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.
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.
On September 25, Prof. Manisha Sinha visited Washington D.C., where she discussed her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, as part of the Congressional Dialogue series. Speaking before an audience of more than two hundred Members of Congress, Prof. Sinha discussed the relevance of Reconstruction to contemporary politics, and to the issues Americans face today.
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”.
Prof. Jason O. Chang has been selected as one of the twenty-five people appointed by Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont to serve as members of the newly formed Connecticut Hate Crimes Advisory Council.
Prof. Manisha Sinha’s recent talk at the event “The Past, Present, and Future of American Democracy” was discussed in the Harvard Gazette under the headline: “Historian sees a warning for today in post-Civil War U.S.”
Dr. Cooper-Owens participated in the PBS documentary, The Cancer Detective. The documentary follows the previously untold story of the war on cervical cancer.
Her research interests include the history of medicine, slavery, and women in the 19th century United States. She is currently working on a biography of Harriet Tubman that examines the revolutionary through the lens of disability and a monograph about the history of race, medical discovery, and the C-section.