News
Congratulations to UVa History dept. grad student Vivien Chang, who has won a Dissertation Fellowship from the UVa Institute of the Humanities and Global Culture's Global South Lab. Vivien's research "focuses on decolonization, development, African nationalism, global governance, and the Cold War in the Third World." This fellowship will support her in her third year of graduate study as she develops her dissertation proposal.
Prof. Will Hitchcock recently wrote a short article for the Washington Post's recurring Made by History feature. (Made by History, incidentally, is edited by UVa History PhD Brian Rosenwald!) Prof. Hitchcock's article investigates the relationship forged between President Eisenhower and Rev. Billy Graham, which has continued to set the stage for interactions between the president and faith leaders. With the recent death of Graham, now is an especially important time to look back upon his political impact over the last several decades. Click here to read the article!
UVa History grad student Swati Chawla will be assisting with Spring RA training on Friday! She'll be speaking on the subject: "Answering 'Where are you From?': Lessons from Modern South Asia." Swati will draw upon her research on citizenship in modern South Asia to lead a workshop that will help new RAs to understand the importance of itinerancy in the construction of the nation-state, and to reflect on the implications of our response to the commonplace inquiry: “Where are you from?”
Profs. William Hitchcock and Brian Balogh, along with several other fellows from the Miller Center, have contributed blurbs to an article on the 10 most important speeches in presidential history. Check it out here!
Listen to Prof. Brian Balogh discuss the history of using the Olympics to conduct politics by other means on NPR's Here and Now. You can find the episode here.
Congratulations to Asaf Almog, Swati Chawla, Alexi Garrett, Stefan Lund, Brian Neumann, and Nicole Schroeder, who have all been awarded Public Fellowships from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to participate in Max Edelson's digital humanities seminar "Mapping the South Atlantic"!
Congratulations to graduate student Swati Chawla for winning a 2018 Summer Graduate Research Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University! Click here to find out more information about the grant.
Listen to the History Department's own Brian Balogh discuss the history of the State of the Union address with his Backstory co-host Ed Ayers on NPR's Here & Now. You can fiind the recording here.
The journal Europe Now has recently launched a Campus Spotlight feature on UVa, which includes a "first response reading list" with reference to "Shock and Outrage" and the Backstory podcast on Charlottesville. This feature was put together with the help of Corcoran Department of History faculty members Manuela Achilles and Kyrill Kunakhovich, as well as Janet Horne, who is associated with the department. Check out the stories here!
Congratulations to Karen Parshall, Commonwealth Professor of Mathematics and History, on receiving the 2018 Albert Leon Whiteman Memorial Prize! This award is given by the AMS in recognition of "notable exposition and exceptional scholarship in the history of mathematics." The award was granted on January 11, 2018 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego.
The partisan divide between Americans is one of the most significant in the last century, according to an October study by the Pew Research Center. But 50 years ago, divisions were arguably worse. The history department's Brian Balogh recently spoke with Here & Now's Robin Young about the divide in 1968.
Congratulations to department graduate student Mina Lee, who has been accepted to the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project’s 2018 Asia-Pacific Nuclear History Institute. The institute will take place on March 4-10 in Soeul South Korea and is jointly organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center and Kyungnam University. Read more here.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is denying a report from The Washington Post that the Trump administration is prohibiting health officials from using several words, including "fetus," "transgender" and "science-based." Brian Balogh spoke to Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson on the U.S. government's long history of guiding the use of certain words. Listen here.
As more men stand accused of sexual misconduct, many are watching for two words: "I'm sorry." But, according to historians, the public apology is not America's strong suit. From Secretary of State Alexander Hamilton to President Grover Cleveland to Justice Clarence Thomas, Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson explores that history with Brian Balogh and Joanne Freeman from BackStory. Listen to the story here.
Leif Fredrickson, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in May, has been awarded the 2017 Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts for his dissertation, “The Age of Lead: Metropolitan Change, Environmental Health, and Inner City Underdevelopment.” A panel of graduate deans with expertise in humanities and fine arts selected his dissertation from a field of 65 dissertations from institutions throughout the United States and Canada. Read more about the award here.
On Tuesday, 28 November, the students in Waitman Beorn’s class, “Curating the Past,” debuted their exhibition, “Contested Spaces: Examining the Past, Present, and the Forgotten at the University” in the atrium of Nau Hall. The six posters, each of which treats an aspect of the history of UVa, represent the collaborative efforts of six groups of four students. Beorn, who kicked off the event, was followed at the podium by Aswanth Samuel, one of the students in the class who had been elected by his peers to speak, and Mark Edmundson, Professor of English. After the unveiling of the posters, the students fielded questions from the sizeable audience. The posters and their creators are: “Introduction: Contested Spaces” by Olivia Tate, Hannah Hicks, Anna Barr, and Lauren Woodrell; “Changing Names, Changing Values” by Lauren Staton, Lily Snodgrass, Gwynnie Powers, and Teresa Nowalk; “Voids: Spaces of Absence, Loss, and Memory” by Rachel Smith, Olivia Bousquette, Ashwanth Samuel, and Jane Diamond; “Buried Over Time: Cemeteries at UVa” by Liz Feeser, Ellen Adams, Sarah Barbour, and Laila Husain; “Changing Over Time” by Ethan Hyman, Addie Patrick, Ashley Botkin, and Gregroty Lee; and “Who is in Control?” by Maeve Jones, Chad Kamen, Shannon Spence, and Jesse Ginn. The project was sponsored by the University of Virginia Library , the University of Virginia Bicentennial, and Gropen.
View the Project Website
Danielle Bernstein, of the History Distinguished Majors Program, has written an article on the US Housing and Urban Development Department. Read it here: HUD's Problems are Bigger than Ben Carson: The Agency's Problem Isn't Personnel--It's Policy.
Department graduate student Erik Erlandson has written an op-ed for the Washington Post about tax reform and how government bureaucracy serves as a bulwark against hasty deregulation. Read the aritcle here: In Praise of Red Tape.
Delaware University professor Robert Hampel has dedicated his new book Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts in American Education (Rowman & Littlefield) to the history department's Michael Holt. Prof. Holt served as Hampel's undergraduate thesis advisor while at Yale. More information about Dr. Hampel's book, including a blurb by the history department's Joseph Kett, is available below and at the publisher's webpage, here.
Robert Hampel’s new book, Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts to
Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), starts with Norman Rockwell’s correspondence school and
ends with Evelyn Wood’s speed reading classes. Along the way he looks at Classic Comics, Paint by
Numbers, shorthand, Cliff Notes, phonetic spelling, Teach for America, three year bachelors degrees,
law school at the YMCA, and other streamlined paths to education.
Tuesday's election was a big night for Democrats, with major victories in Virginia and New Jersey. But as an off-year election, what it says about the state of national politics may be difficult to read. Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson talks with Brian Balogh and yale's Joanne Freeman about how the importance of off-year elections has changed. Listen here.