Faculty Accomplishments: Publications, Grants and Honors

 

Retiring in June 2010 were Prof. Sidney Bland; Prof. Dorothy Boyd-Bragg; Prof. Henry Myers; and Prof. Jacqueline Walker.

 

♦  Undergraduate Research in the History Department: see the video!

Download Adobe Media Player (http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/), then follow this link.

 

♦  Dr. Michael Allain presented “Immigration in Three Cities of the Ancient Mediterranean World” at the conference Immigration, Assimilation, Culture Identity in 2007. In 2008, he presented “The Greek Struggle of Warfare and the Ideal of Peace” at War and Peace, The Eternal Swing. 

 

♦  Dr. Chris Arndt published "Old Revolutionaries, New Views," a review of three recent books on the founding fathers, in History Reviews of New Books (Vol. 38, No. 3), July 2010.

♦  Dr. Sidney Bland published “Shaping the Life of the New Woman: The Crusading Years of the Delineator” in American Periodicals (Vol. 19, No. 2), 2009.

 

Dr. Bland delivered “The Madison Century Begins” at the Faculty and Staff Joint Meeting launching JMU’s Centennial Year on August 24, 2007. Read his remarks. He wrote the Foreword to the University’s Centennial volume, The Madison Century.

 

♦  Dr. Kevin Borg wrote about teaching public history on the ground in Harrisonburg in "Teaching with Historic Places: Sanborn Maps and Dusty Old Buildings" appearing in Notes on Virginia, No. 52.

♦  Dr. Ann Crabb published “If I could write”: Margherita Datini and Letter Writing, 1385-1410” in the Renaissance Quarterly, winter 2007 (vol. LX, no.4).

♦  Dr. Jessica Davidson earned an Edna T. Schaeffer Humanist Award for summer 2009 to support her work on "The Seccion Femenina in Francoist Spain, 1934-1977: Women, Political Mobilization, and Dictatorship."

 

♦  In spring 2010, Dr. Mary Gayne received a Edna T. Shaeffer Grant to support her work on wigs and wigmakers in 17th and 18th century France.

 

♦  Dr. H. Gelfand received a 2007 Edna T. Shaeffer Humanist Award to further his study, "The Culture and Globalization of Board Sports."

 

♦  Dr. Michael Gubser published "Franz Brentano's Ethics of Social Renewal" in the Fall 2009 issue of the journal Philosophical Forum. "A Cozy Little World: Reflections on Context in Austrian Intellectual History" appeared in Austrian History Yearbook, v. XL, 2009.

 

“An Image of a Higher World: Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl on Ethics and Renewal," appeared in the Lithuanian journal Santalka 17: 3 (2009): 39-49.  Once past the abstract and title, readers will find the article in English.

 

♦  Dr. Steven Guerrier received the 2008 Distinguished Service Award from JMU’s College of Arts and Letters.

 

♦  During the spring 2010 semester, Dr. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi spoke about changing patterns of trade at UCLA; about mobility, history and identity at the U.S. Marine Corps University; and about the Pashto language at the University of London.  Links to these presentations can be found here.

 

Professor Hanifi has contracted with Stanford University Press for his Connecting Histories in Afghanistan monograph and I. B. Tauris Publishers for an edited volume titled Power Hierarchies and Hegemony in Afghanistan:  State Building, Ethnic Minorities and Identity in Central Asia, both of which will be available in 2011.

 

♦  Dr. Kevin Hardwick delivered the Patrick Henry Governor's Lecture on November 16-17, 2010, at the Library of Virginia and at Hampden Sydney College.  The annual Governor Henry Lecture is jointly sponsored by the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation and the Library of Virginia.  He spoke about his research in progress on the Virginia Ratifying Convention of June 1788. 

 

His contribution, "Anglican Moderation: Religion and the Political Thought of Edmund Randolph," was published in in  The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, edited by Daniel Dreisbach, Mark David Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press: 2009).  

 
♦  Dr. Dan Kerr published “Countering Corporate Narratives from the Streets: The Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project” in Oral History and Public Memories (Temple University Press, 2008).

 

♦  Dr. Gabrielle Lanier, director of the Center for Valley and Regional Studies, was appointed to a 2nd four-year term on the Board of Trustees of the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia in 2008.

 

♦  Dr. Kristen McCleary has published “Ethnic Identity and Elite Idyll:  A Comparison of Carnival Celebrations in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay, 1880-1910,” Social Identities:  Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (Routledge), Volume 16 Issue 4, 2010.  

 

♦  Mr. Joseph Opala's online exhibits “Bunce Island: A British Slave Castle in West Africa” appeared at the Field Museum in Chicago from July 29, 2009 until February 28, 2010. See the work at www.bunce-island.org.

 

Mr. Opala's work reconnecting Africans and African Americans with common roots in Sierra Leone is described in his member profile on the Web site of the Sierra Leone Gullah Heritage Association, http://slgha.org/

 

♦  Dr. Steven Reich's article "Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement:  Lessons from a Troubled Past" appears in the current issue of New Labor Forum:  A Journal of Ideas, Analysis, and Debate (v. 18, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 61-71.)
 

The article is occasioned by the 100th anniversary of the NAACP and was the text of his talk at the 2009 New Labor Forum Breakfast at the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, which commemorated the same milestone.

 

♦  Dr. Michael Seth, the 2008-2009 Madison Scholar in the College of Arts and Letters, presented the Madison Scholar lecture, "Statistical Reforms in the Republic of Korea, 1954-64." Dr. Seth is the author of A Concise History of Korea from the Neolithic Period through the Nineteenth Century (2006).

 

♦  Dr. William Van Norman, Assistant Professor of History, presented "The Gendered Creation of the Cafetal System in Western Cuba during the Early Nineteenth Century" at the American Historical Association annual meeting in January 2008.

 

He also presented "Negotiating Reality Through Representation: The Works of Cirilo Villaverde and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and the Question of Race in Nineteenth Century Cuba" at the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies annual meeting in April 2007.

 

♦ Dr. Nükhet Varlık, Assistant Professor, presented “Plague, Medicine, and Urban Space: Public Health in the Early Modern Ottoman State,” at the 41st International Congress of the History of Medicine, September 7-12, 2008, Mexico City, Mexico.

 

Her articles on “Contagion Theory (Pre-Modern),” “Flight (from Diseased Areas),” “Public Health in the Islamic World (1000-1600),” “Plague in the Islamic World (1500-1850),” and “Islamic Disease Theory and Medicine” appear in the Encyclopedia Of Plague, Pestilence, and Pandemic (2008).

 

♦ Godfrey Vincent, Dissertation Fellow, published a review in International Labor and Working Class History, No. 71 (Spring 2007). He reviewed Eric Williams & the Making of the Modern Caribbean, by Colin A. Palmer.

 

♦     Dr. Andrew Witmer appeared on the WMRA program "Virginia Insight" serving as the historian on a panel discussing religious tolerance.  The panel also included religious studies professors from University of Virginia and Shenandoah University.