Faculty Achievements
Leslie Alexander published two book chapters this year: “The Black Republic: The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Black Political Consciousness, 1816-1862,” which appeared in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents, and “Africana Studies and Oral History: A Critical Assessment” which was published in African American Studies. She also published an article entitled “A Pact With the Devil?: The United States and the Fate of Modern Haiti” in Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. During this academic year, she received numerous awards including two national awards from the National Council for Black Studies—the Distinguished Scholarship award for her book, African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 along with the organization’s award for Outstanding Service. She also presented her research in numerous forums on campus such the Frank W. Hale Black Cultural Center and the Multicultural Center, as well as in various locations across the country such as Cincinnati, Ohio; Morgan State University; New Harmony, Indiana; Dartmouth University; the University of Connecticut; the University of California, Davis; Port of Spain, Trinidad; and Boca Raton, Florida. She was elected to the Executive Board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and is currently serving as the Program Committee chair for their upcoming conference. She was also elected to the Executive Board of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS), and continued her work on the Committee on Women Historians for the American Historical Association (AHA). Similarly, she served on the Liberty Legacy Award Committee for the Organization of American Historian Historians (OAH). She also continued her work on the issue of diversity, serving on the Advisory Council, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, on the Executive Committee of the African American Coalition, and on search committees for both the Student Representative to the Board of Trustees and the Vice-Provost of Student Services for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
Kenneth J. Andrien attended a formal presentation of his book Crisis y decadenia: El virreindto de Peru en el siglo XVII at the Banco Central de Reserva del Perú in Lima on June15, 2011. He also published the following articles: “The Investion of Colonial Andean Worlds,” Latin American Research Review, 46:1 (2011): 217-225; “La vista de José García de León y Pizarro a Quito” el Boletin de la Academia Nacional de Historia, Volumen LXXXIX Número 184 de marzo de 2011: 97-127, a translation in Ecuador of his 2009 article in the Journal of Latin American Studies; and “Soberanía y Revolución en el Reino de Quito, 1809-1810,” in Robero Brena ed., En el umbral de las revoluciones hispanicas: el bienion 1808-1810 (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2010), pp. 313-334. In addition, he chaired a session at the American Historical Association meetings.
Michael Les Benedict completed his two-year Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Emeritus Faculty, researching the constitutional politics of Reconstruction. He delivered a paper on the constitutional politics of the Thirteenth Amendment at the University of Maryland Law School, which is in the press at the Maryland Law Review. The American Historical Association (AHA) is in the process of publishing his pamphlet on “Copyright for Historians.” He led a number of workshops for teachers on behalf of Humanities Texas, delivering a keynote address on “Constitutional History since Reconstruction” in Laredo. His regular visits to Texas have led him and his wife Karen to purchase a condo in Austin, where they plan to spend the winter months. Besides his project on the constitutional history of Reconstruction, Professor Benedict is completing an essay on the Constitution and Political Parties for the AHA series New Essyas in American Constitutional History. President Obama appointed Professor Benedict to the Permanent Committee on the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, which supervises the expenditure of money Justice Holmes donated to the U.S. government to promote knowledge about the history of American law.
Mansel G. Blackford presented a paper on how to make global fishing sustainable at the Policy History Conference, meeting in Columbus, June 3-6, 2010. His book on the topic is scheduled for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press in the spring of 2012.
John Brooke delivered "Into the American Civil War: Thoughts on the Character of the Nation-building Event," a lecture sponsored by Ohio Early American Seminar and OSU Workshop in Social Imaginaries and the Public Sphere.
Philip Brown gave the Arts and Sciences Inaugural Lecture entitled “Distorted States: People, Land and the Environment in Early Modern and Modern Japan.”
John C. Burnham published “Transnational History of Medicine after 1950: Framing and Interrogation from Psychiatric Journals,” Medical History. He also learned that his 2009 book, Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age, has been released as an E-book. He made presentations at the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences meetings in Utrecht, at Johns Hopkins University, and at the American Association for the History of Medicine meetings in Philadelphia. He also chaired a session at the meetings of the American Historical Association in Boston. The University of Chicago Press has accepted for publication his edited book, After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America.
Alice Conklin delivered invited lectures at the Institute of French Studies (NYU), the University of Virginia, and the University of Leiden, and presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the Society for French Historical Studies. She published “The Civilizing Mission” in an edited volume, The French Republic: History, Values, Debates (Cornell) and has been awarded a sabbatical for 2012-2013.
Theodora Dragostinova received Publication Subvention Grants from the College of Arts & Humanities and the Center for Slavic and East European Studies and Research Grants from the Office of International Affairs and the Mershon Center for National Security Studies. She gave talks at the Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Los Angeles, the National Convention of the American Historical Association in Boston, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Illinois State University.
Carter Findley published the seventh edition of Findley and Rothney, Twentieth-Century World (Cengage). His Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity has won the 2011 Publication Award of the Ohio Academy of History and the Joseph Rothschild Prize of the Association for the Study of Nationalism. Findley also published “The Ottoman Lands to the Post-First World War Settlement,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. V; and he published “Competing Autobiographical Novels, His and Hers,” in Many Ways of Speaking About the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-Documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (14th-20th century), ed. Ralf Elger and Yavuz Köse (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 133-140, as well as “Subjectivity and Society: Ahmed Midhat and Fatma Aliye,” in Hoca, Allame, Puits de Science: Essays in Honor of Kemal H. Karpat, ed. Kaan Durukan, Robert W. Zens, and Akile Zorlu-Durukan (Istanbul, Isis Press, 2010), 121-35. He delivered conference papers at the Third World Congress on Middle Eastern Studies, (Barcelona, July) and the International Conference on the Gülen Movement (Chicago, November), and he presented an invited public lecture at Northwestern University (October). He has been invited to discuss his research on religion and politics in Turkey on a radio call-in show (WILL-FM, 18 January), and he spoke on “Islamic Revivalism in Turkey” at the Foreign Service Institute and the Intelligence and Research division of the U.S. Department of State (8-9 June).
Carole Fink published “Jews in Contemporary Europe,” in Roland Hsu, ed., Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World; “The Peace Settlement, 1919-39,” in John Horne, ed., A Companion to World War I; and “The Palestine Question at the Paris Peace Conference,” in Gaynor Johnson, ed., Peacemaking, Peacemakers and Diplomacy 1880-1939. She gave presentations at Birkbeck College, University of London, the German Studies Association in Oakland, CA, at UNC-Wilmington, and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. She remains on the editorial board of Contemporary European History, International History Review, and Australian Journal of Jewish Studies.
Harvey J. Graff published “The Literay Myth: Literacy, Education, and Demography,” Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, and "The Literacy Myth at Thirty,” Journal of Social History. He gave presentations at Southern Methodist University, Simon Fraser University, and British Columbia Institute of Technology. He was awarded a Grant for Research and Creativity in the Arts and Humanities from The Ohio State University and was named Gartner Lecturer in the Honors Program at Southern Methodist University.
Mark Grimsley has returned to the History Department after a two-year stint as a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College, for which he received the Department of the Army Outstanding Civilian Service Award. He delivered a talk this year at University College, Dublin, Ireland.
Peter L. Hahn completed a new book, Missions Accomplished?: The United States and Iraq since World War I, with Oxford University Press. He presented a paper at a conference on the Middle East in Trondheim, Norwat in May 2011 and participated in the annual meetings of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Organization of American Historians. He continues to serve as Department Chair as well as Executive Director of the Society for Historian of American Foreign Relations.
Barbara Hanawalt has moved into her new house in Bloomington, Indiana. She continues to work at the Newberry Library on her new book on civic ceremony in medieval London. Her former graduate students and colleagues presented her with a festchrift this year, The Ties that Bind: Essays in Medieval British History in Honor of Barbara Hanawalt, edited by Linda Mitchell, Katherine L. French, and Douglas L. Biggs.
Jane Hathaway published “A Mediterranean Culture of Factions? Bilateral Factionalism in the Greater Mediterranean Region in the Pre-Modern Era,” in Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox, eds., Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600-1800 (University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 55-75; and “Habeshi Mehmed Agha: The First Chief Harem Eunuch of the Ottoman Empire,” in Asa Q. Ahmed, Behnam Sadeghi, and Michael Bonner, eds., The Islamic Scholarly Tradition: Studies in History, Law, and Thought in Honor of Professor Michael Allan Cook (Brill, 2011), pp. 179-95. In August 2010, her article “Eunuch Households in Istanbul, Medina, and Cairo during the Ottoman Era” appeared in Turcica 41 (2009): 291-303; this volume comproses the proceedings of a symposium, “Mamluks, Turks, and Ottomans,” held in her honor in Paris in May 2008. She was part of a comparative panel on enuchs at the symposium “Byzantine and Ottoman Civilizations in World History” in Istanbul in Octboer 2010, and also gave talks at Queen Mary University of London, Princeton University, New York University, Tufts University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Georgetown University's McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies in Alanya, Turkey. At the Middle East Studies Association conference in San Diego in November 2010, she served as a panel discussant and participated in a roundtable on her 2008 book The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800, and her colleague Eugene Rogan's book The Arabs: A History. She was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and was named Ottoman-Turkic section editor for the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edition.
David Hoffmann presented a paper at the World Congress of Slavic and East European Studies, held in Stockholm, Sweden. He also completed work on his monograph, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939, which will be published by Cornell University Press.
Michael Hogan completed his first year as President of the University of Illinois. With Professor Frank Costigliola of the University of Connecticut, he is finishing a revised edition of his volume, America in the World for Cambridge University Press.
Robin Judd served as the Chair of the Graduate Studies Committee this year. In addition to participating in the Hartmann Institute’s North American Scholars Circle, she delivered lectures at the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York City), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Wellesley College (Wellesley), and the Ohio State University.
Stephen Kern spoke at Washington University in St. Louis.
Austin Kerr published “A Retrospective Look at The Pabst Brewing Company,” Brewery History.
Mitch Lerner published “‘Mostly Propaganda in Nature’: Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology, and the Second Korean War,” with the Cold War International History Project Working Paper series. He delivered talks at the University of Texas, Brigham Young University, Denison University, Durham University, and the American Historical Association conference in Boston.
Scott Levi published the chapter “Commercial Structures” in The New Cambridge History of Islam. He delivered talks at both the Central Eurasian Studies Society conference in East Lansing, Michigan, and the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies conference in Los Angeles, California. He presented invited lectures to the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University and The Textile Museum in Washington, DC. He also led a series of seminars on Central Asian history and historical methodology for the Soros Foundation, Open Society Institute, Central Asia Research and Training Initiative’s Intensive Summer School in Akbuk, Turkey.
Peter Mansoor published “The Softer Side of War: Exploring the Influence of Culture on Military Doctrine” in Foreign Affairs. Professor Mansoor delivered talks this year to government and business groups in Washington, Columbus, Cleveland, and Houston, as well as to academic audiences at the American Historical Association, the Air War College, the Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright State University, the University of Kentucky, Ohio University, the University of Wisconsin, and West Point. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, PBS Newshour, the Charlie Rose Show, and CBC television networks, as well as on numerous radio programs and in print nationwide to discuss military and foreign affairs.
Robert McMahon was a Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in Japan in the summer of 2010.
Allan R. Millett wrote an essay on the Asia-Pacific War, 1937-1945, for Jeremy Black, ed., War Since 1900 (2010). He lectured or served on panels on the Korean War at the Museum of the Pacific War, Hillsdale College, Miami University-Hamilton, the Kentucky Civil War Roundtable, the University of Hawai’i, Columbus State University (Georgia), and the Lorenzo Cultural Center at Macomb Community College (Michigan). Miami University awarded him the John Dolibois History Prize for his lifetime contribution to the field of public history. The University of New Orleans has named him a University Research Professor, his second endowed appointment at UNO.
Nathan Rosenstein published “Italy: Economy and Demography after Hannibal’s War,” in Dexter Hoyos, ed. A Companion to the Punic Wars; “Aristocrats and Agriculture in the Late Republic: The ‘High Count,’” in J. Carlsen and E. Lo Cascio, eds., Agricoltura e Scambi nell’Italia Tardo-repubblicana, and “Phalanges In Rome?” in Garrett Fagan and Matthew Trundle, eds., New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare. He presented papers at the conference Money and Power in the Roman Republic, held at McGill University; at the West Point Seminar in Military History; and at the January, 2011 meeting of the American Philological Association.
Randolph Roth won the Allan Sharlin Memorial Prize of the Social Science History Association for American Homicide. The book was also named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice.
Stephanie J. Shaw published “The Long and Influential Life of Social History in the MVHR and the JAH” in Richard Kirkendall, ed., The OAH and the Writing and Teaching of American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 127-145, and “Creolization, de-creolization, and being at home in the diaspora” in Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society (June 2010), 27-28, as part of “A Forum on Creolization in and Beyond Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside.” She was elected to the 2011 Nominating Committee of the Southern Historical Association and was elected to represent the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) on the Planning Council of the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio. In June 2010, she taught a workshop on African-American women’s history for the Ohio Historical Society’s “Hands-on-History” summer seminar for teachers of history, and she presented a paper at the 2010 meetings of ASALH. She serves as a content expert for the renovations of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
David Stebenne’s essay on “The Election of 1960 Fifty Years Later” was published by the History News Network, Election Law @ Moritz; and the Columbus Bar Lawyers Quarterly. His review of David Oshinsky’s book entitled Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010) was published by H-Law, H-Net Reviews. Professor Stebenne delivered talks this year at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University; the Ohio Academy of History annual meeting; the Policy History Conference; and at several venues at OSU and elsewhere in Columbus. He was appointed to serve a three-year term on the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize Committee. The prize is awarded annually for the best book on American legal history. He also serves on the Publication Award Committee of the Ohio Academy of History. Professor Stebenne was appointed an Associate Professor of Law as well as History in the fall of 2010. He continues to do research on his new book project (a political history of the USA from the 1930s through the 1960s) and received a faculty research grant from OSU’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies to support that work.
Vladimir Steffel, along with Bishun Pandey, Associate Dean at the Marion Camous, led a group of students on a study tour to India during spring break. While there, the group visited Professor Mytheli Sreenivas and her family.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu co-authored with a former OSU undergraduate and incoming law student Samuel Beavers an essay entitled “Taking Risks in Learning and Teaching: A Student-Faculty Dialogue about Intersectionality and Digital Narratives,” Talking about Teaching: Essays by Members of the Ohio State University Academy of Teaching. She published “The Power of Intersectionality: Reflections on Getting Arrested, Teaching, and DISCO,” in Kirwan Update (the newsletter for the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity) March/April 2010 and “Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Peace Activism and Women’s Orientalism,” No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, ed. by Nancy Hewitt (Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 193-220. She also created and screened a digital narrative entitled “A Trip Down Immigration Lane,” http://www.facebook.com/v/457086952835 for the DISCO Symposium, “Beyond the Arizona Immigration Law: Policing Borders, Bodies, and Belonging,” held at Ohio State University on 29 October 2010. In addition, Prof. Wu gave talks at the the Claremont Colleges as well as the Universities of Massachusetts (Amherst), Washington (Seattle), California (Riverside), Michigan (Ann Arbor), and Kansas (Lawrence via skype). Prof. Wu received two Pressey Honors Course Enrichment Grants (one with Professor Lilia Fernández). She was a finalist for the 2011 College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award, given by the ASC Student Council. She also was selected as an inaugural honoree by Unplugging Society: A Women of Color Think Tank for being an Empowering Female Role Model.
Alumni Scholar Series
This program is designed to cultivate relationships between the Department and its alumni and friends by keeping the expertise of our faculty accessible to a broad audience across Ohio and beyond.
David Cressy delivered “George III, Civil Liberties, and the Birthright of an Englighman,” a lecture that commemorated and celebrated his elevation to the King George III Chair in British History.
Robert McMahon presented a concise overview of his book, Dean Acheson and the Creation of an American World Order (2009). An expert on the history of U.S. Foreign policy, Professor McMahon has also published books on the American experience in Vietnam, the Cold War, and South Asia.
Graduate Student Spotlight
Matthew Folds was awarded a Graduate Associate Teaching Award, Ohio State's highest honor for graduate students with teaching responsibilities - only 10 awards are made annually. Matt's scholarship focuses on sectional branches of the Methodist Episcopal Church that were pivotal to the political culture of Civil War-era western Virginia. He studies how northern and southern Methodist clergymen created extensive communication networks that allowed them to assume positions of political influence and become antagonistic yet determinative forces in the politics of slavery, unionism, secession, and the formation of West Virginia. Professor Randy Roth is his advisor.
Graduate Student Achievements
Yigit Akin published a book chapter, “Education of the Body and Politics in the Process of Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic” in a Turkish collection on body-politics. He also delivered a paper at the annual conference of Middle East Studies Association in San Diego.
Meredith Clark-Wiltz delivered papers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Columbia University.
Dallas De Forest delivered a talk at the Biennial og Public Space, in Rome, Italy, an event organized by the Italian National Institute for Urban Planners, and he published “Between Mysteries and Factions: Initiation Rituals, Student Groups, and Violence in the Schools of Late Antique Athens” in the Journal of Late Antiquity. He has been awarded an Elizabeth Clay Howlad Presidential Fellowship for the academic year 2011-12.
Whitney Dirks-Schuster passed her general exams and had her doctoral prospectus approved. Her working title is “Monstrous Births and the Spread of Knowledge in Early Modern Britain.” She received a Graduate Research Small Grant to purchase copies of research-related materials held at the British Library and a History Department Summer Grant to pursue primary research in England.
Kate Epstein published “Imperial Airs: Leo Amery's Airmindedness, 1873-1945,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and received a Bradley Fellowship. She delivered talks at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and the Southern Conference on British Studies, and chaired a panel at the Society for Military History. She also served on the Weigley Committee and ABC-Clio Grant Committee of the Society for Military History.
Hannah Ewing delivered a talk at Indiana University Bloomington.
Jamie LeAnne Hager Goodall presented a paper at the State University of New York-New Paltz for the 17th Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Sarah Kernan received a Philip Poirier Award and a Joseph H. Lynch Scholarship from the Department of History, a Schallek Award from the Medieval Academy of America and Richard III Society-American Bracnh, and a Nicholas Howe Grant from the OSU Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Lindsey Patterson was awarded a 2011-12 Presidential Fellowship, Humanities Summer Research Award, and College of Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Grant for her project “Accessing Citizenship: The Origins of the Movement for Civil Rights and Accessibility, 1950-1973.” She presented her work at Syracuse University, the American Culture Association, the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective, and the Modern U.S. Seminar at Ohio State.
Anna Peterson delivered a paper at the Social Science History Association's meeting in Chicago, and published “Making Women's Suffrage Support an Ethnic Duty: Norwegian-American Culutral Arguments for a Progressive Identity and the American Women's Suffrage Movement. 1880-1925,” Journal of American History. She received the Genevieve Brown Gist Research Award and a College of Arts and Humanities Small Grant Award from Ohio State, and a Social Science History Association Travel Award.
Hunter Price received a Filson Fellowship from the Fislon Historical Society, the Wills Research Fellowship from the Tennessee Historical Society, and a Retrieving the American Past Summer Research Award. He also presented at the Ohio Academy of History.
Anne Sealey published “The Strange Case of the Freudian Case History: The Role of the Long Case History in the Development of Psychoanalysis” in History of the Human Sciences. She also presented papers at the World History Association and German Studies Association's conferences.
Stephen Shapiro was a Smith Richardson Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University. He presented papers at Yale University and the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University, and was commentator on a panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History.
Mark Soderstrom received a Presidential Fellowship from Ohio State's Graduate School and presented a paper at the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Los Angeles.
Mark Stickle presented a paper at the Business Hsitory Conference, and participated in a Doctoral Colloquium sponsored by the Oxford University Press.
William Sturkey published “I Want to be a Part of History” in The Journal of African American History, presented papers at the conferences of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), University of Southern Mississippi History Department, and Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and gave an invited lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also won the John Higham Award from the OAH, the Shanker Fellowship from the American Federation of Teachers, and the James P. Danky Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Spencer Tyce presented a paper at the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies and was awarded one of the Department of History's Summer Research Awards for his work on the conquest of Venezuela.
Daniel Watkins passed his candidacy exams in winter 2011 and will undertake research for his dissertation next year. He delivered a talk at Ohio State and was awarded one of the Department's Retrieving the American Past awards for the summer.