Author: Weatherwax, Nicole

Frank Costigliola’s New George Kennan Biography Garners Praise

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Frank Costigliola, professor of history, UConn

University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Frank Costigliola‘s recently published biography Kennan: A Life between Worlds. His work 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.

Read about it in Michael Hirsh’s Foreign Policy piece, “Is Cold War Inevitable?” and also in Foreign Affairs, “George Kennan’s Warning on Ukraine.”

Visit KPFA to watch his interview with Mitch Jeserich on Letters and Politics, “George Kennan: The Cold War Architect Who Opposed the War.”

Or check out the video below.

Jeffrey Ogbar Participates in NYT ad “Protect Black Art”

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UConn History Professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music, Jeffrey Ogbar participated in a two page ad that appeared in both the New Jeffrey Ogbar HeadshotYork Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution titled “Protect Black Art.” The ad calls for restrictions on artists’ lyrics and other forms of creative expression including visual arts, film, writing, etc. from being used against defendants in courtroom and emphasizes their right to creative freedom and expression. Prof. Ogbar joins artists, scholars, organizations and companies in the call for protective legislation that allows artists to express their creativity without the threat of it being used against them in the courtroom. The ad was published in the New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on November 1, 2022.

Prof. Ogbar’s scholarship focuses on 20th century African American history in the United States with a focus on Black nationalism and social movements. He has written on varied subjects including the New Negro Renaissance, mass incarceration, civil rights struggles, and hip-hop.

 

Brendan Kane Receives Erasmus + ICM Award

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UConn History Professor, Brendan Kane and University College Dublin Professor, Marc Caball haBrendan Kane, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticutve been awarded funding through Erasmus + International Credit Mobility (a global scholarship and exchange program financed by the European Union and administered in Ireland by the Higher Education Authority) for their proposal entitled, “Digital Early Modern Ireland.” According to a post by University College Dublin, Brendan Kane and Marc Caball will each spend time at each other’s respective institutions to both develop and implement a digital strategy “for early modern Irish research centered on Léamh.org (a digital humanities project enabling engagement with early modern texts in the Irish language).” 

Brendan Kane is a co-director of the digital humanities project Léamh.org and director of the Democracy and Dialogues Initiative at the UConn Human Rights Institute.

With American Democracy at Stake, Manisha Sinha Provides Hope

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Manisha Sinha, professor of historyUConn History Professor Manisha Sinha draws connections between the conditions leading up to the 1866 midterm election and the 2022 midterm elections in her piece for CNN, “Why I hope 2022 will be another 1866,” to provide both context and hope when American democracy is at stake. Prof. Sinha explores similar themes between the 1866 and upcoming midterms including a rise in armed paramilitary groups, racial violence, and the dangerous attempts at power grabs. It is her hope that 2022 will be another 1866 and that Americans will rise to defend democracy as they had in 1866. Read the full article on CNN.

 

Graduate Students Present at Stony Brook University Conference

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On September 29th and 30th, four UConn graduate students presented their research at the Sixth Annual Stony Brook University Graduate History Conference. The presenters included three history graduate students –David Evans, Lincoln Hirn, and Rachel Hendrick– and ELIN graduate student Juan Macias-Diaz.

David Evans presented his paper, “Eradicating Hunger: The World Food Crisis and Anti-Hunger Activism in the 1970s.” This project explores how state and non-state actors reacted to global food insecurity during the 1970s. It highlights the significance of human rights and neoliberal economic approaches to solving the food problem, and the degree to which they intersected U.S. foreign and domestic politics. His dissertation in progress, “Hunger for Rights: The Human Right to Food in the Post-War Era, explores similar themes.

Lincoln Hirn presented his paper, “Dynamic Stories: The Changing Role of the Slave Narrative in Postbellum America,” which discusses how the slave-narrative genre of autobiography changed between 1865 and 1915. It also looks at how formerly enslaved autobiographers adapted to the changing ways that the American public viewed and remembered slavery, enslavers, and the Civil War.

Rachel Hendrick presented her paper, “Benjamin Franklin and the Business of Paper,” which lays out a methodology for combining evidence from Franklin’s business ledgers and from the paper he used to print the Pennsylvania Gazette to show that Franklin had far different paper buying habits than his contemporaries. She argued that Franklin was buying printing paper in the late 1730s to ingratiate himself with his fellow Philadelphia merchants. Her research shows that these purchases later translated into donations of time and money for Franklin’s improvement projects in the 1740s and 1750s.

Juan Macias-Diaz presented his paper, “An Indigenous Kingdom: Indigenous Anticolonial Projects of the Comunero Revolt (1781),” an exploration of the surprising echoes of the Túpac Amaru Rebellion among indigenous and criollo communities in New Granada (Colombia).