News and Announcements
Professor Daniel Stolzenberg Wins UC President's Faculty Fellowship
Professor Daniel Stolzenberg will receive the UC President's Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities for the 2013-2014 academic year. Professor Stolzenberg will use the fellowship to conduct archival research for a book project about the early modern origins of Orientalist scholarship, focusing on Rome as a Mediterranean entrepôt for the circulation of knowledge between Christian and Islamic societies.
History Department Liu Lecture
Prof. Janet Theiss of the University of Utah will deliver this year's History Department Liu Lecture, in honor of the late K.C. Liu, Professor Emeritus of the department. Prof. Theiss' lecture, entitled "Illicit Intimacies in the “Flourishing Age”: A Scandal and Its Afterlife in 18th-Century China," will be held on Tuesday, May 14, at 4pm in the Andrews Conference Room.
History Department Seminar
Professor Kyu Hyun Kim will speak on "The Great Rabbit Pet Boom of 1872 and Other Curious Cases from the Cultural History of Late 19th Century Japan." Wednesday, May 29th, 12:10-1:30 in 2303 SSH (Andrews Room).
History Department Colloquium
Peter Holquist, University of Pennsylvania
"Crimes against Humanity: Genealogy of a Concept, 1815-1945"
Monday, May 13th, SSH 2203 (Andrews Room), 12:10-1:30. Co-sponsored by MESA
Many people identify the concept of "crimes against humanity"with the Nuremberg Trial and view it as a reaction to the Holocaust. In fact, the first penal use of the concept had come three decades before, in the Allies' May 24, 1915 Note to the Ottoman government regarding the Armenian genocide. Professor Holquist's presentation will examine three stages of the emergence of this concept: first, the nineteenth-century precedents of the concept of "crimes against humanity"; second, the negotiations and drafting of the 1915 note and debates around the use of the term "crimes against humanity"; and, finally, the fate of the concept in the interwar years, leading up to the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946. In particular, the presentation will trace the remarkable and overlooked prominence of imperial Russia in the development and usage of this concept.
Susan Mann, Professor Emerita, to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Susan Mann, Professor emerita, has just been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest and most prestigious honorary societies in the country. A specialist in the history of Qing dynasty (1644-1911) China, Mann has been a pioneer is bringing the study of gender to the field of Chinese history. In three books, an edited volume, and innumerable articles, Mann's innovative and trenchant scholarship reshaped our understanding of Chinese government and society. A natural leader, she served as chair of the History department and as President of the Association for Asian Studies, the most important scholarly organization in the Asia field. Mann is widely renowned for her graciousness and unstintingly generosity; she enjoys the widespread esteem and friendship of her colleagues and the enduring appreciation of former students.
Evidence in the Seventeenth Century
English Professor Fran Dolan and History Professor Daniel Stolzenberg will be discussing their new books, The Relations: Reading Literature and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England and Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity. The event will take place on Wednesday, May 8th from 12:00 to 1:30 pm in the Andrews Conference Room (2203 SSH).
Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture 2013
The Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture will be held on Thursday, May 23 from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. in the AGR Room in the Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center. The lecture will feature Dr. Ian Morris, The Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Stanford University .
NSF grants $500K to Mark Carey
Pablo Whipple wins teaching award
Bob Reinhardt wins ACLS Faculty Fellowship
Bob Reinhardt, who finished his PhD in our department in Spring 2012, has been chosen as one of 25 American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellows. This prestigious award, for which some 500 people competed, funds a two-year post-doctoral fellowship. His dissertation is entitled, "Remaking Bodily Environments: The Global Eradication of Smallpox."
History Department Colloquium
James Sweet (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Beyond Slavery: Africanizing Atlantic History”
Monday, February 4
12:10-1:30 pm
SSH 2203 (Andrews Conference Room)
James Sweet (author of Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770and Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World) will present from his forthcoming work on creolization in the early modern Atlantic world. Drawing on examples from Brazil, the Caribbean, and West Africa, Professor Sweet will talk about the ways in which European colonizers Africanized during the early modern Atlantic world.
The Atlantic puts Professor Emeritus Arnold Bauer's memoir in list of "Top 5 Books of 2012"
In 2012, Arnie Bauer, retired professor of Latin American history, published his memoir, Time's Shadow, with the University of Kansas Press. In his list of "Books of the Year 2012: The Top 5 and the Runners Up," Benjamin Schwarz, the literary editorof The Atlantic, placed Professor Bauer's book in the number two slot. "Bauer's portrait of life in rural Kansas from the 1930s to the 1950s conjures with extraordinary thoughtfulness and grace a world we have lost."
The History Project and Professor Omnia El-Shakry win NEH Award
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded historian Omnia El Shakry and The History Projectteam a grant to support a 3-week NEH Summer Institute for teachers called “Roots of the Arab Spring: Understanding the Historical Context for the Arab Uprisings.” It will be held here on campus from July 15 through August 2, 2013. Prof El Shakry will direct the project; History Project leaders will connect the content to the classroom and offer instructional strategies designed to support participants in developing curricular materials. UC Davis scholars Suad Joseph, Keith Watenpaugh, Susan Gilson Miller, Noha Radwan, and Flagg Miller will also contribute. Teachers from across the U.S. may apply by March 4, 2013; 30 will be selected by competitive application.
Professors Ari Kelman and Eric Rauchway to Direct Workshop on Transcontinental Railroad
Ari Kelman and Eric Rauchway will co-direct “The Transcontinental Railroad: Transforming California and the Nation,” a Landmarks in American History & Culture workshop funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH grant will fund two, week-long workshops. These will be held at historic sites in Sacramento on June 23-28 and July 7-12, 2013, with day trips to Donner Pass and to the Bay Area to visit Stanford University and San Francisco. Guest scholars include Stanford’s Richard White and Richard Orsi (emeritus, CSU East Bay). The History Project’s involvement ensures that participating teachers, the Co-Directors, guest scholars, and community partners have ample support to carry out the program. History Project leaders will provide specific attention to translating the experience into classroom applications. Teachers from across the U.S. may apply by March 4, 2013; 80 (40 for each week) will be selected by competitive application.
History Project Award SSRC Grant
The History Project, a statewide network of history educators, will launch “Sites of Encounter in the Medieval World” this fall. Professor Teo Ruiz (UCLA) will serve as faculty adviser to the project, working in partnership with the California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP), headquartered in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. The project is funded by an Our Shared Past grant from the Social Science Research Council and the British Council. The Medieval World project will be the second unit developed by the CHSSP’s History Blueprint initiative (http://historyblueprint.org), a comprehensive program of curriculum, assessment, literacy, and teacher professional development.
Dr. Andrew Denning (Western Washington University) “Alpine Modern: The Stations Intégrées and the French Model of Development, 1930-1980”
Corrie Decker receives fellowship
Hartigan-O'Connor wins fellowship
History Department Statement on the Campus Crisis
The faculty of the History Department unanimously condemns the recent deployment of riot police and the use of violent crowd control techniques, including pepper spray, against non-violent protestors on our campus.
Instead of treating these protestors as the enemy, we suggest that the administration should embrace the protestors’ opposition to the privatization of the University of California. Privatization, which has resulted in relentless tuition increases and crushing student debt, will exacerbate socio-economic stratification statewide while undercutting the University of California’s core mission: fostering publicly engaged scholarship and producing an educated citizenry.
Furthermore, we reject as inimical to our campus culture proposals that may lead to lower admission standards for out-of-state students and any move to sink additional resources into Division I athletics.
Finally, we believe that the current campus crisis provides an opportunity to restore shared governance to the University, governance that must include all members of our community in decision-making as we face the challenges that lie ahead.
The faculty of the History Department respectfully suggest that the administration, partnered with the rest of the Davis campus and the broader University of California community, should lead in opposing any further privatization of the University rather than surrendering to its inevitability. We call on the administration to join forces with students, faculty, and staff to lobby and demonstrate for restoring public funding to the University of California, while rejecting any further tuition increases as counterproductive to the broader project in which we all engage: using public education as the foundation upon which to build a civil society that can be a model for the rest of the nation.