On the verge of its 100th anniversary, the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) has moved to Mount St. Mary’s University, America’s oldest independent Catholic university. Concurrently, as of late June, Charles T. Strauss, assistant professor of history at the Mount, has been named the executive secretary-treasurer of the ACHA.
Strauss is the sixth person to hold this post in the ACHA’s nearly 100-year history. The ACHA, founded in 1919, is a national academic society that brings together scholars interested in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States and around the globe. The ACHA has been headquartered at Fordham University since 2011.
“Mount St. Mary’s University is honored to provide a home for ACHA,” said President Timothy E. Trainor, Ph.D. “The Mount community will support Dr. Strauss in his important work with the ACHA, and I am certain that he will serve the association with distinction.” Strauss will continue his position in the Mount’s History Department.
“I am honored to serve an organization that has contributed to my own development as a teacher and scholar,” Strauss said. “Next year, we will be celebrating the Association’s centennial with several roundtable discussions at our annual meeting in Chicago in January; I am also looking forward to planning strategically for the ACHA’s growth for the next 100 years as we collaborate with other scholarly associations from around the globe, grant new scholarships and awards and serve historians who work at universities but also those who have found careers outside of academia as well.”
Strauss, who joined the Mount’s History Department in 2013, has published articles and book reviews in American Catholic Studies, U.S. Catholic Historian, Journal of Jesuit Studies, Gathered Fragments: Journal of The Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania and Catholic Southwest: A Journal of History and Culture, as well as in edited volumes and encyclopedias. He is completing a book manuscript titled The Battle for Central America in the Catholic Church and the U.S. Congress, 1943-1996. In addition to the ACHA, Strauss is active in the American Historical Association, the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, the American Society for Church History and the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.
An active member of his community, Strauss lives in Gettysburg, Pa. with his wife, Elizabeth Covington Strauss, who is also an assistant professor of history at Mount St. Mary’s, and their four children. Strauss is a member of the Gettysburg Borough Council, Gettysburg Borough Planning Commission, board of the Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice Gettysburg-Adams County and St. Francis Xavier Parish.
Strauss received his undergraduate degree in history, with a concentration in peace and conflict studies, at the College of the Holy Cross. He has a master’s degree in historical studies from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and master’s and doctoral degrees in history from the University of Notre Dame. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Valparaiso University in Indiana from 2011 to 2013.