News

Please join us in congratulating Sarah Milov as The Knight First Amendment Center has published her research article "Gags ang Grievance: The Labor Origins of Whistleblowing".

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/gags-and-grievance-the-labor-origins-...

Congratulations to Justene Hill Edwards who has been selected as a College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Research Fellow for the '24-'25 and '25-'26 academic years.  The Dean's Research Fellows program recognizes a small cohort of exceptional scholars in Arts and Sciences who are outstanding in their respective fields.

Postdoctoral Research Associate Justin McBrien has written an article for TIME that shows Hurricane Helene's damage is not unprecedented and "How America Forgot a Crucial Lesson From Hurricane Disasters of the Past".

https://time.com/7072620/hurricane-lesson-helene-camille-history/

Please welcome our new Visiting Associate Professor, Melissa Vise!

Vise received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in medieval and early modern history (2015) and her master’s in theological studies from the University of Notre Dame (2008).

She has written articles for the Speculum, Viator and American Journal for Legal History. She also has a book release, The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press), scheduled for January 2025.

Full profile can be read here: https://as.virginia.edu/faculty-profile/melissa-vise

The inaugural $50,000 American Battlefield Trust Prize for History has been awarded to historian Elizabeth Varon for “Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South,” a richly reported biography of the complicated Civil War leader who after the war encouraged an examination of the roots of the conflict and advocated for racial reconciliation.

Dr. James McPherson, Pulitzer Prize winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and one of the prize’s three judges, called Varon’s work “a literary and research achievement.” “The special virtue of this book is it tells us the whole story of Longstreet, for the decades after the war as well as the war itself,” said McPherson, professor emeritus at Princeton University. “It’s beautifully crafted and original in its good many insights.”

Varon’s work was selected from among nearly 100 entries for the new prize, which seeks to underscore the irreplaceable perspective and primary research value of preserving the battlefields on which our nation was forged – during conflicts which we still seek to better understand today.

The works of two other authors also were recognized with $2,500 honorable mentions: D. Scott Hartwig’s “I Dread the Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and the End of the Maryland Campaign” and Friederike Baer’s “Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War.”

Full announcement can be read here: https://www.battlefields.org/news/historian-elizabeth-varons-longstreet-biography-wins-inaugural-american-battlefield-trust

Professor S. Deborah Kang was featured in Tim Murphy's article, "The Border Patrol Is an Engine of Crisis—and Has Been Since the Beginning," for Mother Jones. Kang discussed the history of the Border Patrol. 

Read the article here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/05/border-patrol-turns-100-anniversary-cb-hudspeth/ 

Professor S. Deborah Kang details how the US Border Patrol's fraught, seemingly mismatched involvement in asylum processing is, in fact, a matter of design in "The Board Patrol and Asylum Exclusion." This article is a part of the Public Books' series "The Border is the Crisis."

Read here: https://www.publicbooks.org/the-border-patrol-and-asylum-exclusion/ 

Congratualtions to Professor Erik Linstrum, who will be a residential fellow at the Huntington Library! Linstrum is the 2024-25 Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow! 

See announement here: https://huntington.org/awarded-fellowships

Kirt von Daacke (History, American Studies) is co-editor, with Andrea Douglas, of the new book, After Emancipation: Racism and Resistance at the University of Virginia (University of Virginia Press). The book's 15 essays include contributions by Sylvia Chong and Kasey Jernigan (American Studies); Andrew Kahrl, Christian McMillen and Liz Varon (History); and A&S alumni James H. Hershman Jr. (History Ph.D., 1978), Countess Hughes(Psychology B.A., 1982; Assoc. Dir. of Assignments, UVA Housing & Residence Life); Scot French (History Ph.D., 2000) and Andrea Douglas (Art History Ph.D., 2001).

Kirt von Daacke is an Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Andrea Douglas is Executive Director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Together they serve as Co-Chairs of the UVA President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation.

About the book:

This anthology reckons with the University of Virginia’s post-emancipation history of racial exploitation. Its fifteen essays highlight the many forms of marginalization and domination at Virginia’s once all-white flagship university to uncover the patriarchal, nativist, and elitist assumptions that shaped university culture through the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Including community responses ranging from personal reflections to interviews with local leaders to poems, this accessible volume will be essential reading for anyone with ties to UVA or to Charlottesville, as well as for anyone concerned with the legacy of slavery and segregation in America’s universities.

Link to book here: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5925/