History

Dr. Hilton began teaching at Muskingum University in the fall of 2001. She teaches both halves of the World History survey (HIST 111 and 112), 200-level courses on the Holocaust (HIST 240) and the First World War (HIST 245), and upper-level courses on Modern Europe (HIST 318, HIST 320, and HIST 322). She won the William Oxley Thompson Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2008, the Cora I. Orr Award for Outstanding Service in 2012, and the William Raney Harper Award for Outstanding Scholarship in 2021.

The University named her as the Miriam Schwartz Faculty Scholar in January 2023, which will support educational programming centered on keeping alive the memory of the Jewish Holocaust and the horror that can result from unexamined prejudices, myths, and hatred. In 2022-2023, both the Ohio Holocaust and Genocide Memorial and Education Commission and the Holocaust Education Foundation awarded her grants to organize and lead a teaching institute for public school teachers in Social Studies and Language Arts in June 2024. She is the co-editor of Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust, published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2020, with a paperback edition in 2022.

She has a forthcoming chapter “We were nobodies except in ourselves we were somebody,” in Reimagining Citizenship, Rachel Chin and Samuel Huneke (eds.), Cornell University Press, 2024. She has most recently published “Memorialization, Reconciliation, and Reflection: Teaching the Aftermaths of Genocide in Postwar Europe and Rwanda,” in The History Teacher in 2021, “Working with Primary Sources Evidencing Persecution,” in Research Methods for Primary Sources, also in 2021, “Postwar Food Rumors: Security, Victimhood, and Fear,” in Food, Culture, and Identity in Germany’s Century of War, Heather Benbow and Heather Perry (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, in 2019, and “Who Was Worthy,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in 2018. She is working on two projects, a book-length monograph about the rumor culture in postwar Germany and an examination of the roles played by gender, age, working ability, and emotions among stateless refugees following the Second World War in Europe.