Emeritus Faculty

Frederick Adams, Ellis and Nelle Levitt Professor Emeritus of History

Julian Archer, Professor Emeritus of History

Curt Cardwell, Associate Professor Emeritus of History

Curt Cardwell, Associate Professor of History, passed away suddenly on January 7, 2021, at the age of 55. Cardwell joined the faculty of Drake University in 2005, teaching the history of U.S. foreign relations, twentieth-century U.S. history, and modern world history. During his tenure at Drake, thousands of students came to know his love of history, his passion for debate, his booming voice, and his big heart.

Professor Cardwell held the Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University, where he studied with Lloyd Gardner, one of the most prominent diplomatic historians of the twentieth century. A talented scholar and member of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, he published NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War with Cambridge University Press in 2011, a study that focused on the interrelationship between the massive U.S. rearmament program (NSC 68) and the development of the postwar capitalist global economy. Lived experience inspired the subject of Cardwell’s research. He was a proud veteran of the U.S. Army, having served in Germany during the late stages of the Cold War.

Professor Cardwell was working on a study of the Cold War and the US interstate highway system, which was left uncompleted at his death.

Leonard Erickson, Professor Emeritus of History

Walter Houf, Professor Emeritus of History

William Houlette, Associate Professor Emeritus of History

Karen Leroux, Associate Professor Emeritus of History

Understanding women, work, and education in the American past has been the focus of much of Leroux’s research. This work has been published in the History of Education Quarterly‌, the Journal of Women’s History‌, and several other venues. In recent years, teaching modern world history at Drake influenced Leroux to reconsider her subjects in transnational frameworks, leading her to explore education in foreign and domestic policy, and, most recently, North American teachers’ migrations and their lives and work overseas. This new work on migration has been published in International Labor and Working-Class History.

Leroux earned a B.A. at Northwestern University, a M.A. at the University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. She has been at Drake since 2005, and was honored with the Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in 2009.

Leroux was born in Canada, and spent nearly every summer of her childhood on her grandparents’ dairy farm in Nova Scotia, but she has lived most of her life in U.S. cities. As a young adult, she moved around the U.S. and Canada, and enjoyed a couple of years working in Australia. Since then, she has gravitated to the Midwest, making her home in the Chicago area and now Des Moines. She still travels frequently, does yoga regularly, and spends whatever time she has left trying to fix up a 1900-era house.