Professor Brendan Kane and former MA student Emmet de Barra, now a PhD student in Irish at Trinity College Dublin, recently gave a podcast interview on the Celtic Students Podcast about their work on the innovative and fun website to Learn Early Modern Irish Léamh.org.
Listen in for a interesting discussion of Celtic languages, grammar games, collaborative work, and the perhaps surprising utility of the digital humanities as a tool for language revival.
On December 12th, Professor Manisha Sinha keynoted an international conference, 
“Contesting Black Citizenship from the American Revolution to the Present” at the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, University of Leiden at Middelburg, Netherlands. The two-day conference featured multiple sessions with papers by scholars in the field from the United States and the Netherlands.
Professor Sinha’s keynote speech focused “on the rise and fall of the second American republic, covering a period of 60 years, starting with Lincoln’s election, and ending with the ratification of the nineteenth amendment”.
This is the second international conference keynoted by Professor Sinha this year. In June 2024, she keynoted another international conference on Emancipation at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark with scholars from Europe and the United States.
To read more about the events of the conference and the work of the scholars’, the Roosevelt Institute.
In summer 2025, UConn’s Experiential Global Learning program in partnership with the UConn History Department will be offering AAAS/HIST 2866, “China and the West”. This exciting 3-credit study abroad course travels to Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi’an, and will offer students the opportunity to visit world famous heritage sites such as The Great Wall of China, Terracotta warriors, Tiananmen Square, and the Forbidden City. This course will cultivate an increased understanding of Sino-Western shared history and perceptions about each other. In addition to field trips, students will strengthen their critical thinking and writing skills through reading, discussions, assignments, and research.
For further information, please see the attached poster, and the following links to the online brochure and information session on December 17 at 4:00 p.m:
Online Information Session on Dec 17, 4:00 pm:
https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=m721f75f7eda8e4eb620cc7198294a6b7
On November 11th, Cláudio Daflon successfully defended his dissertation “Peripheral Vision:The New Conurbano Universities and the Struggles for a More Popular and Democratic Higher Education System in Argentina, 1980s-2010s”.
Congratulations to Dr. Daflon on his successful defense!
On November 8th, the History Department will be hosting its Foreign Policy Seminar. The event will take place in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge, and there will be a Zoom meeting option available (with registration). The reception begins at 4:30, and the talk will start 
at 5 pm. There will be a dinner after the end of the talk, if you are interested in attending please contact frank.costigliola@uconn.edu.
Anne Foster, a professor of history at Indiana State since 2003, will be presenting “Creating Borders, Creating Crises: The Longer, Broader War on Drugs,”.
In her latest book “The Long War”, Foster examines the global war on drugs.
“Since the early twentieth century, the United States has led a global prohibition effort against certain drugs in which production restriction and criminalization are emphasized over prevention and treatment as means to reduce problematic usage. This “war on drugs” is widely seen to have failed, and periodically decriminalization and legalization movements arise. Debates continue over whether the problems of addiction and crime associated with illicit use of drugs stem from their illegal status or the nature of the drugs themselves. In The Long War on Drugs Anne L. Foster explores the origin of the punitive approach to drugs and its continued appeal despite its obvious flaws. She provides a comprehensive overview, focusing not only on a political history of policy developments but also on changes in medical practices and understanding of drugs. Foster also outlines the social and cultural changes prompting different attitudes about drugs; the racial, environmental, and social justice implications of particular drug policies; and the international consequences of US drug policy.” from Duke University Press.
This October, Manisha Sinha was awarded the John W. Blassingame Award for her significant contributions to the field of African American history through her esteemed sch
olarship, and mentorship of African American students. The John W. Blassingame Award is awarded by the Southern Historical Association every three years. Sinha’s award was announced at the 90th annual meeting of the Association that took place from October 24- 27th this year in Kansas City.
To read more about this impressive achievement, UConn Today.
This October, Jeffrey Ogbar was awarded the Award for Excellence in Documenting Georgia’s History by the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council for his book America’s Black Capital: How African-Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy. The book “chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. What drove them, historian Jeffrey O
. G. Ogbar shows, was the belief that Black uplift would be best advanced by forging Black institutions. ”
The Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council (GHRAC) was formed in 1993 by the Georgia General Assembly. Since then, they have worked to ensure that Georgians have access to the history of Georgia and the records that tell that history, through education and preservation.
Grace Easterly has been selected as a 2024-2025 fellow at the Cold War Archives Research Institute.
The Cold War Archives Research Institute at the Wilson Center has two objectives: “to stimulate original scholarship on the interplay between soft and hard power in the cold and hot wars between 1945 and 1991; and to demonstrate the power of cooperative scholarship through innovative archival practices”. This highly competitive fellowship seeks to train graduate level students in archival research methodologies, and hone the CWAR fellows “critical research skills in historical and archival methodologies, further their own research agendas in Cold War history, improve their communication and presentation skills, and develop a network of supportive professional contacts”.
Congratulations to Grace Easterly on this impressive achievement!
Congratulations to Dr. Abdullah Alhatem, who on September 13th successfully defended his dissertation, “The Domestic Slave Trade and the “Christian Master” in New England”!
On August 28th, 2024, Professor Jason Chang, professor of History and Asian American Studies and Director of Asian and Asian American Studies, became the head of the new Social and Critical Inquiry Department. The department brings together the areas of American Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, under the motto, “Transformation takes social and critical inquiry”. The department prioritizes education, community partnerships and engaged research, and university service, with research focused around “study social and cultural formations and their impact on public life”.
As new department head, Professor Chang believes part of the emphasis of the department is on, “leveraging student experiences and faculty research so that the impact is not just on campus but in communities”. In the next five years, the department hopes to offer “a transformative educational experience that connects students to communities and addresses important societal problems in Connecticut and beyond”.
Professor’s Chang’s work as department head, and the goals of the new department are featured in UConn Today’s article, “Meet Jason Chang, First Head of New Social and Critical Inquiry Department”.