This fall, UConn History Professor Brendan Kane became Faculty Director of the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights & Action Learning Community (HRALC). As Faculty Director, he will work with the students of HRALC and in collaboration with Rachel Jackson and Anamaria Arteaga.
Congratulations Professor Kane and we wish you great success in this new leadership role. For more details about Professor Kane, and his appointment as HRALC Faculty Director, please consult this link.
On June 1st, UConn Today featured the exciting news of a new minor to be offered by the University – Digital Public History! Featuring collaboration between the Department of History and the Department of Digital Media and Design, students who declare the minor will take five transdisciplinary courses: “Introduction to Digital Humanities, Topics in Public History, Collaborating with Cultural Organizations, an experiential Digital Public History Internship with a local library, archive, museum, or other cultural organization, and a project-based capstone course, the Digital Public History Practicum, co-taught by faculty from both History and DMD.”
The funding for this minor comes from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) $35,000 planning grant awarded to two UConn faculty, Associate Professors Fiona Vernal (left) and Tom Scheinfeldt (right). Students interested in the minor can begin taking classes in Fall 2020. To read the article, click here.
The Office of Undergraduate Research has announced the selection of 50 undergraduate students to receive SURF Awards in support of their summer undergraduate research projects.
Jenifer Gaitán, a senior honors History major / Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor will research a project titled “Voces: First–Generation Latinx Students Discuss Their Support Networks.” Jenifer’s faculty mentor is Dr. Laura Bunyan, Sociology.
This research project is in support of Jenifer’s University Scholar project by the same name. Her faculty advisor committee members are: Laura Bunyan, Sociology (Chair); Ingrid Semaan, Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Joel Blatt, History.
Project Summary: In the last decade, the number of Latinx students who have enrolled in college has increased by over 80%. Many of these students are first-generation college students, who as a whole make up approximately one-third of all college students. Despite being the largest ethnic minority group in the U.S., Latinx students are understudied. Those who are the first in their families face unique challenges while often balancing familial, work, and academic responsibilities with limited institutional support. Through in-person interviews, this project explores the systems of support first-generation Latinx students utilize through the completion of their undergraduate educations.
Jenifer is also the President of Husky Outreach for Minority Education (HOME). She is a first-generation college student and proud daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants.
The History Department is proud to announce that five members of Wood Hall will take part in the UConn Humanities Institute‘s (UCHI) 2020-21 cohort of fellows. Professors Melanie Newport, Helen Rozwadowski, and Sara Silverstein will serve as UCHI Faculty Fellows. Doctoral students Nicole Breault and Shaine Scarminach will join the cohort of UCHI Graduate Dissertation Fellows. Congratulations to you all!
Melanie NewportDepartment of History
Project Title: This is My Jail: Reform and Mass Incarceration in Chicago and Cook County
Department of History – Avery Point
Project Title: Science as Frontier: History Hidden in Plain Sight
Sara SilversteinDepartment of History & Human Rights Institute
Project Title: Toward Global Health: A History of International Collaboration
Nicole BreaultHistory Department – Draper Dissertation Fellow
Project Title: The Night Watch of Boston: Law and Governance in Eighteenth-Century British America
The Department would like to congratulate Matt Guariglia for receiving the 2020 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS)! A well-deserved honor for his excellent dissertation, titled “The American Problem: Race, Empire, and Policing in New York City, 1840-1930.” An additional congratulations to his dissertation chair, Micki McElya, and committee members Peter Baldwin and Jelani Cobb.
IEHS announcement:
This year’s IEHS Outstanding Dissertation Award goes to Matthew Guariglia, whose excellent dissertation makes visible the deep connections between the development of policing, immigration, race, and American empire. Well-researched and methodologically expansive (connecting multiple fields and disciplines), Guariglia shows how the early militarization of New York’s police force was shaped by U.S. colonial experiences in the Philippines and Cuba, and how NY officials translated imperial practices abroad into the domestic policing of immigrants and black Americans. Representing some of the exciting new directions for the study of immigration and ethnic history, Guariglia’s dissertation speaks in powerful ways to current debates about the carceral state, surveillance, and the policing of racialized communities in the United States today.
Committee: Julian Lim (Chair), Aldo Lauria, Laura Madokoro
The work of Professor Jason Oliver Chang, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, recently was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In an article titled “Coronavirus Is Prompting Alarm on American Campuses. Anti-Asian Discrimination Could Do More Harm,” Emma Dill highlights Professor Chang’s initiative in tracking incidents of racism against Asian Americans since the outbreak of the coronavirus. While he is not aware of any incidents occurring at UConn, he recognizes the need to document instances of discrimination at universities across the United States.
Ph.D. student Philip Goduti has been named the Connecticut Outstanding Teacher of American History for 2020 by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The award is given to a teacher that demonstrates excellence in: readily sharing an incisive knowledge of American History, being committed to their students, fostering a spirit of patriotism and loyal support of our country, relating history to modern life and events, and requiring high academic standards at all times from their students.
Phil has gone beyond the call of teaching duty to demonstrate these attributes in the classroom and inspire his students at Somers High School. Phil will be competing for the national DAR award this spring. Good luck!
Fifteen scholars from China, Taiwan, and Europe, as well as the US, met on September 27 and 28, 2019 to discuss selected key texts written by Chinese intellectuals and political activists from the late Qing period (1890s) through the Republican period (1912-1949). The conference was held at UConn-Hartford.
The texts ranged from well-known works by Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Mao Zedong to lesser-known writings of Yang Du and Ding Shan. The conference’s discussions were held in English and Chinese. Duan Lian, Pablo Blitstein, Wang Fansen, Gao Bo, Carl K.Y. Shaw, Wen Yu, Mara Yue Du, Axel Schneider, Gu Hongliang, Thomas Fröhlich, Li Yongjin, Shellen Wu, and Peter Zarrow gave papers, while discussants were Stephen Angle, Alexus McLeod, and Fred Lee.
The goals of the conference were to highlight new scholarship on the rich political theorizing of the period, and to help establish modern Chinese political thought as a field not only important in its own right but of interest to non-Sinophone scholars working on political theory, comparative politics, and global intellectual history. We collectively hope to continue to pursue these goals in the future. In terms of making modern Chinese political thought more transparent outside this sub-field, we will work on providing complete translations of key texts and, separately, introductions to them. These introductions will provide basic information on the text’s author, its context, its contents and significance, and its reception and influence. Both translations of complete texts and introductions to them should be of use to scholars and students. At the moment, we lack these scholarly tools—most of the translations we have are highly abridged or limited to a small number of political leaders (Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong). And the monographic literature speaks mostly to specialists.
Papers and discussion at the UConn conference centered around such themes as materiality, utopianism, and temporality, as well as more familiar topics such as secularization, legitimacy, and rights and liberty. We did not come up with a clear definition of what constitutes a “key text” and do not want to establish a canon, but rather we hope to keep open what texts are of historical and contemporary interest. Loosely speaking, we can put key texts into one of two categories: historical importance as defined by the text’s reception and influence (at the time it was disseminated or later); and intrinsic interest as defined by the text’s originality and argumentation. This conference made no attempt to claim the texts discussed could possibly represent the spectrum of political thought in twentieth-century China, but it did include texts that represented a variety of opinion—articles and books by Kang Youwei, Zhang Zhidong, Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, Yang Du, Chen Duxiu, Liang Shuming, Ding Shan, Luo Longji, and Mao Zedong.
Much Chinese writing of the period of course constituted adoption, adaptation, and reflections on ideas that originated in Euro-America and Japan (or via Japan). At the same time, the influence of Confucian and Buddhist ideas on particular texts was profound. In approaching key texts, it is necessary to keep in mind various authors’ particular and original interpretations of the of the questions they were asking. The afterlife of texts is also worth considering; for example, China today has seen a revival of certain texts written a hundred years ago such as writings of Kang Youwei, which interest New Confucians, and writings of Zhang Taiyan (Binglin), which interest New Left thinkers.
In addition to opening up the question of the exact bases of modern Chinese political thought by focusing on key texts, this conference also raised the question of what counts as “political thought” in the first place. Discussions turned to the problem of the hegemony of Western political methodologies and problems, the need to encourage more comparative work, and the advantages of interdisciplinary scholarship, especially among historians, political theorists, and philosophers.
Sponsors of the conference were the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation; and UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office, Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, Humanities Institute, Department of History, Office of Global Affairs, and Department of Philosophy. Photo Credit: Jason Chang.
In today’s Washington Post blog, Made By History, Ph.D. student Alex Beckstrand contributed an excellent article titled “How 1940 provides the way forward for the United States in a treacherous world”. According to Beckstrand, forward-thinking and bipartisan problem solving is a must to overcome this difficult political moment. In particular, Beckstrand provides examples of bipartisan policies from the FDR era that helped the economy and gave the United States a more solid footing before World War II. To read more, click here.
