Dr. Timothy M. Roberts
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Western Illinois University
602 South McArthur Street, Macomb, IL 61455
Tel 309 298 1053 office 309 569 9016 home Email [email protected]
Education and Academic Experience
Ph.D., University of Oxford, 1998; M.A., Brandeis University, 1993; B.A., University of Virginia,
1987
Assistant Professor of History, Western Illinois University, 2008-present. Courses taught include
HIS 105, U.S. history to 1877; HIS 275, World history since 1000; HIS 303, American legal and
constitutional history; HIS 414G, Early American republic; HIS 415G, Civil War and
Reconstruction; HIS 491 Capstone senior seminar: Atlantic slavery and revolutions; and HIS 510,
Graduate student research seminar: researching in printed sources of the nineteenth century.
Assistant Professor of History, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, 2002-2008. Courses taught
included HIS 431 U.S. history to 1877; HIS 432 U.S. history since 1865; HIS 433 American political
history; HIS 420 America in the World Since 1898; HIS 424 the American Revolution; HIS 508,
Historical methodology; HIS 599 Master‟s thesis; HIS 699 Ph.D. dissertation; HIS 544 Comparative
slavery; HIS 595 Seminar in U.S. history: readings in the Civil War era; HIS 596 Seminar in U.S.
history II: readings in modern U.S. foreign relations; HIS 559 History of capitalism; HIS 575 U.S.
labor and immigration history; HIS 580: Early U.S. foreign relations; HIS 587: Topics in American
legal history; HIST 534, History of American radicalism.
Visiting Assistant Professor, Metropolitan State College of Denver, 2000-2002. Courses taught
included U.S. history to 1877; U.S. history since 1865; the Civil War and Reconstruction; U.S.
history since 1945.
Book Monograph and Selected Refereed Articles
Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (University of Virginia,
2009)
“Learning About Civil War, Separatism, and Nation-Building Through Teaching in the Turkish
Republic,” Journal of American History 96 (March 2010)
“The relevance of Giuseppe Mazzini‟s ideas of insurgency to the American sectional crisis of the
1850s,” in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, eds., Christopher
Bayly and Eugenio Biagini (Oxford University, 2008)
“Teaching by Analogy: Comparing American and Turkish History,” Common-place: The Interactive
Journal of Early American Life, October 2007, online at
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-08/no-01/school/
"Margaret Fuller's Rome and the Problem of Provincial American Democracy,” Patterns of
Prejudice 40 (February 2006)
"'Revolutions Have Become the Bloody Toy of the Multitude': European Revolutions, the South, and
the Crisis of 1850," Journal of the Early Republic 25 (June 2005); winner of the 2006 Best Article
Prize of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic
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Dr. Timothy M. Roberts
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Western Illinois University
Book Monograph and Selected Refereed Articles (cont’d)
"Now the enemy is within our borders: the impact of European revolutions on American perceptions
of violence before the Civil War," ATQ: 19th C. American Literature and Culture 17 (September
2003)
Selected Conference Presentations
“Transnational and comparative approaches to the early American republic: patterns in republican
nation-building,” 2010 conference of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic
“American-Levantine interaction in Smyrna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,” conference of
the Mediterranean Maritime History Network, Izmir, Turkey, May 2010
“Louis Kossuth as a European Oriental,” contribution for Global Intellectual History: An
International Workshop, Columbia University, New York City, April 2010
“Teaching the American Civil War in Turkey,” 2009 conference of the American Historical
Association
“American Missionaries and Opium Traders in Turkey,” 2007 conference of the World History
Association
“Relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Early American Republic,” 2003 Conference of the
Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians
“A „Wilder Scheme than the French Socialist Ever Dreamed‟: Reform Movements and the Growth
of the State in America and France during the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” 2001 Convention of the
American Historical Association
Teaching: selected student achievements
Eric Willey, M.A. degree, Western Illinois University, 2010, research article written under my
supervision, “A Time to Build: Competing Visions of ‘Republicanism’ in the Controversy of the
Polish Land Claim in Winnebago County, Illinois, 1834–1842,” currently under review by the
Journal of Illinois History.
Adam Bednar, winner of the Western Illinois University 2009 Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society
Undergraduate Research Paper Award, April 5, 2009, for a research paper written under my
supervision, "The Social Institution of Dueling in Antebellum America (1800 - 1830)."
Robert Deveraux, winner of the Kevin Carroll Award for the Best Graduate Student Paper in
Military History at the 2009 Missouri Valley History Conference, for presentation of a research
paper written under my supervision, “The First American Fleet: the Sailing Warships of the QuasiWar, 1798-1801.”
Bahar Gursel, Ph.D. degree, Bilkent University, 2007, for a dissertation written under my
supervision, “Friendship, Crisis, and Estrangement: U.S.-Italian relations, 1871-1920.” Award of
Ph.D. required publication of a refereed research article, “Citizenship and Military Service in
Italian–American Relations, 1901–1918,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 (July,
2008).
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Dr. Timothy M. Roberts
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Western Illinois University
Teaching: selected student achievements (cont’d)
Melike Tokay, M.A. degree, Bilkent University, 2006, for a thesis written under my supervision,
“The American women's foreign mission movement: „cooperation of Eve with the Redeemer‟ in
evangelical missions.”
Emrah Sahin, M.A. degree, Bilkent University, 2004, for a thesis written under my supervision,
“Errand into the East: a history of evangelical American Protestant missionaries and their missions
to Ottoman Istanbul during the nineteenth century.”
Ozlem Boztas, M.A. degree, Bilkent University, 2003, for a thesis written under my supervision,
“Empowerment through education: Mexican American agency measured through primary education
in New Mexico, 1846-1920.”
Grants and Scholarships Received
Joan Nordell research fellowship, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2010
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “The American Civil War at 150: New
Approaches,” Savannah, Georgia, June-July, 2010
National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, “Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War - A
Traveling Exhibition to Libraries,” to be hosted by Western Illinois University Malpass Library,
October-November, 2010
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Rethinking America in a Global
Perspective,” Washington, DC, June-July, 2008
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation research fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2007
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation research fellowship, Virginia State Historical Society, 1995
London Royal Historical Society research grant, 1995
Brandeis University graduate scholarship, 1992-3
Professional Memberships/Affiliations
American Historical Association, World History Association, Society for Historians of the Early
American Republic
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