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. 
Press
Harvard Gazette on Prof. Manisha Sinha
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. Phil Goduti on JFK’s Vision for World Peace
Recent Ph.D. Phil Goduti has written a compelling article for The Conversation, “The unfinished business of John F. Kennedy’s vision for world peace”, drawing on the dissertation he defended last month. 
Deirdre Cooper-Owens in “The Cancer Detectives” on PBS
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.
Prof Ogbar’s “America’s Black Capital” Talk Broadcast Over C-Span
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar gave a talk on his new book, America’s Black Capital: How African Americans Remade Atlanta in the Shadow of the Confederacy at the Atlanta Center in January.
The event was then broadcast over C-Span.
America’s Black Capital chronicles how African American’s pushed back against Confederate ideology and transformed Atlanta into today’s “Black Mecca.”
“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.”
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.”
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,
Brendan Kane Hosts “Dialogues for Common Ground”
Brendan Kane a professor in the Departments of History and of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, is also the Director of the Democracy and Dialogues initiative (DDI) at the Dodd Center for Human Rights. In 2017 he pioneered the Encounters dialogue series that created a model for community dialogues across Connecticut. A recent National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant and the Connecticut Humanities Council enabled Kane to expand his previous work into a new conversation series, “Dialogues for Common Ground: American Identity and Connecticut’s Civic Reconstruction.” which allows community members to work through primary source documents in small groups, discuss later in a larger group, and then finish with an expert Q&A.
Read more about this program in “Dodd Impact Team Seeks ‘A More Perfect Union’ Through Community Conversation” a recent article by UConn Today.
