Timeline – 1974 – Faculty Diversity – II

As the History curriculum went global in the 1950s and 1960s, our faculty eventually became somewhat more diverse in racial and ethnic terms (although our information is limited).

Image from Solving for X: A New Approach to Faculty Assessment by By Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger
Solving for X: A New Approach to Faculty Assessment

European historian George L. Mosse, who joined the department in 1955, seems to have been the first Jewish member of our faculty.

The first faculty member of Asian extraction appears to have been Tetsuo Najita, who specializes in Japanese intellectual history and taught briefly in our department (1968-1969) before moving elsewhere. He was followed in 1970 by Chinese historian Yu-sheng Lin, who taught in our department from 1970 to 2004. Also of Asian extraction, Avadh Kishore Narain, historian of Buddhism in ancient India and Central Asia, held a joint appointment in History and South Asian studies from 1971 to his retirement in 1988.

The first African American faculty member was William A. Brown, who completed his PhD (1969) in African history and Islamic studies in our department. While a graduate student, he organized the first conference on Black studies at the UW. After holding positions at Ahmadu Bello University (Zaria, Nigeria), Yale, and Harvard, Brown taught in our department from 1974 to 2006.

The University of Wisconsin Digital Collections and the UW Archives have information on some of our faculty, although finding it takes some work.