Three New Faculty Members Join Baylor’s Department of History

We are pleased to introduce three new faculty members who have joined our department for the 2025-2026 academic school year. 

Welcome, Professors!

Benjamin Pietrenka, Assistant Professor of History

Dr. Benjamin Pietrenka is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world whose research explores the entangled cultural histories of religion, gender, race, and empire. His research focuses on the cross-cultural dynamics of early American religion, particularly how transatlantic encounters reshaped local beliefs and practices.

His first book, Religion on the Margins: Embodied Moravian Pieties on the Edges of Atlantic World Empire (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024), examines the believers and lay missionaries of the eighteenth-century Moravian Church, an influential group of radical German Pietists who sought to build a cosmopolitan community centered on an eschatological global vision while navigating diverse cultures, unfamiliar power dynamics, and the institution of slavery. His current book project, tentatively titled Languages of Faith: Translating Scripture in Protestant Early America, compares early modern German and English Protestant cultures of translation. Dr. Pietrenka will teach several courses including History 1300: Religion in the U.S. and the World and the History of Colonial America, and he hopes to develop future courses on women and gender in American religious history, the history of Indigenous peoples, and world history. Dr. Pietrenka also looks forward to working with graduate students interested in the History of Early America.

Anthony Gaspar, Lecturer in History

Dr. Anthony Gaspar recently earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the Medieval Byzantine Empire in the high and later Middle Ages, paying special attention to the empire's political, social, and religious interactions with the Latin West. His dissertation entitled “Countering the Latin West: War, Diplomacy and the Contest of Empire between Michael VIII Palaiologos and Charles of Anjou, 1259-1282” offers a comprehensive reappraisal of the foreign policy of the Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos. During his time at Notre Dame, he was a dissertation fellow at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Dr. Gaspar will teach History 1300: U.S. Empire and the Globe, and he looks forward to teaching Pre-modern World History to the 1500s and further courses on the Crusades and Byzantium.

Andrew D. Gutkowski, Lecturer in History 

Dr. Andrew Gutkowski’s teaching and research focus on the history of environmental inequality in the modern U.S. South, particularly on the disproportionate environmental burdens faced by African American communities. His work explores how segregation, environmental policy, and the rise of the petrochemical and chemical waste disposal industries have contributed to these disparities. His research also traces how the region’s history of civil rights activism shaped the rise of the modern environmental justice movement. He enjoys working with Baylor students to study history from an interdisciplinary point of view, having previously been an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi in Interdisciplinary Studies for three years. At Baylor, Dr. Gutkowski will teach History 1300: Race, Power and the Environment, and he plans to develop future courses around U.S. environmental history and American civil rights.