University of Maine History Department

09/02/2026

It is with a heavy heart we share the following message from UMPI President Raymond Rice about the passing of our colleague Dr. John Zaborney:

"Dear Campus Community,

It is with profound sadness that I share news of the passing of Dr. John Zaborney, Professor of History, who passed away today, August 31, after a period of serious illness which he faced with the same determination and fortitude that defined his work as a scholar, colleague, and mentor. Some of you may have known of his illness; all of us knew how engaged John was, until very recently, in designing, developing, and teaching courses and programs, including the Master of Arts in American Studies that has just completed its initial year. The guidance and leadership that John provided students and colleagues alike for so long makes his loss especially difficult. Our thoughts, especially, are with Dr. Kim Sebold, both his life partner and lifetime colleague; who has shown such grace, care, and perseverance these last few months, not just for John, but for his students, and all those with whom he worked.

John joined the UMPI faculty on September 1, 1997, as an Assistant Professor of History. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004 and to Professor in 2013. He coordinated the History and Political Science program for many years, up until his passing, and served as its institutional memory through significant disciplinary and institutional change. He ensured that the humanities would reach ever larger populations of students, even in the most challenging of times, by leading the move to put History and Political Science online and then, in 2020, adding it to UMPI’s YourPace programming, resulting in over 230 total majors last year, making it the largest such program in the entirety of the UMS.

Above all, John was an outstanding and accomplished scholar. His book, Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), was the first sustained study of its subject, and it was grounded in painstaking research of primary sources, the product of years spent with letters, account books, diaries, and court records. Prevailing scholarship had treated the hiring-out of enslaved people as a marginal practice, but John demonstrated how it worked not to weaken the institution of slavery but to further entrench it — knitting slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike into slavery's economy so thoroughly that Virginia's path toward secession becomes, in his telling, difficult to imagine otherwise. More recently, he had turned to the other laborers of that same world — the working-class men and "plain folk" of pre-Civil War Virginia who left few monuments and fewer papers — and he was at work on that research as a second book through this past year. The scholar and the teacher were never separate people for John: the same conviction animated both, that the past is not a refuge from the present but the only ground on which the present can be understood.

We are so grateful for what John gave to our community and the thousands of students he served during his time with us."

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06/30/2026

Anne Knowles (emerita professor) had a busy spring. Her travels began with two trips as Meyerhoff Lecturer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). She and fellow Meyerhoff speaker Caroline Sturdy Colls (University of Huddersfield, UK) spoke with faculty, students, and community members at University of South Dakota in March and University of Oklahoma in April. Anne also organized a session on spatial approaches to complex histories at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in San Francisco in March. In May, Anne gave the keynote lecture at a geospatial workshop in Prague, organized by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), and a public lecture and workshop at University of Zurich, where she was joined by her long-time Holocaust Geographies Collaborative colleague Tim Cole (Bristol University).

Since she retired in September 2025, Anne has been hard at work on an atlas of the Holocaust. This project draws on years of research and database development with UMaine graduate and undergraduate students, as well as collaboration with many U.S. and European scholars. Anne will be doing archival research for that project next academic year (2026-27) in Washington, DC, as Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at USHMM.

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06/24/2026

Several members of the UMaine History Department attended the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference (ACSC) at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, PEI from July 1-3, 2026. Associate Professors Mark McLaughlin (who also attended and presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, held in conjunction with the ACSC) and Mary Freeman and PhD students Joseph Wrobleski, Anne Bardaglio, and Susan Dickson-Smith all gave well-received presentations. UMaine hosted the 2024 meeting of the ACSC, which was organized by Dr. McLaughlin.

05/11/2026

The History Department ate cake and toasted graduates before the May 8 & 9 commencements. Congrats to HTY majors (r-to-l) Samuel Mather (off to law school), Katharine Poulin (planning to teach), Shane Harriman (going to a grad program in public history), Lauren Poulin (Katharine's twin sister and a Theater major), and Raymond Kieu (considering a move to Ohio). Konner Boucher (far right in the front row of CLAS grads) is also starting grad school in archival and library science. Graduate students include Savannah Clark (PhD), Asher Reisman (August MA), Lincoln Tiner (December MA, partial photo), and Tommy Pinette (August MA, no photo).

04/21/2026

UMaine was well represented at the Organization of American Historians annual conference in Philadelphia this past weekend. Faculty there included Mike Socolow (CMJ prof, but a HTY PhD!), Mary Freeman, Sam Backer, and Liam Riordan. Former UMaine PhDs were also there, Joy Giguere (Penn State York), presenting on cemetery monuments in Richmond after the Civil War, and David Turpie (Chief Communications Officer, Arizona Historical Society). Did we miss anyone?

04/20/2026

We invite you to the final History Symposium of the 2025-2026 academic year. The talk will be held from 5:30-7:00 PM TODAY, April 20 at the Hill Auditorium, Barrows Hall, and serves as this year's Howard B. Schonberger Peace and Justice Lecture. In the spirit of that series, we are delighted to host Michael Denning, an influential scholar whose work explores the intersection between popular culture, labor history, and the global structures of capitalism.

Denning's talk, titled "The Twofold Labors of Marx," seeks to turn a traditional understanding of Marx on its head by placing labor at the center of his theoretical work. Placing Marx's own labors amidst the crisis of artisanal labor, the emerging factory system, and the revolutionary overthrow of enslaved and enserfed labor, the talk explores Marx's account of the metabolism and metamorphosis of labor.

The talk is free, open to the public, and is hybrid. There will also be a pre-talk reception at 5 pm. For more info, see the attached flyer.