News
Faculty News:
Barry Strauss has published "Sparta's Maritime Moment" in Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and Carnes Lord, eds., China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective (Annapolis, MD.: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 33-62 and "Athens as Hamlet: The Irresolute Empire," in David Edward Tabachnik and Toivo Koivukoski, eds., Enduring Empire: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2009), 215-226.
Barry Strauss to appear on the History Channel's "Clash of the Gods" on September 21 (The Odyssey, Part II) and 28 (Beowulf) at 10:00pm.
Eric Tagliacozzo is co-editor, along with Cornell's Andrew Wilford, of Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries Between History and Anthropology (Stanford Univ. Press). Arjun Appadurai (NYU) calls the book "a sparkling reflecton on the exciting results that critical historicism about key interdisciplinary negotiations can yield." Rosalind Morris (Columbia) says, "some of these essays are small masterpieces."
Barton Myers has published Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community 1861-1865 (Louisiana State Univ. Press). A revised version of Barton's M.A. thesis, the book has been awarded LSU's Jules and Frances Landry Award for the year's best book in Southern Studies. Previous winners include Drew Gilpin Faust, John Hope Franklin, Winthrop Jordan, and William Leuchtenberg.
Michael Kammen has published "Reflections on European History and Memory in Exile," Amerikastudien/American Studies 53.4 (2008): 535-553.
Vicki Caron has published "Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siecle France: The Case of the Union Nationale," The Journal of Modern History 81 (June 2009): 294-346.
Margaret Washington has been awarded the Letitia Woods Brown prize by the Association of Black Women Historians for her book, Soujourner Truth's America.
Steve Kaplan has recently been awarded two prizes: The Academie francaise has awarded Steve its Prix Thiers for his book, Le pain maudit. The Academie des sciences morales at politiques has awarded him its Prix Charles Aubert, a lifetime achievement award for his "oeuvre."
The History News Network lists Holly Case in its feature on "Top Young Historians" (see more).
Repetition with Change: The Intellectual Legacies of Dominick LaCapra, September 25-26, 2009, A.D. White House. For almost four decades, Domininick LaCapra has challenged the disciplinary and normative assumptions of scholars throughout the huamnities. He helped to inaugurate and interpret the "linguistic turn" in the historical profession, exploring the relevance of literary theory for historical inquiry, while simultaneously making a case for careful historical study within literary and critical theory. This conference will gather together LaCapra's former students and intellectual interlocutors who have taken up in their own work one or more of the theoretical challenges he has posed over the years. Papers will be grouped according to some of LaCapra's chief preoccupations that have persisted through the decades: historigraphy and critical theory, secularization, trauma and repetition, excess and normative limits, and animal-human relations. Together the papers will illustrate the vast range of work that LaCapra's theoretical reflections have inspired in European intellectual history and beyond. (see schedule of events)
New book: "Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement and the Longue Duree," edited by Eric Tagliacozzo (NUS Press, 2009).
The New York Historical Society announces that Michael Kammen has contributed to its catalog accompanying their fall exhibition "Lincoln and New York" (see attached).
Fred Logevall named Director of Cornell's Einaudi Center, beginning in January 2010 (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July09/LogevallEinaudi.html).
Joel Silbey has added to his long list of books with "Party Over Section: The Rough and Ready Presidential Election of 1848" (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2009). On the book jacket, James Brewer Stewart confirms our suspicion that, as always, it is "gracefully written, cogently documented and exceedingly well argued."
A second edition of Peter Dear's "Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2001, 2009). Simon Critchfield confirms that the book has become "a clear first choice for students and teachers."
A festschrift has been published in honor of John Najemy. Edited by David S. Peterson with Daniel E. Bornstein, it is entitled "Florence and Beyond, Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy: Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy" (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008).
Margaret Washington's latest is Sojourner Truth's America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Nancy A. Hewitt, this year's Carl Becker Lecturer (April 1 & 2) writes of the book, "Engaging enslavement and emancipation, religious perfectionism and social activism, civil war and civil rights, Sojourner Truth's America captures a radical vision of a better world and the challenges to achieving it." Book signings will be held at the Cornell Bookstore on April 21st, and at the History Center, in conjunction with a talk by Margaret on April 25th.
Barry Strauss's latest is The Spartacus War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), about which Donald Kagan says, "Barry Strauss boldly treats the Trojan War not as mythology or poetry but as history. An exciting tale written in a lively style that brings Homer's heroes and the world in which they lived to vibrant and colorful life."
The Indonesian Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), edited by Tineke Helwig and Eric Tagliacozzo. Michael Laffan of Princeton says that it "offers a key corpus of documents to debate and contextualize," and Rudolph Mrazek of Michigan calls it a "Reader that deserves to be read."
Derek Chang has recently received the Robert Paul Advising Award in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Michael Kammen receives the AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction (see attached).
It has just been announced that Professor Mary Beth Norton (the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History) has received a 2008 Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship. The fellowship is meant to honor and recognize tenured faculty members "who [have] a sustained record of effective, inpsiring and distinguished teaching of undergraduate students and of contributions to undergraduate education." The namesake of the fellowship, Stephen H. Weiss '57, is the late emeritus chair of Cornell's Board of Trustees. To date, there have been 50 recipients of the Weiss Fellowship. The current board will hold a cermony in honor of the recipients in May.
A new French translation of Vicki Caron's France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942, (Stanford 1999) has been published. Entitled "L'Asile Incertain: Les Refugies Juifs en France, 1933-1942), it is available from Tallandier, Paris. Vicki is spending the 2008-2009 academic year on a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
David S. Powers' latest has been published: Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet (University of Pennsylvania, 2009).
Stuart Blumin's most recent work, The Encompassing City: Streetscapes in early modern art and culture (Manchester, 2008) is now available. Tom Nichols of the University of Aberdeen hails it "an excellent and illuminating book on a visual genre that has long been familiar to art historians and those interested in art, but has never been fully understood."
Chen Jian (from Chen Zhihong)
Shortly after our arrival in London in October 2008, Chen Jian gave his
inaugural public lecture as Philippe Roman Visiting Chair Professor at LSE
which around 700 people including the donor Philippe Roman, President of
LSE and some former ambassadors attended. Although one or two fanatic
Tibetan and anti-communist people asked him some very challenging
questions, his talk in general was very well received by most of the
audience. This was the first speech, and Chen Jian is supposed to give
altogether four public speeches at LSE. You can listen to his speech
on-line now by looking for the date October 8, 2008. There
are many other very interesting lectures on various topics you can listen
to on the following wonderful website of LSE. For example, Prof. Joseph S.
Nye from Harvard talked about "The Powers to Lead" on May 8, 2008.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IDEAS/events/previousEvents2008.htm
If you have time and are interested, you may also click the links below to
see profiles that LSE made for both of us:
(1)About Chen Jian
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IDEAS/teaching/PhilippeRomanChair2008-09.htm
(2) About me, Chen Zhihong (roll down to the last person on the webpage)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IDEAS/whosWho/visitingFellows.htm
Student Awards and Job Announcements
Chris Cantwell has been awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2009. Congratulations!
Yael Manes has received a two-year post-doc Hanadiv Fellowship in European and Western History. Congratulations!
Suyapa Portillo - Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellowship, Pomona College 2008-2010; Fulbright Hays Dissertation Fellowship 2006; Predoctoral Ford Foundation Fellowship 2005-present
Stephen Frug (PhD, August 2008) has won the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. history submitted in 2008.
Graduate student Rebecca Tally and her student Eric Rabinowitz won the Gertrude Spencer Prize given by the Knight Writing Program for excellent preparatoy and other work leading to a finished paper in a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Graduate student Emma Kuby won a Knight Award for Writing Exercises and Handouts for the exercise, "An Inconvenient Truth: Counter-Evidence," which she prepared for History 1105. A student in that course, Weiyan Chen, also won an Adelphic Award for his essay, "George Sorel: Would Marx Call Him Comrade?"
Also, our former honors student, Eva Rigamonti (summa cum laude in history, 2006), has been endorsed as Cornell's nominee for a Rhodes Fellowship. Congratulations to her, and all in the department who worked with it!