RECENT NEWS AND HIGHLIGHTS

Heath Mitton presented a paper at the Southern Historical Association meeting in Louisville, KY, entitled "'No More Experiments': The American Sectional Crisis as an Atlantic Story," November 6, 2009.

In July, Eric Kimball presented new research findings on colonial New Englanders trading patterns with the Atlantic slavery economies of the eighteenth century at the National Endowment for the Humanities - "We the People" - Summer Institute for school teachers: "The Role of Slavery in the Rise of New England Commerce, Industry, and Culture to 1860" at Brown University.

In June, Eric Kimball presented a paper, " 'The Meat of All the Slaves in All the West Indies': How Fisherman from Salem Sustained the Plantation Complex in the 18th Century Caribbean," at the 2009 World History Association conference in Salem, Massachusetts.

Lawrence Culver has been chosen as a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and the Deutsches Museum. As a fellow in 2010, he will join a group of twelve scholars chosen from all disciplines worldwide conducting research in environmental studies. He will use this fellowship for research and writing related to his second book project, “Manifest Disaster: Climate, Catastrophe, and the Making of America.” He will be in residence at the University of Munich for the summer and fall of 2010.

Prof. Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford, and adjunct Professor of History at Utah State University, has been elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy. The Academy elects annually up to thirty-eight outstanding UK-based humanities and social sciences scholars. Becoming a member of this fellowship is a mark of distinction, as only a very small number of scholars in any field are chosen. Click here for more information about Prof. Pelling and the British Academy.

•"Res Publica Not Res Plebiea: The Management of Elizabethan England," Centre for Early Modern History, Oxford University, June 16, 2009
•"'He never failed to serve his God, before he served his country': Burghley, the Law and the Newly Protestant State," Religion in Britain Seminar, Oxford University, June 4, 2009
•"Of Poetry and Politics: the Management Literature of Sixteenth Century England," History and Literature Seminar, Oxford University, June 4, 2009

Prof. Victoria Grieve was interviewed by the journal The Arts Politic about her new book and contemporary federal support for the arts. Click here to read the interview.

Prof. Victoria Grieve has written a new book The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture, published by the University of Illinois Press. It examines the complicated processes of compromise and negotiation between high and low art, federal and local interests, and the Progressive Era and New Deal during the 1930s. The Press has also created a “Book Blog” page for Prof. Grieve. She has posted an entry entitled “Museums Look to the Common Man.”

Jared Farmer, former USU History major and now Assistant Professor of History at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, has won the 2009 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society for American Historians for his book On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008). The Parkman Prize is awarded annually for the best nonfiction book on an American theme published the previous year. Prof. Farmer is also author of Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country (Univ. of Arizona Press, 1999). Click here to read more about Jared's achievement.

Prof. Sue Shapiro was awarded a grant under the Pilot Program in Enhance Undergraduate Research in the Humanities. The grant, funded by USU’s Office of the Vice President for Research, awards an undergraduate research assistant to a faculty member in the humanities. Her research assistant is Muriel McGregor (a History major and Classics minor) and their project is “ Pasolini’s Medea: A Twentieth-Century Tragedy.”

Prof. Jennifer Ritterhouse was invited to deliver a talk on "Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race," part of the exhibit on "Race: Are We So Different?" at the Cincinnati Museum Center, March 12, 2009.

Prof. Sue Shapiro was invited to give a lecture at the University of Utah on March 11, 2009. Her lecture was entitled “Catiline’s Legacy.”

Prof. James Sanders has published "Atlantic Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century Columbia: Spanish America's Challenge to the Contours of Atlantic History." Journal of World History 20 (March 2009): 131-150.

Prof. James Sanders was invited to the University of Illinois to participate in the symposium "Latin American Revolutions and Civil Wars before Mass Politics, 1810-1910: Towards New Interpretations from the Political Culture and Social Movements Perspectives," April 2-4, 2009, Champaign, IL.

Prof. James Sanders participated on a panel focusing on "Comparative Histories: Writing Across and Beyond the Spanish World," part of the conference entitled "Beyond Modernity: How Are We Writing the Political History of the Spanish World," University of Warwick, UK, March 7, 2009.

Prof. Norm Jones delivered a paper entitled "The Informality of Rule: Managing Elizabethan Government" at the Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar which was held at Cambridge University on February 4, 2009.

Prof. Norm Jones has published “Advice to Elizabeth” in History Today, exploring the 450th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession and examining the problems of state that faced the new queen in November 1558. Jones used as the basis of his article evidence from state papers, newly made available online. Prof. Jones serves as an academic adviser for the State Papers project.

The Department of History offers its congratulations!

last updated on 10-Nov-2009