This Thursday, Professor Manisha Sinha will be presenting her talk, “The Fall of the Second American Republic” as speaker for the Joanna Dunlap Cowden Memorial Lecture. The event will take place at California State University Chico at 5:30 pm. The talk will draw from her book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.

The memorial lecture was established in 2001 to honor the legacy and work of Professor Joanna Dunlap Cowden, a history professor who taught at California State University Chico for 25 years. Professor Cowden’s work focused on United States antebellum and Civil War history.

Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens has been named the Stafford Ellison Wright Black Alumni Scholar-in-Residence at Occidental College in Los Angeles California. This award is funded by the Stafford Ellison Wright Endowment, created by the Black Alumni Organization in honor of the college’s first black graduates, Dr. Janet Stafford, George F. Ellison, and Barbara Bowman Wright. Through this program, Occidental College is able to invite, “distinguished Black scholars, artists, elected officials, and others to spend time in residence at Occidental each year.“

Dr. Cooper Owens will be in residence between February 18th and 19th, 2025, visiting talking with students, as well as holding a healing circle on February 19th. On the 18th at 7pm, she will also present, “Slavery, Gynecology and Black Placental Resistance: Why Black Mothers Matter“, a free public lecture.

To read more about this impressive achievement: Occidental College

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, 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.