Faculty

Office Location
AD 431P

Dr. Stephen E. Balzarini has been teaching at Gonzaga University since 1978. His academic interests include 19th and 20th century European political and diplomatic history, modern British history and military history. Dr. Balzarini's interest in military history arose out of research on interwar European disarmament and summer participation in the ROTC Military History Workshop at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Dr. Balzarini also has an interest in local and Pacific Northwest history that has been stimulated by his students' work in the Historical Methods class. He has won the Gonzaga University teaching excellence award (1992) and has been recognized in Who's Who in American Teachers (1998). When not studying history, Dr. Balzarini enjoys reading British mysteries and playing golf.

Office Location
AD 431A

Office Hours
By appointment.

Professor of History Robert Carriker is in his forty-second year of teaching at Gonzaga University where he has twice won scholar awards.

Office Location
AD 431N

Office Hours
Tuesday 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Wednesday 12 p.m. -2 p.m.

Dr. Kevin Chambers received his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1999. Dr. Chambers teaches upper division courses in Latin American history and Historical Methods, lower division courses in United States history. His research in Latin American History centers on the experience of Paraguay, especially the Guarani-speaking populations. He received a Fulbright Fellowships for research in Paraguay in 1996. While teaching at Gonzaga, Dr. Chambers has published chapters about Paraguay in The South American Handbook, an edited volume concerning the history of Latin American countries since 1945.

Office Location
AD 431J

Office Hours

My Fall 2009 Office Hours are
Thursday from 12:30 to 3:00
Or by appointment

Eric Cunningham has been at Gonzaga since 2003. A specialist in modern Japanese history, Dr. Cunningham also teaches courses in world and East Asian history. He earned his BA in History from the University of Colorado in 1984, an MA in East Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Oregon in 1999, and a PhD, History, also from the University of Oregon in 2004. Dr. Cunningham's other areas of scholarly interest include intellectual history, popular culture, postmodernism, literary critical theory, Zen Buddhism, and eschatology.

Office Location
AD 341A

Biography: Ph.D. History, University of California Santa Barbara, 1982
M.A. History, University of California Santa Barbara, 1977
B.A. History, Santa Clara University, 1974
Research Fields: Social and cultural history of medieval England; aristocratic women

Office Location
AD 431D

Office Hours
Wednesday, Friday 9-10:30; Thursday 11-12

Professor Donnelly earned his Ph.D. from Marquette University, M.A. from Portland State University, and B.S. at Western Oregon University.  He teaches various topics in U.S. history, including urban and post-World War II American politics and society.

Office Location
AD 335

Professor Betsy Downey is an American Historian whose interests, in keeping with her American Studies degree, are wide-ranging. In addition to her work in American History and American Literature at the University of Denver, she has also studied the Cold War, the New Deal, women in American Literature, and women in European History in post- doctoral seminars at Stanford University and the University of Connecticut. She has published on the Cold War, domestic violence on the frontier, and the works of Mari Sandoz. She has given numerous papers on these topics and also on preservation of the buffalo, the Cascade Crest Trail, and women in ski patrolling. A serious photographer, she has used photography in many of her presentations, and her photographs were used in a book on early childhood by faculty in the School of Education.

Office Location
AD 431M

Dr. Andrew L. Goldman has been a member of the Gonzaga History Department since the fall semester of 2002. His fields of special interest are ancient history (Roman and Greek), classical archaeology, and the classical languages (Latin and Greek). He received his BA from Wesleyan University in 1988, and his MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 1993 and 2000, respectively. He has spent several years living and teaching abroad: he lived in Ankara, Turkey, as a Fulbright Fellow and instructor at Bilkent University (1995-97), and in Rome as a teacher at Duke University's Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (1999-2000). Since 1992, he has been an active member of the excavation team at the ancient site of Gordion (central Turkey), where he has been studying the economic and social history of the small Roman-period town that flourished there between the 1st and 5th centuries AD. He has recently published several Latin inscriptions and the funerary finds from the Roman cemeteries at Gordion. During the summer of 2004 and 2005, with the aid of a Loeb Foundation Grant from Harvard University, he directed a team of archaeologists and assistants in what was the first systematic excavations of the Roman town on the site. In the course of this fieldwork, Roman weapons and armor were unearthed, providing the first concrete evidence for the hypothesis that the town was a minor Roman military site. The material, dating from the first and second centuries AD, is some of the earliest Roman military equipment excavated in the Roman East, and the site is the only Roman military base of its period to ever have been explored in Turkey.

Office Location
AD 431L

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Michael Maher entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in 1975. Fr. Maher followed a typical course of Jesuit formation that included humanities, philosophy and theology interspersed with various teaching assignments which included teaching 7^th and 8^th grade science to Native Americans in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, English at Sogong University in Korea, religion to boys in Omaha, Nebraska as well as teaching positions at Marquette University and Saint Louis University. A few years after ordination, he began doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota majoring in early modern European history with additional studies in Chinese History. Fr. Maher has co-edited a book on confraternities and written several articles and book chapters dealing with the implementation and influence of Jesuit practices on various groups. In recognition of his scholarship, Fr. Kolvenbach, then superior general of the Jesuits, appointed Fr. Maher to the Jesuit Historical Institute. Fr. Maher holds this membership in addition to his current position as associate professor of History at Gonzaga University as well as chair of the department of History and the Director of Catholic Studies.

Office Location
AD 431K

Office Hours
Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 a.m.- 12:00 p.m.
Wednesday 1:00 p.m.- 3:00 p.m.

Dr. O'Connor arrived in Spokane to teach at Gonzaga University in the summer of 2004, following stints at Spalding University (Louisville, KY) and Southern Illinois University (Carbondale).  A specialist in Russian history, Dr. O'Connor has recently published Intellectuals and Apparatchiks: Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev Revoution (Lexington Books, 2006).  His scholarly interests also extend to the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), about which he has published two books: The History of the Baltic States (Greenwood, 2003) and Culture and Customs of the Baltic States (Greenwood, 2006).   Dr. O'Connor's personal interest include international travel, Sasquatch sightings, full-contact wiffleball, catapults, and Falkland War reenactments.

Office Location
AD 431E

Ann Ostendorf recently moved to Spokane via Milwaukee, Nashville, St. Louis and my homeland of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. This year, her first at Gonzaga, she will be teaching Western Civilization I, Colonial North America and Jefferson/Jackson. Her scholarly interests include cultural history, studies of ethnicity and race, the lower Mississippi River region and music. She enjoys world music, travel, yoga, vegetarian soul food and the outdoors. She can’t wait to get to know more people in the Gonzaga and Spokane communities!

Office Location
AD 341C

Dr. Ted Nitz teaches world, Middle Eastern, Islamic, and modern European history, and is the director of International Studies for Gonzaga University. His research and scholarly interests include imperial and Weimar Germany, the early history of the Nazi Party in Hessen-Darmstadt, church and state relations, and European relations with the Middle East. Before beginning his doctoral studies at Washington State University in 1991, he served as an officer in the US Air Force for 23 years with assignments in Germany, the Republic of Turkey, and the United States while traveling throughout Europe and parts of the Middle East.

Office Location
United States

Anthony P. Via, S.J., is a graduate of Gonzaga Prep (1946) and Gonzaga University (A.B. Honors Classical, 1950). He entered the Jesuit order in the fall of 1950 and continued his studies at Gonzaga in philosophy (Ph. L., 1956) and history (M.A., 1956). He also had the opportunity to take post-graduate courses in history at the University of Washington. Father Via was then asked to accept a three-year term on the faculty of the newly established Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon, an honor that was acknowledged in 2005 when the school awarded him the Canisius medal. He taught there from 1956-1959 and then went on to pursue theology studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome (S.T.L, 1963).
Father Via resumed his studies in history at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and completed his Ph. D. in 1966. His area of specialization was Medieval and Byzantine history. His dissertation was on the economic and social conditions in south Italy in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries on the eve of the Norman conquest.
Father Via began his career at Gonzaga University in the fall of 1966. He became the chairman of the department in 1967, Academic Vice-President of the University in 1969, and the director of Gonzaga-in-Florence in 1980.
Father Via has published a number of articles and book reviews and has delivered papers at the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Conference, the Medieval Association of the Pacific, and the Mid-West Medieval History Conference. He has also written a series of articles for Medieval Italy, an Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2004).
In 1979, Father Via was invited to participate in a research project at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University) in Washington D.C., entitled Religious Life in the Middle Ages. Upon completion of that project, he undertook research at the Institute for Research in Medieval Canon Law at Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley. He was also the recipient of a post-doctoral appointment at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California at Los Angeles.
As Director of Gonzaga-in-Florence, Father Via had the opportunity to travel extensively in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean (Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Greece).