The Jack and Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History

Adrian De Leon
2024-25 Farley Scholar

An award-winning multidisciplinary writer and public historian, De Leon is a renowned expert in the history of U.S.-Philippine relations and Asian American politics as well as an advocate for the literary arts in his hometown of Scarborough, Ontario. Prior to joining SFU, De Leon worked as an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC) and after completing his term with us as Farley Scholar, he is set to join New York University as an assistant professor of U.S. history. 

Besides being an academic scholar, De Leon also wrote and hosted two shows with PBS Digital Studios—A People’s History of Asian America, a four-part miniseries which addresses the increase in hate crimes and anti-Asian sentiment in the United States; and Historian’s Take, which explores history through the lens of pop culture, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Daytime Emmy.

Ferenc Csirkés
2022-23 Farley Scholar

Dr. Ferenc Csirkés holds a PhD in Islamic history and civilization from the University of Chicago, and he is currently an assistant professor of history at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests include Iranian history, Ottoman history, Ottoman Turkish literature, Persian literature, cultural history, Central Asian history, and Central Asian literature. As a Farley scholar, he is completing a book manuscript with the working title Sons of Japheth and Ali: Turkic Language and Ideology in the Medieval and Early Modern Persianate World, which focuses on the politics of language in Safavid Iran, discussing such topics as vernacularization, confessionalization, and state building.

Read more about Csirkés' research, teaching, and public outreach activity during his time as Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

Linda Morra
2021-22 Farley Scholar

A full professor of English at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Dr. Linda Morra is an award-winning instructor and researcher who teaches in the areas of women’s archives, theories of affect, and women’s writing in Canada. Morra holds a PhD in Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies from University of Ottawa. In addition to holding a post-doctoral fellowship with the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Morra has also held visiting appointments at University College, Dublin and University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on women's archives, women's writing in Canada and archival theories. Morra’s extensive list of publications includes the book, Unarrested Archives: Case-Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and numerous edited or co-edited books. This includes the 2021 collection co-edited with SFU’s Dr. Sarah Henzi: On the Other side(s) of 150: Untold Stories and Critical Approaches to History, Literature, and Identity in Canada (Wilfred Laurier Press, 2021) which earned the Canadian Studies Network award for Best Edited Collection. 

Read more about Morra's plans, and activities during her time as Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar.

Holly M. Karibo
2020-21 Farley Scholar 

Dr. Holly Karibo is currently an assistant professor of Comparative Borderlands History at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on the history of vice, labor, and sexuality in transnational urban spaces from the late-19^th century to the present. Her first book, Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland (UNC Press 2015), examines the history of illegal economies in the Great Lakes border region during the post-World War II period. Sin City North received the Michigan State History Book Award in 2016.

Lynnell L. Thomas
2019-20 Farley Scholar

Dr. Lynnell Thomas' research interests include New Orleans tourism, African American history and culture, and Black popular culture. A native of New Orleans, Lynnell Thomas is part of the post-Katrina diaspora, which informs her teaching and scholarship.  Her research is also concerned with the diverse backgrounds and experiences that constitute and contest American identity and values.  Her most recent scholarship has examined the distortion of African American history and culture in New Orleans’ tourism narrative, the negative impact of this narrative on policy decisions following Hurricane Katrina, and the ways that African Americans and others have attempted to resist and revise this narrative. 

Katrina Jagodinsky
2018-19 Farley Scholar 

Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky is a legal historian and the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska Lincoln. She holds a PhD in History and MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on women’s creative and critical uses of the law in the long nineteenth century as they countered the expansion of empire, misogyny, and racial hierarchies in personal and political contexts throughout the North American West. In addition to many articles, she is author of the award-winning book, Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran & Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946, and co-editor of Beyond the Borders of Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West.