Faculty News Winter 2026
Prof. Mateo J. Carrillo presented the paper "Transportation Infrastructures, Denationalizing Discourses: Rural Roads, Shifting Landscapes, and Contested Citizenship in Postwar Mexico" at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in Chicago on Sunday, January 11, 2026.
In September, Prof. Jeannette Estruth published a new journal article, “The Roots of Inequality: California Agriculture and the Seeding of Silicon Valley’s Technology Economy, 1935–1965” in Urban History. In October, Estruth gave a paper on Silicon Valley feminisms in the 1970s at the Western History Association Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Later that month, Estruth gave a paper at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University as part of an invited conference on the “New Political Histories of the Networked World.” She is currently expanding both of these papers into journal articles.
Amanda Hawes and Jeannette Estruth
In November, Estruth, with the support of the SCU Center for Arts and Humanities, hosted a lecture and moderated discussion with attorney Amanda Hawes, the President and Co-Founder of San José’s Safe Jobs, Healthy Families organization.
Also in November, Estruth presented new writing on the 1992 Senate Elections in California in an invited talk at the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. In December, she submitted this paper as a journal article which is now out for review. Prof. Estruth was also delighted to participate in Prof. G’s inaugural Silicon Valley Studies Initiative planning symposium!
Curt Fukuda and Sonia Gomez in San Jose's Japantown.
Prof. Sonia Gomez has inked a two-book deal with the trade press Basic Books. Readers eagerly await her forthcoming works Dear Mollie and Enemy Aliens. This exciting announcement was made in the nationwide industry magazine Publishers Marketplace! Huge congratulations to Prof. Gomez!
Gomez also published "Inheritance,” an online essay for the Santa Clara Center for Arts and Humanities. The piece is about her maternal grandmother, the inspiration behind her OAH award-winning book, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (NYU Press, 2024).
On a beautiful autumn day in October, Gomez's seminar course on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans took a walking tour of San Jose's Japantown. Led by local historian Curt Fukuda, the group of 17 students strolled the streets of Japantown, learning about the vibrant Japanese immigrant community that developed in the prewar era. Like the Chinese who settled there before, the Japanese experience was marked by exclusion and, during the war, incarceration. Students also learned about current efforts to preserve Japantown.
In high summer, Prof. Meg Gudgeirsson gave two conference papers at the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Meeting. This conference is the regional meeting of the United States’ national guild of historians, and was hosted here at Santa Clara, under the leadership of Prof. Barbara Molony. At the conference, Professor Gudgeirsson presented new work to a national audience, including her "'Principles Incompatible with the Public Peace': The Expulsion of the Berea Abolitionists from Kentucky, 1859-1864” and the paper “'Men Stealers,' John G. Fee, and Berea: Southern Abolitionists’ Religious Foundations against Slavery.”
In September, Gudgeirsson organized the Santa Clara University’s Silicon Valley Studies Initiative first annual symposium. It was eagerly attended by a dynamic and generative mix of faculty from across the University. Prof. Gudgeirsson also coordinated a Call for Papers for an exciting inaugural publication of the SVSI, and has convened writers and abstracts from across the SCU faculty to contribute. This is an ongoing project and we look forward to future updates!
Prof. Marwan Daoud Hanania completed a number of SCU Teaching and Technology Workshops in December to hone his pedagogy skills including “Custom Chatbots for Student Success”, “Managing Inaccessible Documents” and “Creating Accessible Documents.” He continues to work on a number of research projects including a textbook on Middle Eastern history and his monograph on the urban history of Amman.
In early January, Hanania taught an intercession seminar entitled "The Crescent's Journey: Exploring Islamic History, 622-1258" at the Nueva School in San Mateo.
In August, History Department Chair and Prof. Matthew Newsom Kerr attended the biennial conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, held at Humboldt University in Berlin. His paper was titled “The Fault in Our Scars: Inscribing Smallpox Vaccination in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”
October was a massive month for Prof. Matthew Specter. He was invited to give talks on two new projects – one at the Hamburg Institute for Peace and Security Policy and the other at the Institute for World Society Studies at the University of Bielefeld. He also gave a paper at an international conference hosted jointly by Humboldt University and Princeton on the history and future of transatlantic relations. Finally, Prof. Specter’s 2022 Stanford University Press book, The Atlantic Realists, was translated into Mandarin and appeared in the prestigious "Empire and International Law" series from Beijing University.
In December, Specter released a chapter on 1990s cosmopolitanism in the edited volume, Critical Encounters with Habermas's Political and Legal Theory (Brill).
Specter was quoted in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, both online and the January 25, 2026, print edition; Linda Kinstler’s piece surveys leading academics on the malleable concept of realism in foreign affairs.
Prof. Nancy C. Unger (Emerita), presented "More than Orchards: Mountain View in Gilded Age America, 1880s-1920," to a packed house at the Mountain View Library on Nov. 2. The event was sponsored by the Mountain View Historical Society.
Prof. Greg Wigmore (proud Canadian that he is) delivered a number of talks providing the backstory and explaining the backlash to the president's recent rhetoric about Canada. He gave a well-attended colloquium at the Canadian Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled “The 51st State? Canadian Resistance to American Annexationism Since 1775.” Prof. Wigmore also spoke to the American Association of University Women’s Los Gatos-Saratoga branch about "Understanding the Backlash to the '51st State' Idea: Why Canada Has Long Been Wary of Its Biggest Ally." Prof. Wigmore described how, from the nation's founding in 1867 through the 2025 federal election, Canadian leaders have used memories of U.S. invasions, annexation talk, and fears of absorption for domestic political purposes.