News
Since the news broke of the assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, University of Virginia scholars who focus on Haiti have been busy answering media questions about the country.
Three professors whose scholarship focuses on the tumultuous history and politics of this nation – Marlene Daut, Laurent Dubois and Robert Fatton – have been providing background and suggesting possible next steps, but at the same time are surprised at the mystery of who carried out the attack and who’s leading the country, saying it’s a dangerous time for Haiti.
Recommended summer reading: Alan Taylor’s American Republics, Justene Hill Edwards’ Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina, and Philip Zelikow’s The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War.
Gilder Lehrman Book Breaks features the most exciting history scholars in America discussing their books live with host William Roka, followed by a Q&A with home audiences. On June 13, 2021, Professor Max Edelson discussed his book The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/programs-and-events/book-breaks/book-breaks-archive
Here's a link to the video: https://vimeo.com/562931556
The French National Library's digital press collections has a podcast series on crime and the press. Each episode focuses on a particular crime or event that made the headlines in France, and consists of a conversation with a scholar of the crime/event and a scholar of the press in that time/place. The series just released an episode featuring Professor Jennifer Session and Arthur Asseraf ( Cambridge). On this episode, Professors Sessions and Asseraf discuss the Margueritte revolt in Algeria.
Professor Neeti Nair writes an op-ed in the Indian Express on the demolition of the National Archives of India Annexe. In this op-ed, Professor Nair writes: "The demolition of the annexe and the uncertainty over its collection may affect the kind of narratives we are able to craft. So long as scholars are able to access regional and state archives across India, they will be able to write regional histories. So long as they are able to collect oral histories, they will be able to tell stories of past struggles and successes that might have not been deemed worthy of “official” archives. So long as there are other kinds of institutional archives and private archives, they will be able to write those histories."
Congratulations to Professors Sarah Milov and Brad Reed who were recipients of UVA Student Council's 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award! The award acknowledges "their exceptional work in the classroom, their diligence in supporting their students' learning, and their profound impact on their students--both through their teaching and their unparalleled commitment to their students." Thanks Brad and Sarah for advancing the teaching mission of the department and the College.
Congratulations to Professor Liz Varon for her recent election into to the Fellows of the Society of American Historians! Members are elected based on their demonstrated commitment to literary distinction in the writing and presentation of history and biography. Literary excellence in historical work is marked by vividness, clarity, empathy, narrative power, and explanatory force.
The sessions of the Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India symposium are now publicly available on the RSAA YouTube Channel. The recordings have been uploaded into two playlists. Each session can be viewed as a whole - the videos will automatically play one after another. The separate presentations and the Q&A for each session can also be searched for and watched individually. Here are links to the two playlists:
Erik Linstrum was interviewed by Libération about the future of the UK and the decline of Britishness, on the occasion of the recent local elections.
Congratulations to John Mason whose research project Seeing and Mapping Black Charlottesville, 1902-1930 seed funding through 3 Cavaliers grant.
This project explores and maps the family, social, and economic relationships between a cohort of 600 African Americans and their Black and White fellow citizens, at the height of the Jim Crow era. Professor Mason will be working with Professors Jalane Dawn Schmidt and Louis Nelson.
Richard Barnett's first monograph, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals, and the British 1729-1801 has been placed in a prominent reprinting and circulation category as a “Manohar Classic.” Manohar is one of the three major academic publishers in India (the other two are OUP India and Permanent Black).
SPONSORED BY THE INSTITUTE OF THE HUMANITIES AND GLOBAL CULTURES (IHGC), UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY FOR ASIAN AFFAIRS (RSAA)
The question of citizenship and belonging, matters of life and death for those whose provinces were divided during the tumultuous partition of India in 1947, has returned to center-stage in the politics of the sub-continent.
The papers in this symposium revisit the aftermath of the partition of 1947, and the war of 1971, to examine some of the longer-term consequences of the redrawing of borders across South Asia.
PANEL 1: BORDERS, CITIZENSHIP AND CONTESTED IDEAS OF THE NATION [9-11 am EST]
Antara Datta, Royal Holloway College, Hindus in Bangladesh and the Citizenship Question in Assam
Farhana Ibrahim, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, The 1971 War: Perspectives from Gujarat
Sarah Waheed, Davidson College, Hyderabad's ‘Police Action’: Muslim Belonging, Memory, and the Hidden Histories of Partition
Arsalan Khan, Union College, Contesting Sovereignty: Islamic Piety and Blasphemy Politics in Pakistan
Moderator: Neeti Nair, University of Virginia
PANEL 2: LITERATURE AND HISTORY, LONGING AND BELONGING [11:30 am-1:30 pm EST]
Shahla Hussain, St. John’s University, Artificial ‘Borders’: Kashmiri Belonging in the Aftermath of Partition
Uttara Shahani, Oxford University, Language Without a Land: Linguistic Citizenship and the Case for Sindhi in India
Ather Zia, University of Northern Colorado, Kashmiri poetry and the imaginaries of love, loss, and freedom
Mehr Farooqi, University of Virginia, Wounds of Partition as Symbolized in the Fiction of Intizar Husain
Moderator: Sonam Kachru, University of Virginia
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/6016141113474/WN_JV4IQevYTvWvXl0NrYsE1A
Professor James Loeffler recently wrote a review of Eric D. Weitz’s book, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States.
The review was published in The New Rambler: https://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/history/the-nationalism-of-human-rights
Congratulations to Professor Caroline Janney on the publication of the edited collection, Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America.
This collection, edited by Janney and James Marten, also features a chapter by Kevin Caprice, a graduate student in our department.
Philip Zelikow publishes new book, The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917. Professor Zelikow’s book has received great reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the New York Journal of Books.
On Wednesday March 3, the event "Marching Toward Emancipation: Commemorating the Arrival of Union Troops in Charlottesville” featured several UVA historians, including Carrie Janney and Will Kurtz. “It’s important a day, a symbolic day to take in all that it means. For news coverage of the event, click the following link: https://www.nbc29.com/2021/03/03/uva-historians-researchers-weigh-fourth-annual-liberation-freedom-day
Erik Linstrum’s essay, “A History of Violence: Pursuing the Ghosts of the British Empire,” was recently published in the Berlin Journal. A Magazine from the American Academy in Berlin. In the essay, Professor Linstrum notes that “The traumas of the present have a way of reactivating those in the past, bringing neglected truths to light; these events might anger us but also help us to see our history more clearly. It is this kind of “presentism”—no longer, incidentally, the epithet among historians that it once was—which makes colonial violence such an urgent subject now."
To read the article, click the link below:
https://www.americanacademy.de/a-history-of-violence/
Mel Leffler wrote an article for the Washington Post on the significant threats that climate change and pandemics pose to national security: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/26/defeating-todays-top-threats-requires-rethinking-our-idea-national-security/ Mel also recently reviewed Robert Draper’s book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq in the November/December 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs:https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2020-10-13/decider
The history department congratulates Adrian Brettle (UVA PhD c/o 2014) whose book Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World is one of the finalists for this year's Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize: https://gettysburg.edu/news/stories?id=82bb78c6-568d-47f4-87e6-a377456e2f93