Emerita/us Faculty

Robert L. Beisner

University of Chicago

A historian of American foreign relations, Professor Beisner taught at American University for thirty years. He is the author of Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists 1898-1900 and From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900 and the winner of the Nevins and Dunning Prizes. Beisner was editor in chief of the two-volume bibliographic Guide to the Foreign Relations of the United States (2nd edition). He has also just published Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War.

Richard Breitman
Harvard University

A member of the faculty for over thirty years, Professor Breitman is a Distinguished Professor of German History and the Holocaust. He is the author or co-author of ten books and many articles in German History, U.S. History, and the Holocaust. Apart from his latest book, FDR and the Jews, co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman, he is best know for The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Knopf 1991) and Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (Hill and Wang, 1998). He served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which helped to bring about declassification of more than eight million pages of U.S. Government records under a 1998 law. He is editor of the scholarly journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Roger H. Brown

Harvard University

A member of the active faculty for over thirty years, Professor Brown is a historian of early America whose books include Republic in Peril: 1812 and Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution. He founded the university's Friends of the AU Library and still teaches courses on early America.

Ira Klein

Columbia University

After growing up in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, Professor Klein earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he also wrote key articles for the Columbia Encyclopedia, a light history of early modern Europe, and taught at Queens College. He spent three years in England and one in India doing research. In London, he was a founding member of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination. His many other writings include articles on development, environment, and health. At American University, he helped develop the Honors Program and a community service-learning program and dorm floor.

James A Malloy

Ohio State University

A historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, Professor Malloy's early research on the Zemstrov Reform in Tsarist Russia led to a series of important journal articles. Much of his later work focused on U.S.-Soviet space exploration, including a monograph, U.S.-U.S.S.R. Space Negotiations and Cooperation, 1958-1965. For almost two decades, Professor Malloy advised and led American University's chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honorary.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

Howard University

A historian of African American history and culture, Professor Reagon has published many books and articles, including We'll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African-American Gospel Composers; Black People and their Culture: Selected Writings from the African Diaspora; We Who Believe in Freedom: Sweet Honey in the Rock, Still on the Journey; and You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition. She is the artistic director of Sweet Honey of the Rock, the renowned and Emmy-nominated African-American women's a cappella ensemble she founded in 1973. She is curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and has won the Charles E. Frankel prize; the Presidential Medal; the George F. Peabody Award for the radio series, Wade in the Water; and a MacArthur Fellowship.