Faculty | History | SIU

Office Hours: T & R 12-3

Jonathan Bean is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and a Professor of History at Southern Illinois University. He received his Ph.D. in Business History from the Ohio State University in 1994. Bean is the author of Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, which received praise from Choice (American Library Association) and Diverse Issues in Higher Education (formerly Black Issues in Higher Education).

Office Hours: T &R 10-1 virtual

Getahun Benti is a Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He received his Ph.D. in African history and urban studies from Michigan State University in 2000 and came to SIUC in the same year. He teaches a variety of courses in African and world history, including a comparative slavery course.

Ted Cohen (BA, Yale University; Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park) is a historian of Latin America and the African diaspora. He is interested in the racialization of culture, space, and knowledge in regions of the Americas not typically associated with Blackness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Office Hours: MWF 8-10 virtual

Dr. Pamela Smoot received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University and came to SIU the next year. Dr. Smoot specializes in African-American history and archival administration. Her current research focuses on "Black Pittsburgh: The Depths of a Secret City, 1830-1945."

Office Hours: W 12-3; T & R 2-2:30 virtual

Dr. Joe Sramek received his B.A. in history from SUNY-Binghamton in 1998 and his Ph.D. from CUNY Graduate Center in 2007. He is the author of Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), which examines the roles that gender and race played in the construction of colonial rule in British India under the aegis of the East India Company.

Office Hours: M-W 9-11

Theodore R. Weeks is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where teaches courses in modern world, European, and Russian history. He also teaches at the College of Europe, Natolin (Warsaw). Among his works are Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (1996), From Assimilation to Antisemitism: the “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850-1914 (2006), and Vilnius between Nations 1795-2000 (2015). His research interests include nationalism, ethnic relations, antisemitism, and, more recently, the history of technology. He is presently working on a history of radio in interwar Poland (1920-1939).

Dr. Gray H. Whaley earned his PhD in History from the University of Oregon in 2002 and has been History faculty at SIU Carbondale since 2006 where he is a tenured associate professor. His major research fields are American Indians and the American West. His teaching fields include these subjects as well as Environmental history and various topics of the early and modern United States.

Dr. Hale Yılmaz received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 2006. Her research and teaching interests center on Middle Eastern history, including Turkish history and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Dr. Yılmaz previously taught at the University of Montana.