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,
The UConn Avery Point Campus will host a special screening of the film, Nuchi nu Miji – Okinawa’s Water of Life at the Avery Point Campus in the auditorium on March 21st from 3-6 pm, organized by UConn History Prof. and Maritime Studies Affiliate Faculty member, Alexis Dudden. The film portrays Okinawans’ struggle for justice in one of the worst environmental catastrophes in modern Japanese history, where since 2016 nearly one-third of the population’s drinking water has been contaminated with military PFAS “Forever Chemicals.” It features interviews, archive footage and documents obtained via the US Freedom of Information Act, to uncover the truth of what has been happening in Okinawa, and the struggle of residents who feel ignored by both Tokyo and Washington.
Both of the filmmakers, Shimabukuro Natsuko and Jon Mitchell, will also be present to meet.
Shimabukuro Natsuko is a director with Ryukyu Asahi Broadcasting Corporation. Her documentaries about Okinawan history, politics, and environmental problems have won Japan’s top TV prizes, including the prestigious Galaxy Award. She is a member of Waseda University’s Institute for the Next Generation of Journalism and Media.
Jon Mitchell is a correspondent with Okinawa Times and the author of four books about Okinawa’s environment, including Poisoning the Pacific (Rowman & Littlefield), a winner in the 2021 US Society of Environmental Journalists’ book awards. He is a visiting researcher at Meiji Gakuin University’s International Peace Research Institute, Tokyo.
Prof. Dudden’s research includes work on modern Japan, modern Korea, and international history and she is currently writing a book, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020, about Japan’s territorial disputes and the changing meaning of islands in international law.
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.
Prof. Manisha Sinha, the James L. James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, and a leading scholar on the history of slavery and abolition, will be participating in a program through the National Constitution Center on “Liberty and Slavery at America’s Founding.” The program will take place Tuesday, February 28th, and will run from at 7pm ET.
Prof. Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition will join historians Harold Holzer, author of several books on President Abraham Lincoln, including Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America and Edward Larsonfor a discussion on Larson’s recent book American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. They will explore the paradox of liberty and slavery between Revolutionary America through the Civil War.
The National Constitution Center is hosting this free event and online registration is open.
University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History, Frank Costigliola‘s recently published biography Kennan: A Life between Worlds. His work 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.
UConn History Professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Music, Jeffrey Ogbar participated in a two page ad that appeared in both the New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution titled “Protect Black Art.” The ad calls for restrictions on artists’ lyrics and other forms of creative expression including visual arts, film, writing, etc. from being used against defendants in courtroom and emphasizes their right to creative freedom and expression. Prof. Ogbar joins artists, scholars, organizations and companies in the call for protective legislation that allows artists to express their creativity without the threat of it being used against them in the courtroom. The ad was published in the New York Times andThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution on November 1, 2022.
Prof. Ogbar’s scholarship focuses on 20th century African American history in the United States with a focus on Black nationalism and social movements. He has written on varied subjects including the New Negro Renaissance, mass incarceration, civil rights struggles, and hip-hop.
UConn History Professor, Brendan Kane and University College Dublin Professor, Marc Caball have been awarded funding through Erasmus + International Credit Mobility (a global scholarship and exchange program financed by the European Union and administered in Ireland by the Higher Education Authority) for their proposal entitled, “Digital Early Modern Ireland.” According to a post by University College Dublin, Brendan Kane and Marc Caball will each spend time at each other’s respective institutions to both develop and implement a digital strategy “for early modern Irish research centered on Léamh.org (a digital humanities project enabling engagement with early modern texts in the Irish language).”
Brendan Kane is a co-director of the digital humanities project Léamh.org and director of the Democracy and Dialogues Initiative at the UConn Human Rights Institute.
UConn History Professor Manisha Sinha draws connections between the conditions leading up to the 1866 midterm election and the 2022 midterm elections in her piece for CNN, “Why I hope 2022 will be another 1866,” to provide both context and hope when American democracy is at stake. Prof. Sinha explores similar themes between the 1866 and upcoming midterms including a rise in armed paramilitary groups, racial violence, and the dangerous attempts at power grabs. It is her hope that 2022 will be another 1866 and that Americans will rise to defend democracy as they had in 1866. Read the full article on CNN.
Emiliana Pasca Noether January 15, 1917 – March 24, 2018
Emiliana (Liliana to family) was a professor of Italian history, whose career paved a path for the recognition and promotion of future generations of female scholars. After receiving her Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1948, Professor Noether taught Italian history at New York University, Rutgers University, Regis College, Simmons College and the University of Connecticut, where the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History was established in her honor upon her retirement in 1987. Following her retirement, she continued to share her learning by teaching in various elder education programs.
Professor Noether was appointed twice as a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar – in 1964-65 and in 1982 – to further her scholarship in Italian historical studies. She was among the first group of fellows at Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute when it was founded in 1961 to promote women scholars, an experience that she described as “a second chance…after having been relegated to the professional dustbin” for taking time off to be a parent. She went on to serve as president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the New England Historical Association, and to chair the American Historical Association’s Committees on Italian-American Historical Relations and Women Historians. She authored nearly 100 professional articles and books on Italian history and cultural and intellectual ties between Italy and the English-speaking world, and mentored many graduate students – both women and men – over her long career.
Liliana was born in Naples, Italy and emigrated to the United States as a young child. She grew up in New York City in a family of Italian musicians and teachers. In 1942, she married Gottfried (Friedel) E. Noether (1915-1991), a statistician and refugee from Nazi Germany, with whom she shared a passion for music, the arts, and worldwide travel. She is survived by her daughter, Monica Noether, and two grandchildren, Braden and Shannon Harvey.
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, PhD candidate in History, with Professor Blanca Silvestrini, History Department
Blanca G. Silvestrini, an attorney and historian, who recently retired from the History Department after 42 years in academics, has spent her professional life reaching out beyond the Ivory Tower and the courtroom to students, refugee children and repressed women, among other groups.
This spring, Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Ph.D. candidate in history, had the opportunity to talk to Professor Silvestrini about her career and her plans for the future.
As she told Meléndez-Badillo, in the interview “my heart beat history, my thought is legally oriented and I have always aspired to reach out to people, whether inside or outside of the classroom.”
Silvestrini will continue her active research life into Caribbean culture and society with an “emphasis on people, real people living in the region but also people on the move.”
Silvestrini received a doctorate in history from SUNY-Albany; her interests in law and society in Puerto Rico led her to earn a law degree and J.S.M. from Stanford University.
The two academic degrees mesh perfectly with Silvestrini’s philosophy and research focuses.
“My teaching and research have gone hand in hand,” she told Meléndez-Badillo. “I approach law as a historical product and research how it affects change in society. “ She gave as an example her course in Latinos/as and Human Rights in which she emphasized changes, influences, contradictions, successes and failures of social movements.
She said teaching, which she began at age 26 at the University of Puerto Rico, sustains her. Despite administrative jobs in academia, she has always returned to the classroom.
She defined teaching as a “reciprocal process” in which students and faculty give to each other. Young people, she said, “force you to think in a different way … (they) anchor you in the present, ask questions you hadn’t thought about and drive your creativity to a new level.”
She reminds her students that young people created the civil rights movements and have been leaders of their times.
In the classroom, her mantra was “history is about real people,” always encouraging students to think of themselves, their families and their communities “as part of history.”
Predictably, a teacher first led Silvestrini to pursue history – a turning point in her life that should remind all students of the value of the core curriculum. She had entered undergraduate studies as a math major but an opening in a Renaissance history course, required to take, turned into a breakthrough experience when, knowing her interest in science, her professor suggested she read a biography of Leonardo da Vinci.
It was the first “real” history book she had ever read and its impact was so great she switched majors to history. That professor became “my role model,” she said. “Beyond content, he taught me how to be a historian.”
It is a role Silvestrini has taken on for countless undergraduate and graduate students, who, like herself, she has required to diversify their studies by reading novels and ethnographies and analyzing films, legal cases and statistics.
Her focus on interdisciplinary studies was intensified as part of a faculty group that helped create the UConn Human Rights Institute, founded in 2003 by eight Liberal Arts and Sciences academic departments and the Schools of Business and Law to advance the study and teaching of human rights. It now has healthy major and minor programs.
Professor Silvestrini has “mentored a generation of historians, social scientists and legal scholars,” wrote Meléndez-Badillo in the introduction to his interview with her.
“Working closely with her at the University of Connecticut has transformed my conception of the uses of historical scholarship can have within and beyond the ivory tower,” he continued.
A review of Silvestrini’s scholarship and publications makes clear the breadth and depth of her interests.
Among her books, in Spanish and English, are studies of female resistance, the politics and violence and criminality of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean as well as the history of that region of the hemisphere. Her countless journal articles take long looks at research resources in Puerto Rico, Latino culture and civil rights, working conditions for women and the Puerto Rican legal system, among other topics.
She is also a practicing attorney and serves as a counselor-at-law and consultant attorney in cases related to immigration and Puerto Rican family and inheritance law for a Cambridge, Mass.-based law firm.
And although she is leaving the classroom for now, Silvestrini’s creative mind continues to lead her in new directions of research and activism.
These fields include legally representing Central American refugee children, health and citizenship in Puerto Rico (the subject of her latest book), and, in a unique avenue of investigation, the cuisine of Puerto Rico at the turn of the 20th century when profound cultural and societal changes were taking place.
“The question brings together the social and economic transformations from an agricultural to an industrial society, the impact of the transition fro Spanish to American colonials, the incorporation of women in the work force … and the expansion of the state powers into education, public health and urbanization,” she told Meléndez-Badillo. As weighty as these investigations sound, Silvestrini also said she plans to have some “fun” with the project by finding recipes and collecting stories.
How entertaining and educational it will be for all historians to read the results of this undertaking. Thank you, Blanca Silvestrini, for your continued mentoring and work in the field of history.
