History

Timothy Robert

Dr. Timothy M. Roberts, Professor

Fulbright Award Winner -- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow

Dr. Timothy Roberts joined the Department in the Fall of 2008 as a historian of nineteenth-
century American history. He received his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford (St. Catherine’s College). Before coming to WIU he was Assistant Professor of History at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He presently serves as Chair of the Department.

Dr. Roberts’ scholarship includes several books and numerous research articles. His
monographs are After Barbary: Algeria’s Roles in the French and American Empires (Cornell
University Press, 2025) and Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American
Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2009). His edited books are Boundaries of War:
Local and Global Perspectives in Military History (Marine Corps University Press, 2024), co-
edited with Lee L. Brice; This Infernal War: The Civil War Letters of William and Jane Standard
(Kent State University Press, 2018); and American Exceptionalism, 4 vols. (Routledge, 2016),
co-edited with Lindsay DiCuirci. His research articles include publications in the Journal of
World History, the Journal of American History, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques,
Diplomatic History, Journal of the Early Republic, Patterns of Prejudice, and the Journal of the
Historical Society. He has also written for the History News Network, the Chronicle of Higher
Education, The Diplomat, and Commonplace.

Dr. Roberts has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright
Lecturer Award to teach at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. He previously was awarded
two Andrew Mellon Foundation Research Fellowships, two National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH)/American Library Association (ALA) grants, and the Joan Nordell Visiting
Fellowship from Harvard University's Houghton Library. He has been selected to participate in
two NEH Summer Institutes, and won the Ralph D. Gray Best Article Prize from the Society of
Historians of the Early American Republic.

Dr. Roberts teaches courses and supervises graduate students in American legal and military
history, the Civil War era, the United States in the World, public history, and historical
applications of digital scholarship tools. In 2021 he earned a Graduate Certificate in Digital
Public Humanities from George Mason University.