University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Frank Costigliola‘s biography Kennan: A Life between Worlds, offers a new picture of historian and diplomat George Kennan, whose foreign policy of containment of the Soviet Union fueled the Cold War but who later would spend the next fifty years trying to end it.
He recently appeared on Faculti to discuss his work and Kennan, find the interview here.
Professor Nu-Anh Tran’s recent book, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam, examines factionalism among anticommunists and the political culture of authoritarianism and democracy during the presidency of Ngô Đình Diệm in the Republic of Vietnam. The RVN has typically been portrayed as a French creation and later the United States “puppet,” but Tran demonstrates that distinct anti-French resistance in South Vietnam made it a heir to a revolutionary tradition, but was ultimately plagued with disunity and authoritarianism for much of its brief existence.
Professor Nu-Anh Tran spoke about her book on the New Books Network Podcast, “New Books in Southeast Asian Studies.”
Her book earned an Honorable Mention for the Sharon Harris Book Award.
Prof. Melanie Newport won the Sharon Harris Book Award for, This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, an analysis of Chicago and Cook County jails in the late 20th century that served as models around the nation for criminal justice reform. The Sharon Harris Book Award “recognizes scholarly depth and intellectual acuity and highlights the importance of humanities scholarship.”
The University of Pennsylvania Press called This Is My Jail, a “sweeping history of urban incarceration,” that centers jails as “critical sites of urban inequality that sustain the racist actions of the police and judges and exacerbate the harms wrought by housing discrimination, segregated schools, and inaccessible health care.”
Prof. Newport talked about her book on the recent podcast, “This Is My Jail: A Conversation with Melanie D. Newport.”
A huge congratulations to Prof. Dexter Gabriel on the release of his new book, Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism, which examines how the emancipated British Caribbean colonies entered into the debates over abolitionism and African American citizenship from the 1830s through the 1860s to argue that the success of the formerly enslaved in the West Indies served as a focal point for North American struggles against slavery.
Prof. Gabriel also appeared on the Why We Argue podcast for a discussion on, “Seeing Truth in the Speculative,” where he discusses his relationship to truth and memory in both his fiction and non-fiction writing,
