Ellis to Head UB Department of History

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Richard E. Ellis, Ph.D., University at Buffalo professor of history, has been named chair of the Department of History in the UB Faculty of Social Sciences for a three-year term.

Ellis, a noted authority on the United States Constitution, has been teaching early American constitutional and political history at UB since 1974. He received SUNY Continuing Faculty Development awards in 1993 and 1995, and a UB undergraduate Student Association Teaching Award in 1987.

He has published several books on American history and politics including "The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights and the Nullification Crisis" (Oxford University Press, 1987) and "The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic" (Oxford University Press, 1971).

Works in progress include a volume in the New American Nation Series called "Implementing the Constitution, 1789-1835" and a book titled "Aggressive Nationalism in Early Nineteenth Century Law and Politics: McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819."

Ellis serves on the advisory council of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and is an associate of the Institute of Early American History. He also is a member of the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians and Southern Historical Association.

Ellis has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1972-73, he was a Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard University.

A 1960 graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ellis received his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.

He taught history at the University of Virginia and University of Chicago before joining the UB faculty.

He is a resident of Snyder.