Director

Sarah Shurts profile picture
Dr. Sarah Shurts received her Ph.D. in Modern French History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007. She is currently Professor of History at Bergen Community College where she teaches Western Civilization, European History, and Genocide and Holocaust history. She is the author of Resentment and the Right: French Intellectual Identity Reimagined, 1898-2000 and has published articles and book chapters on twentieth-century right-wing French intellectuals in Contemporary Far Right Thinkers and the Future of Democracy (Routledge 2021), Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, European History Quarterly, French Politics, Culture & Society, the Journal of Modern European History and the Journal of the History of Ideas. She is also the author of a Western Civilizations resource collection for Oxford University Press called History in Practice (forthcoming 2023) and two case studies in Research Methods for using Primary Sources (Sage, 2022), and is starting a new book for Bloomsbury-Clio on the Facts and Fictions of the French Revolution. Through the American Historical Association, she has been a co-chair of the AHA Program committee for 2020, a member of the James Harvey Robinson Prize committee, the Tuning Project, and the History Gateways Initiative, and has given talks on history education and prioritizing historical thinking skills and competencies in the classroom for the AHA, the AAC&U, and the National Council for Social Studies and is on the editorial board for College Teaching.

Visiting Director Spring 2023

Dr. Kil J. Yi portrait photo
Dr. Kil J. Yi has been a member of the History and Geography Department since 1998. He teaches U.S. History, Modern Asian history, and World Geography. His specialty is International Affairs with focus on U.S.-Asian relations. His published works dealing with the Vietnam War and the U.S. policies vis-à-vis South and North Korea and Japan. He earned his M.A. and B.A degrees from the State University of New York at Albany and Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University of New Jersey. He is a founding member of the Bergen Community College’s Institute for Multicultural Learning.