Professor Ethan Shagan has been named as Chair of the Department of History. Shagan is preceded by Professor Mary Elizabeth Berry, who concludes her five-year tenure as department chair in June.
A British historian by training, Shagan has published widely on the15th to the 18th centuries, with an emphasis on religion and politics in England. His 2003 book Popular Politics and the English Reformation received the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association. In 2011 he completed The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England. Shagan also serves as Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for British Studies.
Prior to arriving at UC Berkeley in 2007 Shagan was the Wayne V. Jones Research Professor of History at Northwestern University. Shagan received his A.B. from Brown and Ph.D. from Princeton.
-Alex Coughlin, History Staff
