Charles W. Romney, Professor of History and Graduate Coordinator of the Public History M.A. program, received his doctorate in history from UCLA. He teaches classes on American history, digital history, and world history, and recently taught a new class on the “History of the Internet.” Romney is the author of Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2016), and is finishing a study of the Hawaiian Islands from 1850 to 1920. He received a Pilot Jumpstart Grant from the university in Spring 2022 for his project on “concepts of citizenship.” During the Spring 2024 semester, he is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Advanced Research Collaborative, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Recent Grants, Presentations, and Publications
Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2016)
“Consistency and Change in the Vocabulary of Fundamental Rights in Hawaiian Law, 1847-1902,” American Nineteenth Century History 20, no. 2 (2019): 141-160.
“Using Vector Space Models to Understand the Circulation of Habeas Corpus in Hawaiʻi, 1852-1892,” Law and History Review 34, no. 4 (November 2016): 999-1016
“New City Guides and Anachronic Public History,” The Public Historian 37, no. 3 (August 2015): 29-44
“The Seattle Teamsters and the Procedural State, 1935-1942,” Labor History 56, no. 1 (February 2015): 22-39
Co-Curator (with Jess Porter), Dust, Drought and Dreams Gone Dry: A Traveling Exhibit and Public Program for Libraries about the Dust Bowl, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with Oklahoma State University, Mount Holyoke College, and the American Library Association ($293,000, 2013-2016)
Principal Investigator, grant from the National Archives Trust Fund for Graduate Assistant positions at the Clinton Presidential Library ($193,250, 2011-2024)
Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Advanced Research Collaborative, Graduate Center, City University of New York (Spring 2024 semester)
Accepted Participant, JSTOR Labs/ University of Arizona, Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute, Summer 2022 (online)
Pilot Jumpstart Program, CARES Act funding, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, “Concepts of Citizenship” (teaching release, Spring 2022)
Accepted Participant, History as a Data Science Workshop, Columbia University, January 2020
Accepted Participant, Summer Institute in Digital Textual Studies, National Humanities Center, 2015-2016
“Local Organizing and National Coordination in UCAPAWA, 1935-1950.” 43rd Porter Fortune Symposium: “Organizing Agribusiness from Farm to Factory: Toward a New History of America’s Most Ambitious Labor Union.” March 2018, University of Mississippi
“Insular Cases and Contested Citizenship in Hawaiʻi, 1880-1920: An Analysis with Vector Space Models.” The Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 2017, Denver
“A Computational Cambridge School: Identifying Conceptual Change and Legal Languages with Vector Space Models.” The Conceptual Change in History conference, September 2016, University of Helsinki, Finland
“Using Vector Space Models to Understand Conceptual Change.” Pre-circulated paper, Summer Institute in Digital Textual Studies, June 2016, National Humanities Center, North Carolina
“The Problem of Time in Digital and Print Representations of Cities.” Delivered at the “Public History in a Digital World” conference, International Federation for Public History, October 2014, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
