Faculty Accomplishments: Publications, Grants and Honors

 

The History Department’s commitment to undergraduate research was featured in a video shown at the American Historical Association annual meeting in January 2009. Dr. Michael Galgano, chair of the department, wrote the script. To view the video, download the free 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. 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."

♦  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.

 

♦  Dr. Kevin Hardwick has published "Anglican Moderation: Religion and the Political Thought of Edmund Randolph" 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).

 

♦  In his role as a member of the Working Group on South Asia of Columbia University's Institute for Public Knowledge, Dr. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi helped draft "Reframing a Regional Approach to South Asia: Demilitarization, Development, and Sustainable Peace," released in May 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 received an Edna Shaeffer grant to continue her research on the culture of Buenos Aires.

 

♦  Dr. Joseph Opala's online exhibits “Bunce Island: A British Slave Castle in West Africa” appears at the Field Museum in Chicago from July 29, 2009 until February 28, 2010.

 

The Bunce Island Animation Project received a $25,000 grant from the Gondobay Manga Foundation in Los Angeles. JMU art professor Gary Chatelain collaborated on the animation. See the work at www.bunce-island.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.