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History
Our Professional, Dedicated and Diverse Faculty
Karen Belmore
Lawrence Charap received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2001 with a specialization in American cultural and intellectual history. His dissertation focused on Jewish-Christian dialogue in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his work has appeared in the journal _American Jewish History_ and in several volumes of collected articles. Lawrence has taught at URI since 2002, including courses covering both halves of the survey, almost all specialized time periods in American history, and, currently, the U.S. history senior thesis seminar. While not teaching at URI, he works as a content and curriculum specialist in history and social studies courses for the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board.
Catherine DeCesare received her PhD in US History from Providence College in 2000. She received her M.A. in US History from Fordham University in 1987 and a B.A. in History from Providence College in 1985. Her dissertation entitled, "Courting Justice: Rhode Island Women and the General Court of Trials, 1671- 1729" focuses upon women's participation in civil litigation and criminal proceedings in colonial Rhode Island. She has contributed a chapter on women and the legal culture of colonial Rhode Island in Patrick T. Conley, ed., Liberty and Justice: A History of Law and Lawyers in Rhode Island, 1636- 1998. She enjoys teaching US History and especially US Women's History. In addition to women's history, other areas of interest include colonial and revolutionary America, legal history and Rhode Island History. She also serves as history coordinator for the Providence Campus and is available to meet with students in room 253.
Burton Edwards received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, specializing in Medieval European History. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University; Drexel University; Camden County College; Rhode Island College and the Rhode Island School of Design. His research focuses on Biblical commentaries written during the Carolingian Era. He is an expert in the history of medieval handwriting; the history of the manuscript book and textual transmission. His teaching interests include the entire span of Western Civilization; Early and Late Medieval History; The History of The Renaissance and the Reformation and the History of the Book from 300 A.D. to 1600. He also works full time at the John Carter Brown Library on the campus of Brown University.
David Fitzsimons received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He has received fellowships for study at Harvard, Brown, and Penn. He worked his way through college at Wayne State University in Detroit, an urban institution similar to URI-Providence in that it is dedicated to serving a diverse student population composed of both traditional and non-traditional students. His research interests include the history of American politics, international history, the history of 17th- and 18th-century British North America, and the history of the United States to 1848. His teaching interests include both halves of the U.S. history survey, the history of United States foreign relations, and upper level classes on early American history to 1848. An award-winning author, he recently completed a book on the ideology of American foreign relations.
Reva Greenburg received her BA in History from Northwestern University (more years ago than she’s willing to count), a Master’s in Education from Roosevelt University while teaching in the Chicago Public Schools, and a Ph.D. in European History from the University of California, San Diego. She taught at San Diego State University in both the History and Women’s Studies Departments before leaving that lovely climate for the delights of Rhode Island. She then taught at the Kingston Campus for the first several years and has been teaching in Providence for more than a decade. She has found the students at URI Providence to be an absolute joy. The wide variety in age, experience, country of origin, and interests of the students has made teaching here continually interesting and rewarding. Her specialty has been British History. She has published a book, “Fabian Couples, Feminist Issues,” and various articles on related topics. She would be hard pressed to state which area she most prefers to teach, British, European (especially Twentieth Century Europe) or Women’s History. She loves to teach them all.
Virginia Laffey
Bill McCoy is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Boston University. He specializes in African history, with minor fields in modern British history, anthropology, and theology. He got his M.A. from BU in 2004 and his B.A. (also in history) from Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, CA in 2000. He has spent more than 8 years living in Africa, primarily in Swaziland, but also in Rwanda. His research focuses on southern Africa (primarily on Swaziland) and on social history and religious practice in the African context.
Samuel Oppenheim has degrees from the U. of Arizona
(B.A., History, 1962), Harvard U. (A.M., Regional Studies Soviet Union,
1964), and Indiana U. (Ph.D., Russian/Soviet
and European History, 1972). His area of research specialization
and publications is late nineteenth and twentieth century Russia/U.S.S.R.
He taught for three years at Bishop College, an all-black college
in Dallas (1964-1967) and for thirty-five years at California State
University, Stanislaus (1971-2005), teaching Russian/Soviet History,
Modern European History, Western Civilization/World Civilizations,
Comparative Religions, Jewish History, the Holocaust, and graduate
seminars in International Relations and European History. Among his
publications are articles and book reviews in Soviet Studies, Slavic
Review, Russian Review, The American Historical
Review, the Australian Journal of Slavonic Studies,
and The History Teacher, a pedagogical journal. He also wrote
sixty-nine entries in the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet
History and a twenty-five page entry under "Jew" in An
Ethnohistorical Dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires.
Dennis Ricci
Alison Rose received her Ph. D. in Jewish History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998. She has an M.A. in History from the University of Washington in Seattle and a B.A. in History from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her research focuses on the images and participation of Viennese Jewish women in turn of the century Viennese culture. She has published several articles in this area and is currently working on a book on Jewish women in Fin de Siècle Vienna. She enjoys teaching modern European history courses at URI, including Western Civilization Since 1789, the History of the Holocaust, as well as the capstone in European history.
Frederick Stirton Weaver received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is Emeritus Professor of Economics and History at Hampshire College. He has published five books on Latin American history and four books on higher education and economics. His most recent book on Latin American history is Latin America in the World Economy: Mercantile Colonialism to Global Capitalism (Westview Press). He very much enjoys working with students at the Providence campus.
Robert Widell grew up in Alabama before attending Duke University in North Carolina. Since that time he has lived for various periods in Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans, Boulder, Colorado, and, now, Providence. His interests outside of history include film, running, cooking, and Duke basketball. His current research focuses on black activism in Birmingham, Alabama during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Based on that research, his current project explores a variety of efforts by that city's African American community to address such long-standing issues as police brutality, job discrimination, poverty, and health care. In so doing, the work encourages historians to take an expanded view of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, taking into account locally-based activism that continued into the mid-1970s. At URI, he teaches both United States and African American History, including HIS 150, HIS 340, and HIS 341.