News
Congratulations to Professor Ellen Zhang on the publication of her new book, Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China: Family, State, and Native Place (University of Hawaii Press). More information is available here.
Dr Jennifer Sessions was featured in UVA's Learning Tech Blog for its first Faculty Spotlight. In this feature, Professor Sessions discusses her use of Peerceptiv in her classes, describing its "magical" effects on students' reading and editing skills.
Professor Jennifer Sessions was interviewed for the WGBH/PRX radio program The World for a story about the French interior minister's recent adoption of the far-right term "ensauvement."
História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro recently published an article by Professor Christian McMillen, “Water and the death of ambition in global health c. 1970-1990.” The article explores the effects of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade and the Blue Nile Health Project on water development.
On Wednesday, September 9, UVA Clubs hosted a webinar featuring Professor Kevin Gaines called “Understanding the Global Protests: The African American Freedom Struggle and the World.” Professor Neeti Nair's book, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, was quoted and discussed in an op-ed published by Faizur Rahman in Daily O titled ‘Are Indian Muslims victims of their “victim mindset”?’ This week the Washington Post published an article by Professor Liz Varon, “Trump’s 2020 playbook is coming straight from Southern enslavers.” In the article Varon traces connections between the current framing of the 2020 election by President Trump and the rhetoric deployed by southern enslavers against abolitionists. She writes, “In short, the slavery debates established an enduring pattern in American politics, one in which reformers have been met by hate and violence, perpetrated by reactionaries who cynically tell the American people that the only way to dispel hate and violence is by rejecting reform that challenges their power and privilege. That pattern has been sustained by White Americans’ stubborn incapacity to learn the lesson the abolitionists began preaching so long ago: that racism is the root of America’s culture of violence, and only racial justice can bring true fidelity to the law, social coherence and moral order.” The Washington Post also featured an article by Gillet Gardner Rosenblith, a 2020 graduate of our PhD program and current postdoctoral research associate with the Memory Project at the Democracy Initiative. In her article, “Covid-19 has exposed the consequences of decades of bad public housing policy,” Rosenblith considers the enduring impact of public housing policies including the 1996 One Strike Act and efforts to transform public housing into mixed income developments on public housing residents navigating the current pandemic and public health crisis. She writes, “Rather than recognizing tenants’ power and enabling community control, politicians’ focus became the “empowerment” of individual tenants through the increasingly popular political ideas of personal responsibility or self-sufficiency. In practical terms, this shift — which also permeated education, health care and welfare policies — resulted in Democratic and Republican politicians alike touting empowerment as a key policy goal for public housing reform but seeing it as something that they had no responsibility for facilitating. Instead, they could withdraw resources from public housing under the auspices of helping residents to gain self-sufficiency.” The College of Arts and Sciences featured an article, “How Did We Get Here?” UVA Podcast Explores the Rise of Illiberalism,” on Will Hitchcock and his new podcast, Democracy in Danger. A collaboration with Siva Vaidhyanathan, the podcast can be found on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher and on the Democracy in Danger website.
Click here to read Prof. Neeti Nair's op-ed titled "Mindless devotion to Congressi politics is no substitute for a thoughtful reckoning of the past."
Last week, TIME published Chad Diehl’s article, “‘Hiroshima' Has Become Shorthand for the Atomic Bombings. Here's Why We Shouldn't Overlook Nagasaki.” In the article, Chad argues that “‘Hiroshima’ has become shorthand for the historical experience of both cities, eclipsing the unique story of Nagasaki’s rise from the ashes. Moreover, “Hiroshima” has muffled the voices of the Nagasaki hibakusha (“the bombed,” the term for atomic-bombing survivors), who have struggled for more than seven decades to gain equal attention for the trauma and aftermath of their bombing.”
Professor Carrie Janney’s “The Next Lost Cause?” was recently published in the Washington Post. Here is an excerpt from Carrie’s insightful piece: “Even as Confederate monuments tumble this summer, we may be witnessing an attempt to form a new lost cause. Today, President Donald Trump describes his opponents as “unfair,” the pandemic sapping his popularity as a “hoax,” the polls that show him losing to Joe Biden as “fake,” and the election in which he’ll face ultimate judgment in November as “rigged” or potentially “stolen.” His defenders are already laboring to cast him as a righteous, noble warrior martyred by traitors and insurmountable forces. They rely on the same tools that were used to promulgate Confederate myths: manipulating facts, claiming persecution, demonizing enemies and rewriting history. In other words, Trump is laying the groundwork to claim moral victory in political defeat — and to deny the legitimacy of the Democratic administration that would displace him.”
Professor Jim Loeffler has published a wonderfully informative article in The Atlantic, “The Problem With the ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition.” In this article, Jim explains why the concept , “Judeo-Christian Tradition,” was always an unstable foundation on which to build a common American identity.
Professor Philip Zelikow’s recent article in The American Interest, “Lessons from the Second World War: A Reply to President Putin,” turns our attention to the European Parliament’s and President Putin’s recent debates about World War II. In the article, Philip argues that “the European Parliament’s proclamation about the cause of World War II is wrong. It offers a fundamentally inaccurate version of the most important episode in modern history. President Putin’s rebuttal is serious, yet it, too, is deeply misleading. The net result is to deepen Europe’s divides, not overcome them.”
Professor Jennifer Sessions was interviewed for a series on contested monuments by the podcast Paroles d'Histoire. As many of you know, in recent months, statues and monuments associated with slavery and colonialism have been contested and sometimes overturned. The eruption of memorial issues in public space is the subject of Paroles d'Histoire’s five podcast show. Jennifer’s insightful commentary provides a much needed global perspective on monuments and our collective reckoning with the past.
In the latest installment of UVaToday’s special series, “UVA and the History of Race,” Professor Christian McMillen examines the George Rogers Clark and Lewis and Clark statues. In this article, Christian details how the George Rogers Clark and the Lewis and Clark statues were “also monuments to white supremacy” and “instrumental in creating and perpetuating the myth of brave white men conquering a supposedly unknown and unclaimed land.”
This month, Professors Will Hitchcock and Siva Vaidhyanathan started a new podcast series: “Democracy In Danger.” The series interviews leading scholars about the erosion of democratic norms in the US and around the world. Each week Will and Siva address a different topic, from populism and xenophobia to the dark web and the role of social media in the democratic process. The impressive line-up includes scholars such as Nicole Hemmer on right-wing media; Federico Finchelstein on fascism in Latin America; Matt Hedstrom on Christian Nationalism today; Erika Lee on xenophobia in America; Leah Wright Rigueur on Black Lives Matter; Elizabeth Hinton on Mass Incarceration; Nina Jankowitz on Russian disinformation tactics; and Carol Anderson on voter suppression. Two episodes are live now; they will be adding one each week through the November election. The series runs from July 2020 through the election cycle and beyond. New episodes post on Tuesdays. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and tweet your thoughts @UVAMediaLab.
Table Magazine published an article by Prof. Jim Loeffler on capitalism, music, and Jewish politics. The article, “The ‘Lust Machine’” is adapted from his article “The ‘Lust Machine’: Recording and Selling the Jewish Nation in the late Russian Empire” which was published this year in Polin Studies in Polish Jewry.
Prof. Loeffler was also featured in a UVA Today Faculty Spotlight: “For James Loeffler, Musical Path led to the Apex of Jewish Studies."
The New York Times published an op-ed by Prof. Andrew Kahrl: “Who Will Get to Swim This Summer?”
Prof. Kahrl was also featured on The Takeaway podcast's July 2nd’s episode, “Restrictions on Beach and Pool Access Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic,” and quoted in two articles: Pew’s “Black Homeowners Pay More Than ‘Fair Share’ in Property Taxes” and the Washington Post’s “Black families pay significantly higher property taxes than white families, new analysis shows.”
Slate recently published an article by Prof. Grace Hale, “The Birth and Death of Pylon, America’s Best Rock Band,” adapted from her recent book, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture.
The Annual Review of Criminology published an article, “Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview,” co-authored by Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook, who graduated from our history program with distinction in 2017. DeAnza currently studies at Harvard and is working on a dissertation project that “traces the rise of proactive "community, problem-solving" policing and data-driven law enforcement in Boston and beyond at the dawn of the twenty-first century.”
Streaking the Lawn featured an interview with recent graduate and decorated student athlete Leah Smith, who minored in history during her tenure at UVA. In the interview, Leah noted George Gilliam and his courses, ““History of Virginia Pre1865” and “History of Virginia Post 1865,” as the most impactful classroom experiences of her undergraduate career.
Prof. Xiaoyuan Liu’s new book, To the End of Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party and Tibet, 1949-1959, was just published by Columbia University Press. In To the End of Revolution, Liu “draws on unprecedented access to the archives of the Chinese Communist Party to offer a groundbreaking account of Beijing’s evolving Tibet policy during the critical first decade of the People’s Republic.” Congratulations, Xiaoyuan!
Prof. Holly Shulman has been awarded the Association for Documentary Editing's 2020 Lyman H. Butterfield Awards for her work on the Dolley Madison Digital Edition. This award honors the memory of Lyman Henry Butterfield, whose editing career included contributions to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, the editing of the Adams Family Papers, and publishing the Letters of Benjamin Rush. Congratulations, Holly!
Prof. Karen Parshall was recently named co-editor, along with Sergei Tabachnikov, of The Mathematical Intelligencer, a journal published by Springer Nature dedicated to the history and culture of mathematics, emergent mathematical communities around the world, new interdisciplinary trends, and relations between mathematics and other areas of culture. Congratulations, Karen!
The Journal of Asian Studies has just published an article co-authored by Prof. Joseph Seeley and Aaron Skabelund, ““Bite, Bite against the Iron Cage”: The Ambivalent Dreamscape of Zoos in Colonial Seoul and Taipei.” The article “examines the zoological gardens established by Japanese imperialists in colonial Seoul (1908) and Taipei (1914). Drawing on multilingual sources, it argues that zoos explicitly exposed the unequal interethnic and interspecies hierarchies that undergirded the colonial project.” To access the article, click here.
Prof. Paul Halliday’s "The Suspension Clause: English Text, Imperial Contexts, and American Implications" (Virginia Law Review 2008) was recently cited in the U.S. Supreme Court, in three of the opinions and on both sides in a detention case involving judicial oversight of political asylum claims.
On June 19th, The Washington Post published an article by Prof. Grace Hale, “Video alone can't solve the problems of policing.” Hale writes, “the long history of images of racial violence in the United States suggests that we need to question...the idea that more cameras -- not just bystanders with phones but police body cameras and other forms of surveillance -- will fix the problem of law enforcement violence.” To read the article, click here.
On June 26th, National Geographic published an essay by Prof. John Mason, “Why does this legendary Black photographer's work continue to resonate today?”, on the work of Gordon Parks and protest photography in Minneapolis. You can read his essay here.
Jotwell, a journal of legal history, has published a review of Prof. Sarah Milov’s book, The Cigarette: A Political History: read here.
Foreign Affairs has published an article by Prof. Philip Zelikow, co-authored with Eric Edelman, Kristofer Harrison, and Celeste Ward Gventer, on “The Rise of Strategic Corruption: How States Weaponize Graft.” You can find Philip’s article here.
In this Q&A with UVA Today, Prof. Kevin Gaines compares modern protests to the civil rights movements of the '50s and '60s.
Click here to read Prof. Mason's essay titled "Photos can show protests’ complexity—or they can perpetuate old lies."
Prof. Erik Linstrum was featured in a UVA Today piece as a recent recipient of the Berlin Prize. Click here to read the full article.
Prof. Grace Hale has published an article in the Washington Post in which she explores the link between the video of Ahmaud Arbery’s death and lynching photos. Click here to read the full article.
History department grad student Alexi Garrett has received one of UVA's 15 Graduate Student Teaching awards. UVA Today has provided a write-up of all UVA recipients: click here to view the article.