CLEVELAND – Northern Illinois' Dr. Aaron Fogleman has been named the winner of the 2025 Mid-American Conference Outstanding Faculty Award for Student Success. This accolade, awarded for the sixth consecutive year, celebrates the commitment to student success demonstrated by a selected full-time faculty member from each MAC institution. Fogleman has not only stood out as a dedicated nominee from NIU but has also emerged as the overall conference winner.

Aaron Spencer Fogleman is a Distinguished Research Professor and Board of Trustees Professor in the History Department at Northern Illinois University, where he has worked since 2002.

He was born in Burlington, North Carolina and lived in many places before studying History and German at Oklahoma State University and completing the Army ROTC program there. After a few years of active duty service, primarily in Germany, Fogleman received the M.A. in Modern History at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany, funded by a Fulbright Grant for two years. Thereafter, he completed doctoral studies in History at the University of Michigan, before taking a position at the University of South Alabama, where he taught for eleven years before coming to NIU.

Fogleman teaches classes at all levels on Early America and Atlantic World History, promoting research among students and including them inpaid positions that contribute to his own research. He has been recognized as a Fulbright Honorary Senior Professor, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute forHistory in Göttingen (1996-97 and 1999), held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt in 2008-2009, received the American Historical Association’s Rawley Prize for the best book in Atlantic History (2014), and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has published four books and numerous articles, all of which appeared on his mom’s living room wall shelf. Fogleman lives with his wife and two of three children still at home in Batavia, Illinois.

For more on this year’s Outstanding Faculty institutional winners, click HERE