The Department of History is celebrating three faculty members who recently earned promotions or reappointment, joining more than 160 Michigan State University faculty recognized for their achievements in teaching and scholarship.
LaShawn Harris and Helen Veit were promoted to full professor, while Shayan Rajani earned reappointment as assistant professor.
“The faculty promoted in 2025–26 exemplify advancing knowledge and transforming lives,” said Teresa Mastin, vice provost and associate vice president for Faculty and Academy Staff Affairs. “Their scholarship, creative work, and outreach and engagement span a wide range, benefiting both Michiganders and communities around the world.”
The promotions and reappointment reflect the breadth of expertise within MSU's Department of History:
LaShawn Harris is a scholar of African American and Black women’s histories. She is the former managing and book review editor for the Journal of African American History (JAAH). Her first book, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, won the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Darlene Clark Hine award and the Philip Taft Labor Prize from The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). Dr. Harris’s work has been featured in several outlets, including TV-One, Glamour, Huffington Post, Vice, and the History Channel. Her second book, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs and the Police Killing that Galvanized New York City, tells the life and 1984 murder of a beloved Black grandmother that changed community activism forever.
Helen Veit specializes in the history of American food. Her new book, Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, traces dramatic changes in children’s eating since the 19th century and tells the fascinating story of how “picky eating” came to hijack American childhood — and increasingly childhood around the world. Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century, explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era and was a finalist for a James Beard Award in Reference and Scholarship. Dr. Veit’s writing on food history has appeared in a variety of academic journals and in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere.
Shayan Rajani is a historian of early modern South Asia. His research focuses on the relationship between individual and community, and region and empire. He is also interested in questions of gender and sexuality, and animal-human relations. His first book, Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia, examines the enterprise of assembling texts, monuments, and children as concerted material traces for posterity. Dr. Rajani’s second book project explores the material and cultural history of gender segregation in the Mughal world. He has also published shorter articles and book chapters on same-sex love, the history of the ethnicity concept and other related ideas, and on Persian literature and its relationship to society and politics in early modern Sindh.
Portions of this article previously appeared on MSU Today.