Professors David Sartorius And Mikhail Dolbilov Granted Tenure & Promotion To Associate Professors

The Department of History welcomes two new associate professors to its ranks, Professors David Sartorius and Mikhail Dolbilov.

The Department of History welcomes two new associate professors to its ranks, Professors David Sartorius and Mikhail Dolbilov

David Sartorius is a historian of colonial Cuba who has examined Spanish loyalism in the period before, during, and after independence. Sartorius received the PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003, and has travelled often over the years to Cuba to conduct research in local archives.  His book, Ever Faithful, appeared from Duke University Press in 2014, and it examines the large numbers of slave and free Cubans that remained loyal to Spain despite a mounting independence movement.  Besides contributing to our knowledge about the texture of Cuba’s independence movement, Sartorius’s work makes major interventions into the history of slavery and the African Diaspora.  In the department Sartorius has also been active in raising undergraduate and graduate student awareness of recent trends in theory as they relate to the study of history. 

Mikhail Dolbilov is a historian of imperial Russia who focuses on the tsarist bureaucracy’s mentality and statecraft.  Dolbilov completed the PhD at Voronezh State University in 1996 and since then has compiled an enviable record of publication.  His opus includes the 2010 Russian language study,  Russian Country, Foreign Faith, as well as more than twenty articles, and three edited books dealing with the nineteenth-century Russian empire’s confessional and ethnic policies. At almost 1,000 pages, Russian Country has sparked a major reevaluation of notions about imperial treatment of religious and ethnic minorities in the period leading up to the Revolution.  Meticulously researched, the “Dolbilov Thesis” it outlines has been described by one reviewer as a “stupendous” achievement.