For our history faculty and graduate students summer isn’t all fun in the sun. They scatter across the globe giving lectures, researching and writing about history. We’ll be posting about their travels (near and far) and research projects here during the coming months.
This summer Professor Stephen Kern is, “completing a book on modernism that focuses on six major cultural figures: Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence (pictured below), André Gide, and Martin Heidegger. It argues that modernism is a dialectic of radical fragmentation and a search for unification.” The title of his book is, “Toward Unification: The Modernist Project”.
D.H. Lawrence
This summer Associate Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries participated in an NEH Seminar on Black Freedom Struggles outside the South and conducted research at the Schomburg, a few blocks from the historic heart of Harlem. His research is focusing on black working class life in New York City over the last fifty years.
Graduate Student Sara Halpern has been in the archives at the United Nations and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in New York City to learn more about the fate of European Jews, who were stranded in Shanghai during WWII, in the postwar period. She is researching how relief agencies responded to the needs of the refugees upon the conclusion of the war and how various Allied bureaucracies made repatriation and permanent resettlement very difficult.
Below is a scan, from the JDC Archives of the second page of a letter from two male refugees to the JDC headquarters in New York City, explaining the reality of their community (dated September 25, 1945).
The other image is a photograph, from the UN Archives, taken by notable Jewish photographer, Arthur Rothstein, who was part of the Signal Corps’ India-Burma-China theater. It is the entryway to the “ghetto” where the Japanese had kept the Jews in during the war. The painting of the flags was done by the refugee artists.
This photograph, from the UN Archives, was taken by notable Jewish photographer, Arthur Rothstein, who was part of the Signal Corps’ India-Burma-China theater. It is the entryway to the “ghetto” where the Japanese had kept the Jews in during the war. The painting of the flags was done by the refugee artists.
This is a scan, from the JDC Archives of the second page of a letter from two male refugees to the JDC headquarters in New York City, explaining the reality of their community (dated September 25, 1945).
Nikki Freeman is a history PhD student who studies 20th century German history and gender history. This summer she is taking language courses and conducting research in both Germany and Poland. She received a DAAD Intensive Language Course Grant to study German for two months in Dresden, Germany. After completing her language studies in Dresden, she will travel to Poland in order to conduct research at the new POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Then she will spend some time at archives in Berlin and Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany, exploring documents concerning German and Polish refugees and expellees after the Second World War.
Nikki Freeman with Dresden’s “Old City” in the background.
A church in Frauenkirche
A mural in Fürstenzug
With his new book, Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (2015)
https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/undisciplining-knowledge, a critical and comparative history of interdisciplinarity, just published, Harvey J. Graff, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and Professor of English and History, is now writing The Origins of Literacy Studies. This book, aimed to recast how we think about literacy and literacies, critical reviews theories about literacy and approaches to the study of literacy in the major disciplines and fields that influence how we understand reading and writing across media and modes of comprehension and expression. The book explores and builds on the historical foundations of knowledge in such major fields as linguistics, anthropology, psychology, reading, writing, visual studies, math and science, and history. A new, critical synthesis is the goal. He is also planning his likely next project, a study of the decline of public higher education.
Ayse Baltacioglu is a PhD candidate in our department. She spent part of the summer in Iran conducting dissertation research. She writes,
“For my dissertation I am working on early modern Middle Eastern history in the context of Sunni-Shi’ite conflict and conversion. I am mainly examining religious policies, as well as conversion practices within Islam for the 15th-to-17th century Ottoman Anatolia and Safavid Iran. As a part of my research, I was in Iran last and this summer. I visited main libraries, manuscript collections, as well as historical sites in various cities such as Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Ardabil. Iran, as one of the oldest civilizations, has a lot to offer to its visitors with its rich history, culture, language, food, and very friendly people.”
Ayse Baltacioglu-Brammer
History Graduate Student Dani Anthony just returned from a two-week trip to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. She writes, “I spent my time looking through their collection of Pizarro-La Gasca Manuscripts related to a civil war in Peru in the 1540s. I was happy to be able to go thanks to a Bradley research fellowship. The photo below is an example of a woman writing to the leader of the rebel forces to tell him he is in her prayers.”
Professor Theodora Dragostinova spent her summer as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) at Regensburg, Germany. An hour away from Munich, the medieval town of Regensburg is a UNESCO World Heritage site that features many finely preserved buildings from as early at the 12th century (in addition to the ruins of a Roman garrison). At the Institute, Prof. Dragostinova met with doctoral students and researchers, led a seminar on cold war cultural diplomacy (the topic of her second book project), and participated in a conference on migration in modern Europe (the topic of a new lecture class she will teach next year).
Professor Dragostinova in Regensburg
Regensburg
Regensburg
This image and the two following it are from the work of Cold War political emigres from Bulgaria who worked at Radio Free Europe in Munich. The study of emigres is also a part of the story she is telling in her second book.
