Hannah Anderson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of early America and she is interested in the history of science, environmental history, and gender history. Her book manuscript, Lived Botany: Settlers and Natural History in the Early British Atlantic, examines how settlers exchanged botanical knowledge with Indigenous people and how these interactions shaped the development of the science of natural history.

Before coming to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, Dr. Anderson was the University College Fellow in Early American History at the University of Toronto. Dr. Anderson鈥檚 work has been supported by many institutions, including the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. In 2024, Dr. Anderson was a Dibner Long-Term Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in California.

You can reach her at heanderson2@ualr.edu.

Publications:

“The Useful Caribbean: Settlers’ Botany and Plantation Cultures,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 87 no. 2 (April 2026).

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Dr. Kyungsun Lee is an assistant professor of Geography and coordinator of geography in the Department of History.

As an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, Dr. Lee’s research focuses on investigating the governance of socio-technical systems for urban water sustainability transitions. She is particularly interested in the social-political aspects of unconventional freshwater resources, including desalination, wastewater reuse, and stormwater management systems. Her recent research examines how desalination technology is developed, diffused, and implemented in specific locations, and the role of key stakeholders and their networks in each of these processes.

Dr. Lee earned her Ph.D. in environmental and natural resources policy from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and completed her postdoctoral training at Texas A&M University. She holds a master’s degree in the history of science and a bachelor’s degree in chemical and biological engineering, both from Seoul National University. Before joining 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, Dr. Lee was a teaching assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Barclay Key was a bicentennial baby who spent much of his youth in Moulton, Alabama, about 90 miles northwest of Birmingham. His grandparents toiled in a variety of jobs:  picking cotton, raising a few cattle and hogs, driving a school bus, inspecting clothes in a garment factory, and working at the Ford plant in Muscle Shoals. His parents鈥� careers were in public education and the postal service. Barclay lived a charmed childhood compared to his grandparents and parents, occupying much of his time with sports, video games, the church youth group, and aggravating his younger brother.

As an undergraduate, Barclay sampled a variety of colleges and majors but graduated with a degree in history from the University of North Alabama. Unsure of what he wanted to be if and when he grew up, Barclay finished an M.Div. at David Lipscomb University, while working as a high school history teacher. He later earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Florida.

Before joining the faculty at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock in 2012, Barclay taught for one year at Iowa State University and five years at Western Illinois University. He recently published a book, : Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle (Louisiana State University Press, 2020) and previously聽published chapters in two edited collections, (University Press of Florida, 2011) and (University Press of Florida, 2012). Barclay has taught courses in modern US history, African-American history, southern history, US religious history, and Arkansas history.

Through little merit of his own, Barclay married Sonya Gray in 2003, and they have two children. Family and work leave little time for hobbies, but Barclay is an avid runner and a recovering college basketball and football fan. He has run every day since August 1, 2011. As time, opportunity, and finances permit, he also enjoys traveling. His favorite band is the .

Select Publications and Media:

“Historian hears echoes from the past in debate over what history to teach in schools,” , March 26, 2023.

“In the wake of the Central High crisis, crime and injustice,” , October 27, 2020.

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Charles W. Romney, Professor of History and Graduate Coordinator of the Public History M.A. program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, received his doctorate in history from UCLA. He teaches classes on American history, digital history, and world history, and recently taught a new class on the 鈥淗istory of the Internet.鈥� Romney is the author of Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2016), and is finishing a study of the Hawaiian Islands from 1850 to 1920. He received a Pilot Jumpstart Grant from the university in Spring 2022 for his project on 鈥渃oncepts of citizenship.鈥� During the Spring 2024 semester, he was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Advanced Research Collaborative, Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Recent Grants, Presentations, and Publications

Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2016)

鈥淟ocal Organizing, Central Leadership, and a National System of Labor Law, 1940-1945,鈥� in Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll, Impossible Union: The Epic Story of Organizing America鈥檚 Agriculture Industry Workers from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2026)

鈥淐onsistency and Change in the Vocabulary of Fundamental Rights in Hawaiian Law, 1847-1902,鈥� American Nineteenth Century History 20, no. 2 (2019): 141-160

鈥淯sing Vector Space Models to Understand the Circulation of Habeas Corpus in Hawai驶i, 1852-1892,鈥� Law and History Review 34, no. 4 (November 2016): 999-1016

鈥淣ew City Guides and Anachronic Public History,鈥� The Public Historian 37, no. 3 (August 2015): 29-44

鈥淭he Seattle Teamsters and the Procedural State, 1935-1942,鈥� Labor History 56, no. 1 (February 2015): 22-39

Co-Curator (with Jess Porter), Dust, Drought and Dreams Gone Dry: A Traveling Exhibit and Public Program for Libraries about the Dust Bowl, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with Oklahoma State University, Mount Holyoke College, and the American Library Association ($293,000, 2013-2016)

Principal Investigator, grant from the National Archives Trust Fund for Graduate Assistant positions at the Clinton Presidential Library ($257,250, 2011-2026)

Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Advanced Research Collaborative, Graduate Center, City University of New York (Spring 2024 semester)

Accepted Participant, JSTOR Labs/ University of Arizona, Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute, Summer 2022 (online)

Pilot Jumpstart Program, CARES Act funding, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 鈥淐oncepts of Citizenship鈥� (teaching release, Spring 2022)

Accepted Participant, History as a Data Science Workshop, Columbia University, January 2020

Accepted Participant, Summer Institute in Digital Textual Studies, National Humanities Center, 2015-2016

鈥淟ocal Organizing and National Coordination in UCAPAWA, 1935-1950.鈥� 43rd Porter Fortune Symposium: 鈥淥rganizing Agribusiness from Farm to Factory: Toward a New History of America鈥檚 Most Ambitious Labor Union.鈥� March 2018, University of Mississippi

鈥淚nsular Cases and Contested Citizenship in Hawai驶i, 1880-1920: An Analysis with Vector Space Models.鈥� The Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 2017, Denver

鈥淎 Computational Cambridge School: Identifying Conceptual Change and Legal Languages with Vector Space Models.鈥� The Conceptual Change in History conference, September 2016, University of Helsinki, Finland

鈥淯sing Vector Space Models to Understand Conceptual Change.鈥� Pre-circulated paper, Summer Institute in Digital Textual Studies, June 2016, National Humanities Center, North Carolina

鈥淭he Problem of Time in Digital and Print Representations of Cities.鈥� Delivered at the 鈥淧ublic History in a Digital World鈥� conference, International Federation for Public History, October 2014, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

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Katrina Yeaw received a Ph.D. in modern Middle Eastern and North African history from Georgetown University in 2018. Her research interests include gender, race, colonialism, violence, memory, law, resistance and collaboration, and colonial and post-colonial literature.

Her current manuscript project, 鈥淲omen, Resistance and the Creation of New Gendered Frontiers in the Making of Modern Libya, 1890-1980,鈥� examines the gendered transformation in the territory that became Libya from the late Ottoman period until post-independence, examining the multiple ways in which Libyan women interacted with the modernizing Ottoman, Italian, British, and later Libyan states. This project combines oral history narratives and archival research with intersectional approaches to gender, race and class in order to evaluate the impact of foreign rule. She found that the Ottomans鈥� modernizing efforts were not dissimilar in formal intent from some of the rhetorical aspirations of European modernizers as they endeavored to strengthen their political institutions. A part of this modernizing effort included the introduction of new gender norms, which required the introduction of new forms of education. While some Ottoman initiatives met with opposition, they more effectively pursued and had greater moral authority to make reforms. In contrast, the Italian administration struggled to establish a well-ordered colony and to create cohesive modes of governance.

Her second book project, tentatively titled “Gender, Policing and Order in Colonial North Africa and Egypt (1881-1956)”, continues her scholarly work on policing as a way in which to tell a social history of women and non-elite groups under colonial rule. Rather than focusing on a single nation-state or colony, this project will utilize a transnational approach to study policing under three colonial powers in North Africa: The British, the French, and the Italians. Evaluating the racial and gendered assumptions underlying colonial rule, it evaluates the shared patterns of colonial practice between the different European empires in the region and the interaction between indigenous and colonial forms of knowledge. She co-edited a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies on 鈥淕ender and Transnational Histories of Libya鈥� with Barbara Spadaro from the University of Liverpool that appeared in Fall 2018. Her article “Gender, Violence and Resistance under Italian Rule in Cyrenaica, 1923-1934鈥� was published in the issue.

At 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, she is a faculty member with the Middle Eastern Studies Program along with the history department. She teaches classes on the gender, the modern Middle East and North Africa, World Civilization until 1600, historical methods, and historiography.

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To learn more about Dr. Anson, visit .

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Nathan Elliot Marvin is an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he is also a Gender Studies affiliate faculty member. He teaches courses on world history, historical methods, and upper-level seminars on the histories of France, the Haitian Revolution, and the Atlantic world. His research explores the topics of race, religion, slavery, and resistance in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonial empire. Dr. Marvin is currently revising his first book manuscript, Bourbon Island Creoles: Family, Belonging, and the Politics of Race in the French Colonial World, which traces the making of racial categories in France鈥檚 Indian Ocean colonies (R茅union and Mauritius) before and during the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions. He is also working on a second book examining the practice of slaveholding by Catholic clergy in France鈥檚 colonial empire. Dr. Marvin鈥檚 work has been supported by fellowships from the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Camargo Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (Project Development Grant), and the Social Science Research Council. He holds a PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Information about his publications, digital projects, teaching materials, and CV can be found on his .

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Dr. John A. Kirk is the George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Kirk was born and educated in the United Kingdom, where he taught at the University of Wales and the University of London before moving to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock in the summer of 2010. He served five years as History Department chair (2010-2015), and four years as director of the 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity (2015-2019). Kirk鈥檚 research focuses primarily on the history of the civil rights movement. He has published ten books alongside other work in a wide variety of peer-reviewed journals, edited book collections, newspapers, and magazines. He has held several grants and fellowships in both Europe and the United States, including as Roosevelt Study Centre Fellow (Middleburg, The Netherlands), John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Fellow (Boston), and Rockefeller Archive Center Scholar-in-Residence (New York).

Books

Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912-1956. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 2022.

The Civil Rights Movement: A Documentary Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020.

Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2014.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. London and New York: Pearson, 2013.

Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011. Co-edited with Jennifer Jensen Wallach.

An Epitaph for Little Rock: A Fiftieth Anniversary Retrospective on the Central High Crisis. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008. Foreword by Juan Williams.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: Controversies and Debates. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007. Foreword by Minnijean Brown Trickey.

Martin Luther King, Jr. London and New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.

Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

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Marta Cieslak received her Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo and joined the Department of History at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock in 2017. Dr. Cieslak specializes in transatlantic history and her work spans East-Central Europe and the United States as she investigates historical connections and parallels between these two regions. Her research interests include transatlantic migrations, nationalism and nation-building, rural and urban poverty, and progressive reform movements. In her current project, she examines migration in and out of East-Central Europe after the abolition of European serfdom, which took place around the same time as the abolition of slavery in the United States. She is also interested in how these developments shaped dominant nationalist discourses and national reform movements on both sides of the Atlantic.  More recently, she has begun works on a project that will focus specifically on the transatlantic experience of Polish rural women after the abolition of serfdom.

Dr. Cieslak teaches courses in European, world, and women鈥檚 history. As an undergraduate history internship coordinator, she connects history majors with internship opportunities at public history and other institutions across Little Rock and Central Arkansas.

Dr. Cieslak is a native of Leczyca, a small town in Central Poland. Before she joined the Department of History at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, she worked at a non-profit organization that offered educational programs for refugees and as a curatorial assistant at the Buffalo Architecture Center in Buffalo, NY. She is the recipient of the 2017 Swastek Prize, awarded by the editorial board of Polish American Studies for the best article published in a given year.

Recent publications:

鈥溾�橧n the Buffalo Community, but Not of It鈥�: Polish Migrants, Urban Poverty, and American Nation in Buffalo at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,鈥� in Currents: Buffalo at the Crossroads, ed. Peter Christiansen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

鈥淐rossing the Boundaries of Modernity: The Transatlantic Journey of Polish Peasants to the United States.鈥� Polish American Studies, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Fall 2016).

鈥淎nti-Nationalism in the Struggle for a New Just Nation: David Walker, Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois and the African American Search for an American National Identity.鈥� [Published in Polish: 鈥淎ntynacjonalizm w walce o nowy sprawiedliwy nar贸d: David Walker, Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois i afroameryka艅skie poszukiwania ameryka艅skiej to偶samo艣ci narodowej鈥漖. Gda艅skie Studia Mi臋dzynarodowe (Gdansk International Studies), Vol. 13, No. 1-2 (2015).

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Jess Porter is director of the 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture. Before that, he served as History Department chair, an associate professor, and coordinator of geography at the university. Dr. Porter came to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock in 2009 and holds a Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University where he was awarded with the Susan Shaull Medal for Excellence in Teaching Geography. Prior to 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, Dr. Porter taught at Oklahoma State University, where he developed and implemented geospatial curriculum for rural schools, worked as an environmental analyst and mapping specialist in the oil and gas industry, and was employed by an adventure tourism company in Colorado.

Dr. Porter鈥檚 research interests include human-environment interaction with an emphasis on the American Dust Bowl, geospatial technology education, and urban geography. His research on the Dust Bowl was featured in an episode of The Weather Channel鈥檚 When Weather Changed History. He is co-curator of a National Endowment for the Humanities traveling exhibit about the Dust Bowl. He has published four, interactive textbooks in Pearson鈥檚 Encounter Geography series.

Select Publications and Media

鈥淒ust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry: A Traveling Exhibit and Public Programs for Libraries about the Dust Bowl.鈥� Charles Romney co-author. National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association, 2014-2016.

鈥淭he 1930鈥檚 Dust Bowl: Geoarchaeological Lessons from a 20th Century Environmental Crisis,鈥� co-authored with Carlos Cordova. The Holocene, 2015.

鈥淭he Segregation of Little Rock: How Public Policy and the Private Sector Created Racially Segregated Neighborhoods,鈥� co-authored with John Kirk. Arkansas Times, 2014.

鈥淲hat Was the Dust Bowl? Assessing Contemporary Popular Knowledge.鈥� Population and Environment, 2014.

Encounter Weather: Interactive Explorations of Earth Using Google Earth. Stephen O鈥機onnell, co-author. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2014.

Encounter Physical Geography: Interactive Explorations of Earth Using Google Earth. Stephen O鈥機onnell, co-author. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2013.

鈥淟essons from the Dust Bowl: Human-Environment Education on the Great Plains.鈥� Journal of Geography, 2012.

鈥淩e-defining the Dust Bowl Region: Applying Geotechnology to Popular Perception.鈥� Allen G. Finchum, co-author. Great Plains Research, 2009

鈥淒etecting Landscape Change: The View from Above.鈥� Journal of College Science Teaching, 2008.

鈥淧reliminary Assessment of Sand Dune Stability along a Bioclimatic Gradient, North-Central and Northwestern Oklahoma,鈥� co-authored with Carlos E. Cordova. Great Plains Research, 2007.

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