Providence College Department of History and Classics

06/11/2026

06/11/2026

04/30/2026

Edward Andrews, Ph.D. '01 of the Providence College Department of History and Classics was recognized as the honorary alum and keynote speaker at the 2026 Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony, held on campus in April. 🎓

Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s most prestigious academic honor society. This year, 57 students were inducted to the Providence College chapter for being among the top 10 percent of liberal arts majors in their graduating class.

Watch Andrews' address to the 2026 inductees: link in comments.

04/28/2026

Sharon Ann Murphy, Ph.D., of the Providence College Department of History and Classics has been awarded a a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation — one of the most distinguished honors bestowed on scholars and artists in the United States and Canada.

Murphy, who also serves as director of the college’s signature Development of Western Civilization Program, was among 223 individuals selected as members of the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows from nearly 5,000 applicants.

Murphy will use the fellowship to support her book project, Doing Business in the Public Interest, during a full‑year sabbatical in the 2027–28 academic year. The project examines early 20th‑century American corporations — particularly life insurance companies — that challenged the emerging concept of shareholder primacy by pursuing policies they believed served the broader public good. Her research traces the evolution of corporate governance and corporate responsibility. In addition to the book, Murphy plans to develop several scholarly articles related to the project.

This year, Murphy also was selected to receive the Faculty Service Award, recognizing exceptional dedication to Providence College. She serves on numerous college-wide and department committees, mentors junior faculty, and is a dedicated advisor to students, including as the primary director for senior honors theses by history majors. In the last three years, she has been president of the Business History Conference, associate editor of the peer-reviewed journal Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, and served as soccer coach for several middle and high school teams.

Her books, Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States, Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic, and Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America, have received numerous awards as well.

Read more: link in comments

07/02/2025

Sharon Ann Murphy, Ph.D., professor of the Providence College Department of History and Classics, was recently featured on C-SPAN discussing the history of U.S. tariffs and their impact on the economy as part of the American Historical Association's Congressional briefing series.

Watch the full feature: https://prov.ly/43WgPmM

03/28/2025

10/28/2024

Congratulations to Dr. Sharon Murphy whose book "Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States," was awarded the Bennet H. Wall Award by the Southern Historical Association for the best book on Southern economic or business history!

10/15/2024

As people in the United States observe Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day, learn about Bartolomé de las Casas, the 16th century Dominican priest and scholar who sailed with the mariner on his third voyage.

Columbus' original ship log was lost but las Casas had made a copy. "A lot of what we know about his initial landing in the Americas came from las Casas' pen," said Rev. David T. Orique, O.P of the Providence College Department of History and Classics and director of the Latin American and Latina/o Studies Program.

Orique is one of the founders of the Bartolomé de las Casas Study Center at PC, which "seeks to advance critical understanding of the long-term consequences of European expansion into Africa, the Atlantic world, the Americas and Asia, which complex and conflictual realities las Casas witnessed and critiqued."

Over time, las Casas became an advocate for the native people of the Americas and was the first to argue against their enslavement, lobbying the Spanish monarchy on their behalf.

Calls for proposals are open now for the 2025 Las Casas Conference, which will be held in Seville, Spain, the missionary's birthplace. There have been two scholarly volumes published from past conferences thus far, and Father Orique is working on a third based on the 2023 event, which was held at Providence College.

More information about las Casas, the study center, the conference, and its publications: https://catholic-dominican.providence.edu/las-casas-studies-at-providence-college/

P.S. The keynote speaker at Academic Convocation, Paolo G. Carozza, J.D., an internationally renowned human rights expert, cited the example of las Casas. Watch his address: https://www.youtube.com/live/xb88SIf7_5E?si=nmmu6z4fkrh09_lJ&t=2768

10/09/2024

Faculty Spotlight!

Over the summer, Dr. R. Alexander Orquiza took part in an online video series on Filipino food, for a group called Kamayan Film by Christian Origenes.

Dr. Orquiza was a talking head on a History Channel documentary on Walt Disney titled “How Disney Built America,” released this past summer.

He contributed to a curriculum development for the Choices Program through the Brown University Department of History. They make teaching modules for high school and higher education on topics oftentimes missing in the American history curriculum. He contributed pieces on Asian American Studies, as well as race and ethnicity in American immigration history.

Dr. Orquiza will be a reviewer for The Winterthur Portfolio for an upcoming manuscript on material culture and American empire; and a reviewer for a collected essays manuscript titled Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food coming out from University of Hawai’i Press in spring 2025.

10/01/2024

Faculty Spotlight!

This past August, Dr. Karen Holland presented a paper entitled "The Besieged Women of Londonderry in John Michelborne's Ireland Preserv'd; or the Siege of Londonderry" at the 12th annual Tudor and Stuart Ireland interdisciplinary conference at the University of Galway, Galway, Ireland.

In addition, her article entitled "The Politics of Attire: The Sidneys' Elizabethan Gift Exchanges 1559, 1568 and 1579" will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Sidney Journal, vol. 42.2