People

Our Academic Team

Co-Director: Denver Brunsman is the Chair of the History Department at George Washington University. He writes on the politics and social history of the American Revolution, early American republic, and British Atlantic world. His courses include “George Washington and His World,” taught annually at Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, and "The Price of Freedom: Normandy, 1944," which includes a trip over spring break to the Normandy region of France. He is an author or editor of eight books, including The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press, 2013), which received the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work in eighteenth-century studies in the Americas and Atlantic world. A retired staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserves, his honors include the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Teaching Excellence and induction into the George Washington University Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He regularly leads professional development workshops for organizations such as the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the George Washington Teacher Institute, and Humanities Texas.

Co-Director: Eric Arnesen is the Teamsters Professor of Modern American Labor History and former Vice Dean for Faculty and Administration in GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. His scholarly work focuses on issues of race, labor, politics, civil rights, and the Cold War. In his book, Brotherhoods of Color, he explored traditions of black trade unionism and labor activism, white union racial ideologies and practices, and workplace race relations. In various essays, he has debated the uses of the concept of “whiteness” in American history, the character of black anti-communism, and the utility of the “long civil rights movement” framework. His current project is a political biography of the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Professor Arnesen teaches courses on modern US history, American labor history, communism and anticommunism, 20th century civil rights, the US in a World at War (1939-1945), and the Normandy Campaign. In 2006, he held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden and in 2011-2012; he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and in 2023 was a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. He is currently co-chair of the Washington History Seminar, sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Staff Administrator: Alex Brandis graduated from the George Washington University with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science and a minor in Economics in 2023. She took the GW undergraduate class, The Price of Freedom: Normandy 1944 in 2022 where she wrote her biography for PFC Joseph Petersen from Pennsylvania who served in the 357th Infantry Regiment, 90th Infantry Division. He is buried in Plot E, Row 20, Grave 8 of the Normandy American Cemetery. She is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in Museum Studies at the George Washington University alongside her work in the Albert H. Small Normandy Institute.