News

Professor Karen Parshall was featured in an article titled, "Celebrating Karen Parshall as an Advisor" in the most recent issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Five of Karen's former graduate students reflected on her dedication to and excellence in mentoring.   

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202203/rnoti-p400.pdf?adat=March%202022&trk=2445&cat=career&galt=none&utm_source=Informz&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March%20%20notices&_zs=qW1QA1&_zl=djlc6

The University of Virginia Lifetime Learning Program’s most recent podcast featured Professor Justene Hill Edwards, who discussed her book Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina.

https://m.soundcloud.com/user-648419957/the-economic-lives-of-enslaved-people

Professor Sarah Milov was a guest on the podcast, "This Day in Esoteric Political History." The episode focused on the 35th anniversary of General Services Administration regulations limiting where federal employees could smoke at work. 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-smoking-section-1987-w-sarah-milov/id1502728938?i=1000550214163

Graduate Student Allison Mitchell's article, "For Jobs and Freedom: How Histories of the Civil Rights Movement Resurrected Black Folks' Economic Demands," was published in Medium as part of the New Ideas in American History project. 

https://medium.com/new-american-history/for-jobs-and-freedom-edee5c9b4631

Graduate student Meghan Herwig's op-ed in the Washington Post's "Made by History" series, discusses whether the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics will push China on human rights.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/04/will-diplomatic-boycott-olympics-push-china-human-rights/

The history department congratulates Professor Thomas Klubock on the publication of his new book, Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile. Below, is the description for his book:

The first major history of Chile’s most significant peasant rebellion and the violent repression that followed
"In 1934, peasants turned to revolution to overturn Chile’s oligarchic political order and the profound social inequalities in the Chilean countryside. The brutal military counterinsurgency that followed was one of the worst acts of state terror in Chile until the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Using untapped archival sources, award-winning scholar Thomas Miller Klubock exposes Chile’s long history of political violence and authoritarianism and chronicles peasants’ movements to build a more just and freer society. Klubock further explores how an amnesty law that erased both the rebellion and the military atrocities lay the foundation for the political stability that characterized Chile’s multi-party democracy. This historical amnesia or olvido, Klubock argues, was a precondition of national reconciliation and democratic rule, which endured until 1973, when conflict in the countryside ended once again with violent repression during the Pinochet dictatorship."

Professor Neeti Nair spoke on the latest incident of Anti-Muslim hate speech in India, and the lack of response from political leadership on NPR's All Things Considered.

India’s Supreme Court steps in after Hindu leaders call for violence against Muslims.

The history department congratulates Professor Brian Owensby on the publication of his new book, New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy. Here’s a description of Professor Owensby's new book: 

“In the centuries before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, social and material relations among the indigenous Guaraní people of present-day Paraguay were based on reciprocal gift-giving. But the Spanish and Portuguese newcomers who arrived in the sixteenth century seemed interested in the Guaraní only to advance their own interests, either through material exchange or by getting the Guaraní to serve them. This book tells the story of how Europeans felt empowered to pursue individual gain in the New World, and how the Guaraní people confronted this challenge to their very way of being. Although neither Guaraní nor Europeans were positioned to grasp the larger meaning of the moment, their meeting was part of a global sea change in human relations and the nature of economic exchange.

Brian P. Owensby uses the centuries-long encounter between Europeans and the indigenous people of South America to reframe the notion of economic gain as a historical development rather than a matter of human nature. Owensby argues that gain—the pursuit of individual, material self-interest—must be understood as a global development that transformed the lives of Europeans and non-Europeans, wherever these two encountered each other in the great European expansion spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.”

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33262

The Chinese translation of Brad Reed’s Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty, is out. The book is now in its fourth printing with total sales around 30,000.