FEBRUARY 2023
moments in history
UMD Department of History Newsletter
Copyright University of Maryland Department of History, 2023
Moments in history FEBRUARY 2023 contents History has its eyes on you Achieving MEDIA MOMENTS Publishing & Presenting Practicing History Training Historians Learning History Random moments FORWARD LOOKS
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Department of History
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Antoine Borrut Awarded NEH Fellowship
History has its eyes on you
Antoine Borrut was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)! The fellowship will allow Antoine to complete his book manuscript on astrology and the construction of historical knowledge in early Islam. See the NEH press release HERE. Detailed list of awards by geographic location HERE. Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
Karin Rosemblatt is a recipient of one of 25 Individual Project Grants awarded as part of a total of $30M in UMD Grand Challenges Grants. Grand Challenges Grants support research on topics as diverse as preparing for future pandemics, fighting racism, developing human-centered artificial intelligence, better understanding the processes of our body’s microbial communities and strengthening democracy. Karin's project is in the Threats to Democracy category and is entitled Human Rights Politics and Policies: Lessons from Latin America. A summary of the project includes the following information: "Latin Americans have long deployed the language of human rights to defend democratic norms such as elections, free speech, and freedom from arbitrary arrest; to challenge racial, class, ethnic, and gender inequalities; and to protest the profit-driven despoilation of nature. The politics of rights generally, and of human rights specifically, have been central to Latin American history. Yet examples from Latin America are not well represented in the burgeoning historical scholarship on human rights. The result is an impoverished notion of how human rights have functioned in the past, how they are being used in the present, and how they can be deployed to imagine a more just future. The project will dispute criticisms of human rights by showcasing Latin Americans’ capacious human rights norms and their intersection with movements for the defense of natural environments, democratic norms, racial and ethnic equity, and economic justice." Photo courtesy of Autumn Hengen/The Diamondback
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Julie Greene has been appointed editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. Shay Hazkani received the Korenblat Book Award in Israel Studies at Hebrew University in December 2022. He was also awarded the Concordia University Library Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Best Book in Israel Studies Award. These awards recognize his recent book from Stanford University Press, Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (2021). Piotr Kosicki been awarded an Independent Scholarship, Research and Creativity Awards (ISRCA) from UMD Division of Research for Fall 2023. The award will support his current book project entitled "A New Kind of Progressive: How Poles, Venezuelans, and Germans Reimagined Latin America." Erin Mosley has also received an ISRCA award for Fall 2023. It supports her work on "The Future of Rwanda's Past: History and Historians After Genocide." Colleen Woods In December 2022 joined a team that met with Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) to advocate for the repeal of the 1946 Recision Act, a little known U.S. law that stripped veterans benefits and citizenship rights of Filipinos who were promised benefits for their service by President Franklin Roosevelt. President Harry S. Truman signed the bill into law. While restoring benefits to Filipino veterans is no longer possible, the group hopes to persuade Congress to issue an official apology for the Recision Act.
ACHIEVING
Senator Hirono (in blue) with Colleen Woods and other members of the working group. Photo courtesy of Colleen Woods
On November 9, 2022 The Soldier's Opinion, a film based on Shay Hazkani's book, Dear Palesting, was screened at UMD. The film has also been screened on Israeli TV, and on various U.S. campuses since that date. Photo courtesy of Tom Weintraub Louk.
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MEDIA MOMENTS MOMENTSOMENTS
"This is a pull quote to help the reader stay interested and focused."
MEDIA MOMENTS
A lecture from Piotr Kosicki's course, HIST 328E Apocalypse, aired on C-SPAN2 American History TV. After January 28, the lecture will also be available online HERE. The lecture is entitled "The Cold War & the Atomic Apocalypse," Between January 2022 and February 2023 Piotr recorded thirteen episodes oof his monthly New Books podcast. The topics range from dependency theory in Latin America to Poland's contributions to post-Holocaust war crimes trials. The full list of episodes is available HERE. Photo courtesy of C-SPAN2. Paul Landau was interviewed about his new book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (OhioUP, 2022) on New Books Network. The interview aired on January 13, 2023. Listen to the interview HERE.
PUBLISHING
Julie Greene co-edited a book, Global Labor Migration: New Directions (University of Illinois Press, 2022) with Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, and Joo-Cheong Tham. Publication of the book brings to fruition a long-term project of UMD's Center for Global Migration Studies (CGMS). The book dreived from a conference in Amsterdam on global labor migration in 2019. Julie Taddeo published her latest book, Writing Australian History On-screen: Television and Film Period Dramas “Down Under” (Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), co-edited with Jo Parnell.
Rick Bell's work on free-born Blacks who were kidnapped and brought bach to the South was featured in an article, "Kidnappers of Color Versus the Cause of Antislavery," published in JSTOR Daily on December 8, 2022. Jim Gilbert has just published his fifth novel: Murder at Ampas Beach (Atmosphere Press, January 2023). This novel is the third in the Amanda Pennyworth series, set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He plans a sixth novel. Jeffrey Herf published a review of Richard Wolin's book, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology.(Yale University Press, 2022) in Quillette on February 22, 2023. Read the review HERE. Sonya Michel's letter to the editor of The Washington Post was published on February 2, 2023. Read the letter HERE. Kristina Poznan and Daryle Williams published an article, "Using Data to Discover and Explore the Stories of Enslaved People," in JSTOR Daily on February 15, 2023. The article is based on the work of the Enslaved.org Database. Three UMD undergraduates participated in the project. Read the article HERE.
PublishING
Stefano Villani published two book reviews. The first review was of Diplomazia e comunicazione letteraria nel secolo XVIII: Gran Bretagna e Italia (Diplomacy and Literary Exchange: Great Britain and Italy in the Long 18th Century, Francesca Fedi and Duccio Tongiorgi, eds. (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2017), This review was published in Società e. Storia 178 (2022): 843-4. The second review was of Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent: Naked, Veiled, Vilified, Worshipped, Xenia von Tippelskirch and Elisabeth Fischer, eds. (Routledge, 2021). This review was published in Società e Storia 178 (2022): 838-9. Peter Wien published a book chapter: “Surviving in Nazi Berlin: Husni al-ʿUrabi’s 89 Months in Exile,” in Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period, Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, eds. (Brill, 2022), 141–57.
The inaugural symposium of the University of Maryland's 1856 Project took place on Wednesday, February 1, 2023. The 1856 Project investigates the University of Maryland’s connection to the regional context of slavery. It is our local chapter of the Universities Studying Slavery, an international group of colleges and universities encouraging their campuses to think about their connections to slavery and the slave trade while addressing historical and contemporary issues surrounding race and inequality in higher education. Department of History faculty Rick Bell and Chris Bonner both serve on the 1856 Project's Advisory Board. On February 16, Rick Bell delivered a keynote address to the President's Inclusive Leadership Institute at Towson University. His address was titled “Critical Race Theory for the Informed and Mis-Informed.” Julie Greene gave a talk at Northeast Normal University in China on December 11, 2022, titled "Conceptions of Class in US Labor HIstory." In January 2023 Piotr Kosicki served as the invited European Union Distinguished Visiting Professor at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, On December 5, 2022 Piotr was on a Georgetown University panel entitled "The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality: The Holocaust, The Cold War, and Ukraine." The panel was recorded and is available HERE.
PRESENTING
Julie Greene in China. Photos courtesy of Julie Greene
Paul Landau discussed his 2022 book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio UP) on February 24, 2023 as part of the ARHU Dean's Collquium Series on Race, Equity & Justice. Julie Taddeo presented multiple talks in January & February 2023 on Regency Britain for the Jane Austen Society of North America; Context Learning. Julie also spoke in other public history venues. On January 21, 2023, Stefano Villani presented a paper titled "Edwin Sandys, William Bedell, Paolo Sarpi, and the Editions of A Relation of the State of Religion" at Stuart Serenissima: Anglo-Venetian Cultural Exchange in the 17th Century international conference organized by the Cambridge History Faculty and the Oxford Centre for Early Modern Studies. On February 16, at a conference on the Italian language and the Reformation at the University of Bern, Switzerland, he presented a paper on a 17th century manuscript translation of the Book of Common Prayer . November 10-11, 2022, Peter Wien participated in a conference at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on “Ordinary” Ottomans: Post-WWI Settlements and Experiences of the End of Empire. His talk was "Fitna! Grassroots Mobilization and Working-Class Sufism in post-Ottoman Damascus." In June 2022, Peter co-organized an international conference “Ruling the Waves”: Transnational Radio Broadcasting in the Middle East and the Mediterranean Between Production and Reception, 1920-1970 in Rome, Blog post HERE.
Robert Chase's (PhD, 2009, Advisor: Gary Gerstle) book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020) won the H.L. Mitchell Best Book Award on the Southern Working Class from the Southern Historical Association. IHe also won an American Council of Learned Societies Grant (ACLS) Sustaining Public Engagement Grant of $224,000 for the project "Writing Beyond the Prison: Reimaging the Carceral Ecosystem with Incarcerated Authors and their Families." This digital humanities project will publish the writings of incarcerated authors and make them publicly available in a "Living Archive of Mass Incarceration" website and build a curriculum around incarcerated people's writing. Alan Shane Dillingham (PhD, 2012, Advisor: Karin Rosemblatt) won the Conference on Latin American History's María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican hHstory for his book, Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford, 2021). The prize was awarded at this year's annual meetings of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, PA. Sheldon Goldberg (PhD, 2012, Advisor: Jeffrey Herf) reviewed a new book by Adam D. Mendelsohn,, Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: the Union Army (NYUPress, 2022) that will appear in the spring edition of The Jewish Veteran.
PRACTICING HISTORY
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Joseph Mannard (PhD, 1989, Advisor: David Grimsted) organized 2 three-paper sessions for 2 different scholarly conferences.: “’She Is in a Dangerous Frame of Mind’: American Catholic Leadership and the 1831 Scandal of Sister Gertrude” for a joint panel at the American Historical Association 135th Annual Meeting, and the American Catholic Historical Association, 102nd Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, January 6-9, 2022. and “’The Very Interesting Case of an American Lady’: An Ex-Nun’s Successful Financial Claim against Mexico, 1849-1852,” at the Conference on the History of Women Religious 12th Triennial Meeting, University of Notre Dame, June 26-29, 2022. Both conference papers examine aspects of the life of Ann Gertrude Wightt, about whom He is writing a book. At the Notre Dame conference, he also participated in a roundtable titled “Nunspeak: What is a Historian to Do?” which addressed the issue of the problem of what we called “Nunspeak”—the significance of words and terms within religious congregations, and how historians might search for meaning within religious history. Joseph Slaughter (PhD, 2017, Advisors: Whit Ridgway and David Sicilia) took part in a panel discussion on firearms, regulations, and the second amendment at AHA 2023 in Philadelphia as a part of his work with the Center for the Study of Guns and Society at Wesleyan University. Also in January, The Conversation published an interview with Joseph as a part of its “Uncommon Courses” series, which focused on his new course, “God and Guns: the History of Faith and Firearms in America.” Charlotte Treadwell (HiLS, 2021, Advisor: Piotr Kosicki) is the new digital archivist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society's Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center in Boston, MA
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announced today that Jonathan W. White (PhD Advisor Herman Belz) author of A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), is a joint recipients of the 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Jonathan is Professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA, where he has taught since 2009. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (2014), which was a finalist for the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, a “best book” in the Civil War Monitor, and the winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s 2015 book prize. He has published more than one hundred articles, essays, and reviews. Harvard Pofessor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called A House Built by Slaves “an attempt to size Lincoln up through the eyes of Black Americans who visited the ‘people’s house’ that their people had built and in whose names they were determined to win the fight for freedom and citizenship.” Jonathan will be recognized during an award ceremony at the Harvard Club in New York City on April 11, 2023. See the press release HERE.
Brice Bowery, PhD candidate (Advisor: David Sicilia) has been named a 2023 Michael E. DeBakey Fellow in the History of Medicine at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD. His research project topic is "Modeling of Historical Biomedical Technology Research Literature." The fellowship provides support for archival research and digital projects based on the collections of the NLM. Brice will be using most of the funds to support the development of a digital humanities project, which involves computational analysis of mid- and late-twentieth century scientific literature related to medical device development. Leo Johnson (PhD student, Advisor: Ahmet Karamustafa) is presenting a paper, "The Meaning of Lesbian Sex in Twelfth-Century Satire: Khaqani's 'Number 351'" at the Forty-Fifth Annual Warren Susman Graduate Conference at Rutgers on April 7, 2023. Caitlin Kennedy (PhD student, Advisor: Julie Greene) presented a paper entitled "Arbitrators of Race: Irish Police Officers in New Orleans during the Civil War Era" at the Texas A&M History Conference on February 17, 2023. Caroline Angle Maguire (PhD tudent, Advisors: Paul Landau and Peter Wien) received a Cosmos Scholars grant, as well as the Joan Ridder Challinor Meritorious Award for Overall Excellence, from the Cosmos Club Foundation in Washington, DC. The grant will help support her dissertation research. .
TRAINING HISTORIANS
History students Paige Little, Allen Madarang, and Samory Senh worked with John Cade Sr.'s pioneering oral history project with formerly enslaved African Americans, creating an Enslaved.org dataset of the interviewees under the direction of Daryle Williams and Kristina Poznan. Their work was featured in a JSTOR Daily article. Their dataset is available now and an article they authored will appear in the spring issue of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. History Undergraduate Association (HUA) has had two events so far this semester, the February Social Hour and a Valentine's Day Social Hour.
LEARNING HISTORY
RANDOM MOMENTS
Sonya Michel. Birch Loves You. Collage. Photo courtesy of Sonya Michel
FORWARD LOOKS
Friday, March 3, 2023 10:00 am-Saturday, March 4, 2023 6:00 pm Taliaferro Hall, Second Floor
History Graduate Student Association Conference
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Thomas Zeller will give a talk at the University of Maryland Libraries Series Speakiing of Books about his new book, Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). The talk will be on Thursday, March 9, 2023, at 12 noon. The event is open to the public, but seats are limited. Register for the talk HERE:.
Giving Day is March 8, 2023. Consider giving to the History Enhancement Fund which augments the student experience, supports History Department programs, and increases the impact of our contribution to the field. Donations provide the flexibility to support undergraduate and graduate students through student awards, travel funds, research resources, and more. Your generosity leads to opportunities such as tuition support, field trips, transportation to internships, hands-on research and archival trips, and presentations at conferences. Your involvement encourages active learning, innovation, and creativity. Thank you for your donation!
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GIVING DAY 2023
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