June 2023 Department of History Newsletter

MOMENTS IN HISTORY NEWSLETTER June 2023 Faculty Moments 19 14 IN THIS ISSUE 07 17 11 Media Moments Current Students Forward Looks 03 Random Moments Alumni History Has Its Eyes On You 13 Julie Greene has been selected as a 2023-24 UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. As her award letter states: "The Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Program honors members of UMD faculty who have demonstrated outstanding scholarly achievement as well as outstanding accomplishments as teachers. This program recognizes those who have led the way in both areas and who thus serve as models of excellence for the faculty of a top research university." A panel of former recipients of the award chose the new recipients from a group of dedicated and talented faculty. Julie Greene Chosen Distinguished Scholar-Teacher 03 history has its eyes on you history has its eyes on you outstanding excellent The UMD Graduate School has selected Robyn Muncy to receive a Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award for 2023. She was nominated for this Award by Lauren Carter Cain and several other students. From the award letter: "Outstanding faculty mentors are a hallmark of excellent graduate education. The Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award recognizes faculty members who have made exceptional contributions to a student’s (or students’) graduate experience. This Award serves the dual purposes of acknowledging outstanding mentoring provided by individual faculty and of reminding the university community of the importance of mentoring to graduate studies." The Award carries an honorarium and will be presented at the Graduate School’s Fellowship and Award Celebration on Tuesday, May 9, 3:00 - 4:00, in the Stamp Student Union, the Atrium. exceptional Leslie Rowland ends a 5-year term on the History and Social Sciences Faculty Board for GenEd. She received a commendation letter from the Dean for Undergraduate Studies, William Cohen. He especially commended her work reading course proposals and providing feedback to the Board. He writes further: "Thank you for your contribution. ... Your time, effort and leadership have allowed General Education to become a successful and nationally recognized program. Your insight and commitment to the mission of General Education has been valuable." history has its eyes on you Freedmen and Southern Society Project Receives $160,000 NHPRC Grant The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) has awarded a grant of $160,000 to the Freedmen and Southern Society Project for August 2023-July 2024. The grant will support final production work for Law and Justice, 1865-1867, the seventh volume of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, as well as editorial work for Family and Kinship, 1865-1867, the eighth volume. The announcement about the grant is HERE. History has its eyes on you Zachary Dorner has been awarded a short-term Virtual Scholarly Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library to support research for his new project tentatively titled "Caring for the Precariat: State Responsibility in an Age of Uncertainty." The Fellowship will be during the 2023-24 academic year. Jeremy Simmons has received a fellowship. at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in DC for the Fall 2023 term. He will be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in Spring 2024. Julie Taddeo's book, Rape in Period Drama Television, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) was featured in the ARHU Dean's celebration of ARHU authors in May, and she was named as one of the University's "Groundbreakers" in the Spring 2023 issue of EnTERPrise Magazine. media moments Antoine Borrut served as historical consultant for a popular YouTube channel “Epic History” with almost 2M subscribers, for a two-part series on the Abbasid dynasty (r. 750-1258 CE). The first part was released mid-May and has already been seen by over 335k viewers. media moments Jim Gilbert's most recent novel, Murder at Amapas Beach (Atmosphere Press), was featured in the June 14, 2023 edition of MarylandToday. The book features Amanda Pennyworth, the American consul to the resort city of Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. She finds herself trying to solve two murders, one of a close friend. See MarylandToday HERE. Shay Hazkani appeared May 15, 2023 on NPR's Morning Edition. He was featured in a segment titled "75 Years Ago: Israel's triumph became a catastrophe for Palestinians" with Daniel Estrin. Hear the segment HERE The Spring 2023 edition of EnTERPrise: The University of Maryland Research Magazine lists books by Jeffrey Herf, Julie Taddeo, Stefano Villani, and Thomas Zeller in its list of Groundbreakers. See the magazine HERE. Sonya Michel's collage work was featured in Washingtonian magazine May 23, 2023. The article "A Maryland Artist Turned Jamie Raskin’s Bandannas Into a Collage" showcased the collage she created for US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) as a gift for his wife. Raskin recently underwent successful chemotherapy for lymphoma. During the treatment, Raskin received hundreds of bandanas from supporters including musician and actor Steven Van Zandt. Quincy Mills was featured in the New York Times May 20, 2023 article titled "Inside the Life of Influencer Barbers." Read the article HERE. . media moments Julie Taddeo did a radio interview for WTOP and a TV interview for WBAL-TV (Baltimore) about the coronation of King Charles III of the United Kingdom. Julie has been interested to see far less attention to the coronation than to the death of Charles III's predecessor and mother, Queen Elizabeth II. WTOP segment is HERE. WBAL segment is HERE. Julie was interviewed by the French newspaper Liberation about the history of the corset and how it is used in period dramas on British television to convey women's oppression. Julie is an expert on Victorian and Regency women's history. Read the interview HERE. Julie was interviewed by CBC Canada Tonight about the relationship between the British tabloids and the Royal Family, particularly Harry and Meaghan. See the interview HERE. In her first podcast, Julie Taddeo was featured by One Day University and iHeartRadio discussing the coronation of King Charles III. Julie has been a featured commentator on the coronation in a number of media outlets. Listen to the podcast HERE. PUBLISHING The English translation of Antoine Borrut's first book will be published by Brill in July 2023 (with a new preface) under the title Between Memory and Power: The Syrian Space under the Late Umayyads and Early Abbasids (c. 72-193/692-809. See the publisher's website HERE. Antoine also co-edited a volume entitled Mers et rivages d’Islam: de l’Atlantique à la Méditerranée. Mélanges offerts à Christophe Picard (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2023) which was published in May. The volume consists of 25 contributions gathered in a Festschrift dedicated to Prof. Christophe Picard. Antoine’s essay in the volume is entitled “Histoires astrologiques et construction du temps culturel dans les débuts de l’islam.” The Russian and Kazakh-language translations of Sarah Cameron’s book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell UP, 2018) were reissued in honor of Kazakhstan’s Famine Remembrance Day on May 31, 2023. The book continues to be widely read in the region: this marks the second printing of the book in the Russian language and the third in the Kazakh language. While in Almaty, Sarah held a Q&A about the book and signed books. The May 2023 issue of Commonweal magazine includes Piotr Kosicki's new article about the weaponization of historical memory of Pope John Paul II (and the suppression of research into his ties to clerical abuse) in Poland. The digital version is available HERE. Piotr also published a new article in The Atlantic titled "Poland Is Not Ready to Accept a New McCarthyism." The article explores the significance of a June 4, 2023 march celebrating the 34th anniversary of the 1989 elections that led Poland to abjure communism. Piotr argues that the march was also a protest against the current autocratic Polish government. Read the article HERE. Marlene Mayo's essay is among seven which have been selected for publication in a recent e-book, a Project Muse issue published in October 2022 by University of Hawaii Press, entitled Celebrating 60+ Issues of "U.S.-Japan Women's Journal," edited by Alisa Freedman. Marlene's essay is "A Friend in Need: Esther B. Rhoads, Quakers, and Humanitarian Relief in Allied Occupied Japan, 1946-1952," originally published in U.S.-Japan Women's Journal 50 (2016). On May 25, 2023, Julie Taddeo published a review of "This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s," a recent photo Exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The exhibit included 46 photos, most of them in black and white which present multiple versions of what it means to “be British” as a generation of socially conscious photographers expose issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality that threaten inclusivity during these two tumultuous decades. The exhibit also includes an hour-long film, Handsworth Songs, made in 1986 by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah for Channel Four’s series, Britain: The Lie of the Land. The newsreels and still photographs from the 1985 riots featured in Handsworth Songs provide context for the racism directed against the Black community in Birmingham in the 1980s. The exhibit ran until June 11, 2023. Read the full review HERE. faculty moments faculty MOMENTS Antoine Borrut was in Paris in May as an invited Professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) where he gave four talks on his current book project tentatively entitled "Heaven and History: Astrology and the Construction of Historical Knowledge in Early Islam." See video of the conference HERE. Rob Chiles and HIST222 presented another successful, popular FoodFest in May. It was attended by a large number of students and the ARHU Dean Stephanie Shonekan. Paul Landau attended the 2023 European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Köln, May 30 thru June 4, 2023 and presented a paper entitled, "Lost Prophets of Afrotopias in Pre-War South Africa," on June 2. Currently Paul is assembling two panels on "Reconsidering the World Anti-Apartheid Movement," for the South African Historical Association's biennial meeting to be held in 2024 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Julie Taddeo organized a virtual one day conference in June with UK and US colleagues on Georgian and Regency British history in relation to the Netflix TV series Queen Charlotte and Bridgerton. On May 26, Stefano Villani participated in the roundtable "England: 1640-1660 in a European Perspective," organized by the Euronews project at the University of Florence. graduate alumni Caitlin Schoen Justin Shapiro will begin a three-year Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship in Climate Change Education and Communication at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment this summer. Justin will work on his book manuscript about the environmental history of public housing in DC. Department of History PhD student Caitlin Schoen (Advisor: Piotr Kosicki) has won a very competitive Chateaubriand Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences (the major fellowship for PhD students in French Studies awarded by the Republic of France) for the academic year 2023-24. The Fellowship will support her PhD research in France. History Undergraduates Stars on Undergraduate Research Day, April 26, 2023 Four Library Research Awards were presented at Undergraduate Research Day on April 26, and all four went to History students! Here is the line-up of award-winners: Elizabeth Early (Advisor: Rick Bell) won the Library's new IDEA Award, which goes to a research essay that explores issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion for her History Honors thesis "'A Quest for the Truth': An Analysis of the Background and Context of the Southern University Slave Narrative Project and the WPA Slave Narrative Project;" Emily Fox (Advisor: Kate Keane) won a Library Award for a Research Essay for her paper "Toward a People's History of the University of Maryland: AFSCME Local 1072;" Cecelia Hough (Advisor: Colleen Woods) won a Library Award for a Research Essay for her essay "Homosexual Investigations: The CIA's Contribution to the Lavender Scare from the 1950s to the 1980s;" and Evan Richardson (Advidor: Kate Keane) won a Library Research Award for his paper "Getting From Sesame Street to Sesamstrasse: The Development of Sesame Street's International Adaptations, 1970-1978." undergraduate ARHU Undergraduate Student Service Award Kaylie Bergeson (BA History, 2023) has been awarded the College of the Arts and Humanities (ARHU) 2023 Undergraduate Student Service Award. She was nominated by Sabrina Alcorn Baron and Gail Russell for her work in the Department of History Office where Kaylie also devoted a significant portion of her time to maintenance of the History website. She even continued her work with the website while she spent Fall 2022 studying abroad at the University of Bristol, UK. She was also a student in the History Honors program and wrote her thesis in Spring 2023. The award carries a cash honorarium and will be presented at the ARHU Fall 2023 convocation. undergraduate undergraduate The Hoosier-Clio Award for this year's cohort of History Honors thesis writers was awarded to Julia Grafstein for her amazing thesis, “Alienation and Alliances: Transgender Coalition-Building from the 1970s through the 1990s.” Katarina Keane was her advisor. The thesis also won the Winston Family Award for best Honors thesis from the Honors College. Julia is graduating in May 2024. Paulina Leder, triple major in History, German, and French, was named a University of Maryland Undergraduate Researcher of the Year for 2023. She was nominated by Piotr Kosicki and Peter Wien. Leder is one of seven undergraduates selected by the Office of Undergraduate Studies to receive the annual award. While studying in Berlin, she researched the experiences of filmmaker Konrad Wolf, who fought for artistic expression while also representing the oppressive East German Cold War government. Leder was inspired to major in History by taking Anne Rush’s course HIST289O “Lawlessness: From Pirates to Body-snatchers, Exploring the Legitimacy of Illicit Activity” during her first semester at UMD. In her time at Maryland, Leder honed her writing, independent research, and leadership skills as the editor-in-chief at Janus, the undergraduate journal for History and the Humanities. She participated in the Maryland-in-Nice Study Abroad program from March to August 2022. Her History Honors thesis, supervised by Piotr Kosicki, was titled “Between Compromise and Utopia: Konrad Wolf, an Artistic Life Unfulfilled, 1949-1990.” After graduation, Leder will return to France as a TAPIF teaching assistant. History Minors Are Senior Marshalls at UMD Campus Commencement Natalie Adams and Mark Salman (BA 2023), have completed the History Minor. Natalie and Mark were among the 79 Senior Marshalls for the Spring 2023 UMD campus Commencement ceremony held Monday, May 22 in SECU Stadium. Read more about Natalie and Mark and their achievements in the MarylandToday article HERE. undergraduate RANDOM MOMENTS Conference Program politics memory history A one-day conference celebrating the retirement of Distinguished University Professor Jeffrey Herf was held on May 3, 2023. It was organized by Jeffrey's former students Sam Miner and Christina Morina. Piotr Kosicki led a book talk and the History Department held a farewell lunch for Jeffrey on May 2. Photos Stefano Villani UMD Department of History is well represented in the Enslaved.org SROP faculty leads: Daryle Williams, Kristina Poznan, and Quincy Mills. Scholar profiles have been rolled out HERE. Take note of Dylan Bails, incoming HiLS student. The key partner and research site in 2023: Tudor Place and their work that follows from an IMLS Inspire! Grant. Research is especially focused on a document for the archives commonly known as the Peters' account book (1795-96) which lists numerous enslaved persons, some from Mt. Vernon (VA) who came to be associated with Tudor Place (Georgetown, DC) and related properties in Montgomery County, MD. Chris Bonner is co-leading a separate SROP cohort, working on the cross-college 1856 Project. random moments ARHU Dean Stephanie Shonekan and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Herf random moments random moments SAVE THE DATE "London, Florence, Europe 1640-60: Conflict in the News" June 23, 2023 3:30-6:00 PM CEST 9:30 AM-!2:00 PM EST Online Roundtable from the Euronews Project Forward looks The Washington Area Early American Seminar, hosted by the University of Maryland, invites proposals from scholars wishing to present work in progress in the next academic year on any topic connected to Atlantic world or American history prior to 1865. Genuine work in progress is preferable to polished, already-accepted pieces. The seminar meets twice per semester during term time in College Park and at partner institutions like Mount Vernon, George Washington University, and the Smithsonian. Papers are pre-circulated and we expect that our face to face Friday afternoon (4-5.30pm) seminars will be followed by a dinner at a local restaurant. To propose a paper, please upload a brief, one-page cv and submit a title along with a 300-word description of the paper HERE. Deadline for submissions is June 30. If you want to be added to the mailing list or if you have questions please contact any of the conveners: Rick Bell (rjbell@umd.edu), Chris Bonner (cjbonner@umd.edu), Holly Brewer (hbrewer@umd.edu), Zack Dorner (zdorner@umd.edu), or Clare Lyons (clyons@umd.edu). MOMENTS IN HISTORY Text GIVE NEWSLETTER Text University of Maryland Department of History 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall College Park, MD 20742 301-405-4265 hist-web@umd.edu Copyright, UMD Department of History, 2023. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Media Manager June 2023 UMD DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall College Park, MD 20742 301-405-4365 history-web@umd.edu Text Text