School of Arts & Sciences

Institutional Structure, Designations, and Duties

The titles and designations of those participating in the activities of the Institute and the Journal follow:

the Chair of the Institute will be the NWOSU Department of Social Sciences Chair who is responsible for allocating funds from endowments via the NWOSU Foundation to the Institute as they become available;
two Executive Directors of the Institute will be responsible for conducting the Institute’s daily operations, and they will also serve as the Senior Editors of Civitas, making all decisions concerning the Journal;
a select group of Review Board Members of the Journal will be determined by the Executive Directors;
all faculty members within the NWOSU Department of Social Sciences will be designated as Assistant Review Board Members of the Journal; and
the Executive Directors will establish as well as serve on a several-member Advisory Board to promote an exchange of ideas on and recommendations for future Institute projects and activities.

The current personnel of the Institute and Journal include:

Chair:

Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, Professor of History, Chair of the Department of Social Sciences, Northwestern Oklahoma State University (Alva)

Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, Professor of History and Global Studies, has taught American, European, and World History at Northwestern Oklahoma State University (NWOSU) in Alva, Oklahoma, since 2005. In 2021, he was named the Donovan Reichenberger Chair in History.

Both sides of Schmaltz's family claim some Black Sea German ancestry, and their odyssey across half the globe influenced him to pursue the history profession. Though born in North Dakota, he has lived in several states over the years (in some of them more than once), including Maryland, Arizona, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota as well as time abroad as an exchange student at the University of Paderborn in Germany.

Schmaltz earned a B.A. with honors (summa cum laude) in History and German Language at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (1994). Following the M.A. in History at the University of North Dakota-Grand Forks (1996), he completed a Ph.D. in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2002), specializing in the area of Germans in Russia and the former USSR. In the summers of 1994 and 1995, he also worked as a library assistant to Professor Michael M. Miller at the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University (GRHC NDSU) Libraries in Fargo. In recent years, he has become more interested in issues of diasporas and transnationalism, as well as the complex and evolving relationship between ethnic nationalism and globalization.

Schmaltz was among a group of recipients of the prestigious American Library Association (ALA) “Choice Academic Book of the Year Award” for 2005, contributing an article to the international compilation edited by Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar: German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). Additionally, while at NWOSU he has secured a number of successful mini- and major grants through the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2014, he also received the John Barton Distinguished Teaching and Service Award at NWOSU.

For more than a quarter century in connection with his education, research interests, and professional development, Schmaltz has traveled across the United States and to fourteen countries on four continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and South America), including Argentina, Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Holland, Italy (May 2019), Moldova, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Vatican City (May 2019). He has visited former ethnic German communities in western Ukraine and current ones in Argentina.Despite significant teaching commitments, Schmaltz has spoken over the past three decades at numerous conferences and events both here and abroad (more than one hundred presentations to date). He has also produced original articles and German- and Russian-language translations for publication in the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR) in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota, and the GRHC NDSU in Fargo. Many other articles, reviews, and translations have appeared either online or in newsletters, local newspapers, and interdisciplinary journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Eurasia Studies Society Journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management, Journal of Genocide Research, Nationalities Papers, Oklahoma Politics, and Yearbook of the Society for German American Studies, as well as in international anthologies by Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford), De Gruyter Publishing (Berlin), the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe (Oldenburg), the German Cultural Forum of Eastern Europe (Potsdam), K. G. Saur Verlag (Munich), and Lexington Press. In 2003, the GRHC NDSU in Fargo published his monograph, An Expanded Bibliography and Reference Guide for the Former Soviet Union’s Germans. Working on several book and other research projects, he remains ever grateful for a wonderful worldwide network of friends, colleagues, and collaborators.

Schmaltz is both co-founder and co-director of the endowed NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies and co-editor of its annual journal Civitas (http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/civitas). Moreover, from 2010 to 2020 he served as GRHS Heritage Review editor, and since 2008 he has been an AHSGR Journal editorial board member. From 2008 to 2017, he was also a frequent contributing editor to the Germans from Russia in Oregon and Washington (GROW) Newsletter.

Schmaltz is a current member of the AHSGR, GRHS, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Phi Beta Kappa (Academic), Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, Pi Gamma Mu International Honor Society in Social Sciences, Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS), and Society for German American Studies (SGAS).

Co-Executive Directors:

Dr. Aaron Mason, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern Oklahoma State University

Dr. Aaron Mason holds a B.A. from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Ph.D. from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His research interests include American Politics, the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers and the American Civil War. He has made academic presentations at Oklahoma Research Day, the Western Social Science Association, the Arkansas Political Science Association, and many others. Active in the Oklahoma Political Science Association, he has published articles and papers for Oklahoma Politics and Kendall Hunt. He has held jobs in the public and private sectors is proud of co-ordinating the annual Constitution Day observances held at NWOSU each September. He lives in Alva with his wife DeeAnn and their two children, Hannah and Morgan.

Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, Professor of History, Chair of the Department of Social Sciences, Northwestern Oklahoma State University (Alva)

Senior Editors:

Dr. Aaron Mason, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern Oklahoma State University

Dr. Aaron Mason holds a B.A. from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Ph.D. from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His research interests include American Politics, the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers and the American Civil War. He has made academic presentations at Oklahoma Research Day, the Western Social Science Association, the Arkansas Political Science Association, and many others. Active in the Oklahoma Political Science Association, he has published articles and papers for Oklahoma Politics and Kendall Hunt. He has held jobs in the public and private sectors is proud of co-ordinating the annual Constitution Day observances held at NWOSU each September. He lives in Alva with his wife DeeAnn and their two children, Hannah and Morgan.

Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, Professor of History, Chair of the Department of Social Sciences, Northwestern Oklahoma State University (Alva)

Review Board Members:

Dr. Shawn Holliday - Professor of English and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Northwestern Oklahoma State University (Alva)

Dr. Shawn Holliday served as an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the English, Foreign Language, and Humanities Department at Northwestern prior to working in Graduate Studies.

He received his M.A. degree from Marshall University in 1993 and his Ph.D. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1999. His areas of specialization include American Realism and Naturalism, Modernism (American and British), and Literary Criticism, especially New Historicism. He is also interested in Asian American literature, Western American literature, and Appalachian literature.

Dr. Holliday is the author of three books, Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism, published by Peter Lang in 2001, Lawson Fusao Inada, published by Boise State University’s Western Writers Series in 2003, and The Oklahoma Poets Laureate: A Sourcebook, History, and Anthology, published by Mongrel Empire Press in 2015 in Norman, Oklahoma. His articles have appeared in a wide variety of journals and reference books, including Notes on Modern Irish Literature, Appalachian Heritage, The South Carolina Review, and The Encyclopedia of Appalachia. From 2006 to 2008, Dr. Holliday served as the President of the Thomas Wolfe Society. In past years, he has also worked as a Consulting Editor for The Thomas Wolfe Review.

Dr. Holliday’s awards and prizes include the Everett T. Helm Fellowship (to support research using the Clifford Odets papers at Indiana University’s Lilly Library), the Zelda and Paul Gitlin Literary Prize (for the best article published on Thomas Wolfe in 2006), and the William B. Wisdom Grant in Aid of Research (to support research using the Thomas Wolfe papers at Harvard University’s Houghton Library). In 2003, he was appointed a fellow to the Salzburg Seminar session in Contemporary American Literature, and, in 2005, he was appointed to Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers.