynbee?” At the time, I opted for the Boss while privately thinking that Toynbee wouldn’t be half bad at all.
Dr. Cynthia Bisson, Adjunct Assistant Professor
615-460-6994
A Kentuckian (a happy event that puts me in the ranks of other famous Kentuckians like Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Alben Barkley, and Mary Todd Lincoln) I earned my doctorate in History from The Ohio State University in 1989. As an unapologetic Francophile and Japanophile, I teach courses on French Revolution, Modern France, Europe in the Age of Absolutism, as well The Samurai and their World and Modern Japan. Recently Modern China and a Survey of East Asian history were added to my teaching repertoire. Of course, I enjoy learning about all cultures and their histories (which helps a great deal when teaching the two-course sequence in world history). Currently I am taking my second year of Japanese language instruction and surviving.
I have published numerous book reviews, a brief article on Napoleon Bonaparte for Tennessee Humanities and contributed entries to historical dictionaries on World War II France and Napoleon. Moreover I made numerous public presentations throughout Tennessee on Napoleon’s life for Tennessee Humanities. In addition I attended conferences sponsored by the American Historical Association and French Historical Studies where I presented my research on crime and criminal justice in France during the nineteenth century. Other conferences in which I participated as chair or commentator include the European Section of the Southern Historical Association, the AsianNetwork, and the Southeastern Conference of the Association of Asian Studies. In May 2008 I joined the Belmont Study-Abroad trip to Japan and look forward to returning to Japan in May 2009 with Belmont students.
A member of West End United Methodist Church, I enjoy gardening, watching foreign films -- primarily French and Japanese ones -- and listening to jazz. (I like all jazz—from the Big Band era to free form.) Most of all, I enjoy the time spent with my husband (a heartless Anglophile), our son, Richard, and with parents, siblings, friends, and students.
Dr. Daniel Schafer, Professor
615-460-6378
I was born and raised in Chicago, pursued my undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis, and earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan. Before coming to Belmont in 1996 I taught for a few years at Truman State University in Missouri. As a scholar I am particularly interested in the role that non-Russian minorities have played in Russian and Soviet history, particularly the Muslim peoples of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Russia proper. My research has focused on the history of two Muslim groups in Russia, the Tatars and Bashkirs, who live throughout the former Soviet Union, but especially in a region stretching from the Volga River eastward to the Ural Mountains.
My teaching load includes an introduction to historical methods and historiography called The Craft of History, a two-semester sequence on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, a research seminar on the Russian Revolution and Civil War, surveys of Central Asian and Middle Eastern history, and an introduction to environmental history. I have also taught the First-Year Seminar and Linked Cohort classes. I've enjoyed my work with students on campus as an advisor to Belmont's chapter of Amnesty International and to the Belmont Coalition Against Genocide. I've also enjoyed traveling with students on study abroad trips to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. On one trip to China, I was ‘discovered' in Yunnan Province by a film crew and asked to play the role of Joseph Rock, the National Geographic writer and botanist, in a documentary made for China National Television. My portrayal nearly won me an award for best leading role in a comedy.
Attending my sons' sports and music activities keeps me busy. Vladimir, 17, is the basketball and soccer player, while Jacob, 16, is a violinist and tournament chess player. Melissa, my wife, is an assistant dean and associate professor of piano at Vanderbilt. Rounding out the family are our two rescue dogs, Betty and Mabel, who specialize in chasing squirrels in the park. My hobbies are puttering in the yard and garden at home, collecting historic paper money, and reading alternative history novels. As a speaker of Russian, I like to listen to Russian radio stations over the internet. I've traveled to Russia quite often during the past quarter century-ask me sometime about my travel adventures, especially on trains, in the Soviet Union and Russia.
Dr. Jeffrey Coker, Associate Professor
615-460-5512
Gina Peeler, Instructor
615-460-6413
I grew up in Kentucky, and graduated from Murray State University with an undergraduate degree in History in 1997. I received my MA in Modern European History from Catholic University of America in Washington, DC in 2000. I have been adjuncting at Belmont since 2004. I also has a passion for database development, and when I am not at Belmont teaching, I am often working on database design projects. In my spare time, I am an outdoor junkie, and in a perfect world, I would teach history and design databases while hiking though the woods. I enjoy backpacking, mountain biking, and trail running, and was recently able to combine all three activities in a single fantastic week in Moab, Utah.
Debi Back, Instructor
615-460-6413
