UConn Today has highlighted the recent and monumental research of UConn History Professor Cornelia Dayton. Professor Dayton has made groundbreaking recoveries into the lives of prominent African-born writer, Phillis Wheatley, and her free husband, John Peters. For years, scholars were unsure about where Wheatley and Peters had gone after they left Boston. Using legal papers from Essex County, Massachusetts, Dayton uncovered that Phillis Wheatley and John Peters spent 3 years in Middleton, MA, on a farm where Peters had been enslaved. For Dayton, this work challenges the myth that nothing, or very little, exists about the lives of people of color in New England.  Dayton’s research proves that in following “the small details,” we can arrive at new understandings of freedom, race, and gender that complicate what we think we know about the individual lives of people of color.

A job well done! Be sure to stay tuned for more developments, including a website! In the meantime, read the award-winning article in the September 2021 New England Quarterly and check out the @Wheatley_Peters Twitter!

 

 

 

Sending a huge congratulations to UConn History professor, Micki McElya, on receiving a 2022-23 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholars Fellowship. This fellowship supports scholars in producing works that speak to broad audiences within and beyond the academy.

Professor McElya’s book, No More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation, fits within that goal of public scholarship. As a narrative and character-driven history, the book explores gender, race, and politics through the lens of the protests and participants in the 1968 pageant. Professor McElya is writing an intentional history that captures the complexities of the women involved in the protests and pageant by demonstrating just how beauty contests were sites of oppressive acts and liberating movements. In a fabulous UConn Today profile, Professor McElya describes that:

“The women who participate in these pageants are often written off in history books, their motivations are not made clear, and they’re even accused of potentially participating in their own oppression” and that “one purpose of this book is to show these women in the same fully-formed way, with clear motives and understandings, that the activists of the 1960s and 1970s get.”  

To find out more, read the full UConn Today article!

A job well done! We look forward to reading this exciting and groundbreaking work.  

We are thrilled to welcome Professor Hana Maruyama to UConn this fall as Assistant Professor of History jointly appointed with the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. A specialist in Digital Public History, she is part of this year’s exciting cluster hire in Anti-Racism and Anti-Bias. Professor Maruyama brings an impressive array of skills, strengths, and research and teaching interests which will advance the Department of History’s EPOCH program, the joint minor in Digital Public History being developed with Digital Media and Design, and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute’s K-12 curriculum initiative and commitment to teaching anti-racism.

Hana C. Maruyama is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, with a graduate minor in Heritage Studies and Public History. This August she defends her dissertation, “AlienNation: The Role of Japanese American World War II Incarceration in Native Dispossession.” Her work on Japanese American World War II incarceration, how it relied on and reproduced settler colonial logics, and how it impacted American Indian and Alaska Native people. She is the co-creator/producer of Campu, a podcast created in partnership with the Japanese American oral history organization Densho. She formerly worked for American Public Media’s Order 9066, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. She is yonsei (or fourth generation Japanese American) on her father’s side, with family incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Gila River, and Jerome.

What an incredible first year for UConn History Professor Sergio Luzzatto.

Since joining the department in spring 2020, besides teaching his courses, and doing so virtually, he also inaugurated a new speaker’s series, the Noether Dialogues in Italian & Modern History. Professor Luzzatto organized and moderated four panels this past year (fall 2020-spring 2021) with speakers from all around the world. And on top of those accomplishments, he just delivered a talk for the University of Connecticut Provost’s Distinguished Speaker Series. Professor Luzzatto’s talk, “Looking into a Name: The Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair and World History,” focused on the personal and intellectual history of Emilia Pasca Noether and her family, the namesake and supporters of his academic chair and speaker series.

Well done, Professor Luzzatto, on an excellent first year as part of the UConn History family. Here’s to an even more amazing year two!

On March 16th, in Atlanta, eight people were shot and killed, six of whom were Asian women. The past year has seen a dramatic increase in anti-Asian harassment and violence. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, there have been nearly 3,800 assaults and other forms of harassment of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States.

But anti-Asian discrimination and violence is not new and has a long history in the US. Along with University of Minnesota Professor Erika Lee, UConn History own’s Professor Jason Chang appeared on WNYC’s On The Media to discuss “how the model minority myth has cloaked patterns of brutality against Asian-Americans, and the bloody events that have been wiped from public memory.” It’s a gripping conversation that provides much needed insights into last week’s horrific shooting. Do yourself a favor and give it a listen, it’s very much worth your time.