University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Frank Costigliola will discuss his most recent book, Kennan: A Life between Worlds, with the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center Kai Bird. The hybrid event will occur Thursday, November 9th, 2023, at 6:30 p.m. in-person at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Segal Theatre and online via Zoom.
Faculty
“Happy Birthday, Hip-Hop”: Three Albums with Prof. Jeffrey Ogbar
In a twist on “Three Books” to honor the 50th birthday of hip-hop, Professor Jeffrey Ogbar sounds off on one classic, one essential, and one of his favorite hip-hop albums in an article for UConn Magazine, “Happy Birthday, Hip-Hop.”
In addition to being a UConn history professor, he is also the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music. He has written and taught extensively on the role of hip-hop in the United States with his book, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap, and his popular course, “Hip-Hop, Politics, and Youth Culture in America.”
Andy Horowitz is the new Connecticut State Historian
Prof. Andy Horowitz is the new Connecticut State Historian. He is a historian of the modern United States. His res
earch focuses on disasters and the questions they give rise to about race, class, community, trauma, inequality, the welfare state, extractive industry, metropolitan development, and environmental change. As a public historian, he aims to support communities as they “engage in acts of collective autobiography.”
Prof. Horowitz was interviewed by Tess Terrible and Catherine Shen for CTPublic, “Andy Horowitz is the New Connecticut State Historian.”
Emeritus Professor Walt Woodward previously held the position for over twenty years but retired in 2022.
Fiona Vernal to Present for Hartford Lecture Series on Oct. 5th
Hartford Lecture Series brings local organizations and their histories to light. UCONN’s Fiona Vernal, Director, Engaged, Public, Oral and Community Histories (EPOCH), convened the series in collaboration with CT State Community College, the Hartford Heritage project, and series founder Bill Hosley. Vernal will deliver her lecture (in person and live stream) on Hartford’s ethnic heritage on October 5th at 5:45 p.m. at CT’s Old State House.
For streaming information, please see the attached poster.
McElya in the Post on Removal of Arlington’s Confederate Memorial
Prof. Micki McElya provides meaningful commentary and historical context on the removal of and plans for the Arlington Memorial’s Confederate statue in the Washington Post article, “Youngkin directs VMI to accept controversial Confederate statue.” The piece, written by Joe Hein and Ian Shapiro, discusses Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s request for the Virginia Military Institute to accept responsibility for the placement at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park.
McElya’s book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Ceremony (a Pulitzer Prize finalist) highlights the role of Arlington Cemetery as the most influential site of politicized national identity formation in the United States. Her scholarly work provides important context for understanding the removal and the continued education necessary to clarify, as McElya noted, “the toxic misrepresentations of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War the monument represents.”
Alexis Dudden Piece Top Pick for Imperial and Global History
Prof. Alexis Dudden was featured in last week’s top picks for imperial and global history by the University of Exeter, as part of a larger project on “Mapping China’s Strategic Space,” for her piece, “Mental Maps, Territorial Imaging, and Strategy: Thinking about the Japanese Empire,” which analyzes how Japanese leaders used mental maps and territorial imagining as global communication to reinforce existing territories and later, expand their empire.
Frank Costigliola Discusses George F. Kennan on Faculti
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.
Nu-Anh Tran sheds new light on the RVN in recent book, Disunion
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.
Melanie Newport Wins Sharon Harris Book Award for This Is My Jail
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.”
Dexter Gabriel’s Recently Published Book, Jubilee’s Experiment
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,
