History Faculty and Staff

Heidi manages office operations, carries out administrative tasks, and supervises student workers.

Dr. Joanne Jahnke Wegner is a historian of Early American history with an emphasis on captivity and enslavement in early New England. She teaches both halves of the American history survey as well as classes on health humanities, historical methodology, and graduate seminars. She is working on articles about Indigenous peoples, human commodification, and racial capitalism. She also serves as a mentor for undergraduate student research projects.

Dr. Jiménez Frei specializes in the history of Argentina, memory and the built environment, visual and material culture, monuments, and Latin American cultural history. She teaches courses in public history, museums, Latin American History, fashion history, and global history. She is a core member of the WI Latinx History Collective, and her other public history projects include the Western WI Covid-19 Archive and the Voces del Campo oral history project. 

My teaching and research interests include African American Literature, American Cultural Studies in the mid-20th century, and Popular Culture Studies. My courses and professional publications are frequently interdisciplinary, blending examinations of creative nonfiction and memoir, social constructions of race and gender identity, and the cultural impact of mass communication (film, popular music, and related media) on everyday life. I make a special effort in my courses to connect the history of institutions with current events in the present day.

I teach the remote HIS114/115 sequence for both UWEC-Barron County and the CESA 10 and 11 students.