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,
Join us in congratulating our past and present UConn History graduate students on their wonderful achievements!
Graduate student Constance Holden has been awarded the 2023-2025 UConn Greenhouse Studios Graduate Assistantship to Support Diversity in Digital Humanities.
Former graduate student and current New England Air Museum Curator Nick Hurley (MA ’15) has been named the 2023 U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH) Scholar in Residence. This program is a professional development opportunity established in 2021 for Army National Guard and Reserve officers possessing advanced degrees in history. Participants spend one year on the rotating faculty of the Department of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point and another as a member of the CMH staff in Washington, D.C.
UConn History and Africana Studies Professor, Fiona Vernal was awarded a $200,000 Partnership Grant from Connecticut Humanities for the expansion of her public history program, “An Integrated Framework for Engaged, Public, Oral, and Community Histories” (or EPOCH), she founded in 2015. EPOCH fosters collaboration between UConn undergraduates and faculty, as well as community organizations and archivists to highlight both Connecticut and global histories. Past projects include child labor exploitation in global chocolate production and an 80-year history of housing discrimination in Hartford. This recent partnership with Connecticut Humanities will allow EPOCH to collect community histories across Connecticut beginning with Bloomfield, Windsor, and Enfield. Prof. Vernal’s work and new partnership with Connecticut Humanities are featured in the UConn Today article, “EPOCH Shares Community Histories, From Connecticut to Côte d’Ivoire.”
The UConn Avery Point Campus will host a special screening of the film, Nuchi nu Miji – Okinawa’s Water of Life at the Avery Point Campus in the auditorium on March 21st from 3-6 pm, organized by UConn History Prof. and Maritime Studies Affiliate Faculty member, Alexis Dudden. The film portrays Okinawans’ struggle for justice in one of the worst environmental catastrophes in modern Japanese history, where since 2016 nearly one-third of the population’s drinking water has been contaminated with military PFAS “Forever Chemicals.” It features interviews, archive footage and documents obtained via the US Freedom of Information Act, to uncover the truth of what has been happening in Okinawa, and the struggle of residents who feel ignored by both Tokyo and Washington.
Both of the filmmakers, Shimabukuro Natsuko and Jon Mitchell, will also be present to meet.
Prof. Dudden’s research includes work on modern Japan, modern Korea, and international history and she is currently writing a book, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020, about Japan’s territorial disputes and the changing meaning of islands in international law.
Find more information about the event here.
Brendan Kane a professor in the Departments of History and of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, is also the Director of the Democracy and Dialogues initiative (DDI) at the Dodd Center for Human Rights. In 2017 he pioneered the Encounters dialogue series that created a model for community dialogues across Connecticut. A recent National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant and the Connecticut Humanities Council enabled Kane to expand his previous work into a new conversation series, “Dialogues for Common Ground: American Identity and Connecticut’s Civic Reconstruction.” which allows community members to work through primary source documents in small groups, discuss later in a larger group, and then finish with an expert Q&A.
Read more about this program in “Dodd Impact Team Seeks ‘A More Perfect Union’ Through Community Conversation” a recent article by UConn Today.
UConn History Alum Kate Aguilar, now an Assistant Professor in History at Gustavus Adolphus College, contributed a thought-provoking piece to the Washington Post about race and football ahead of the first contest between two Black quarterbacks in the Super Bowl, “It took until 2023 for two Black QBs to start in a Super Bowl. Here’s why.” The article explores how narratives about Black people during slavery “being athletically superior but intellectually inferior” have impacted where white owners and white coaches have allowed Black players to participate on the football field. Her hope is that the attention to this historic moment will draw attention to the barriers placed on Black athletes historically and in the present, which will “help fans better understand how slavery — and the noxious, racist ideas that came with it — still affect how we see race, sports and leadership in the 21st century.”
Kate Aguilar’s research focuses on the intersection of Black student activism and the Black athlete at the University of Miami (Fla.)
Prof. Manisha Sinha, the James L. James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, and a leading scholar on the history of slavery and abolition, will be participating in a program through the National Constitution Center on “Liberty and Slavery at America’s Founding.” The program will take place Tuesday, February 28th, and will run from at 7pm ET.
Prof. Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition will join historians Harold Holzer, author of several books on President Abraham Lincoln, including Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America and Edward Larson for a discussion on Larson’s recent book American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. They will explore the paradox of liberty and slavery between Revolutionary America through the Civil War.
The National Constitution Center is hosting this free event and online registration is open.