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The Department of History is made up of an impressive and accomplished group of faculty. Read about some of their recent accomplishments below.
Prof. Eddie Brudney’s Article and Publications
Prof. Eddie Brudney published an article entitled “(P)Reimagining the Nation: Citizenship, Labor, and the State in António Ribeiro Sanches’s Cartas sobre a educação da mocidade” in Luso-Brazilian Review (Vol. 57, no. 1, 2020). Read more.
He also contributed to a series of posts on non-tenure track labor and working in academia during COVID-19 for the blog LaborOnline (the blog for the Labor and Working-Class History Association).
Prof. Susan Eckelmann Berghel Promoted
Prof. Susan Eckelmann Berghel was awarded tenure and promoted to the tank of Associate Professor.
Prof. Fang Yu Hu’s Research and Teaching
Prof. Fang Yu Hu spent the summer working on her current book manuscript, “Good Wife, Wise Mother”: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls in the Japanese Empire, 1895-1945″ and will present her research to the public in the near future.
She also reported on the work she did over the summer to prepare to teach online this fall:
I worked on course syllabi for the coming academic year. I have designed my course, HIST 3640 Modern Japan, to be conducted completely online in the midst of the pandemic. I am excited to incorporate amazing podcast episodes and non-textual sources into this course on Japan. I hope that these new materials will encourage class engagement as we conduct the class online. Additionally, I received a 2020-21 Affordable Course Materials Initiative Grant from the UTC library to redesign my course syllabus for Hist 1120 World History from 1400 to Present. There will be no textbook as the course will rely on primary and secondary sources available through UTC Library and the internet at no financial cost to the students.
Prof. Carey McCormack’s Book Chapter
Prof. Carey McCormack‘s chapter on “Discovery and Patriarchy: Professionalization of Botany and the Distancing of Women and ‘Others,’” was included in a volume on Environments of Empire: Networks and Agents of Ecological Change, edited by Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett M. Bennet, published with UNC Press.
Prof. Kira Robison’s Book and Article
Prof. Kira Robison‘s book, Healers in the Making: Students, Physicians, and Medical Education in Medieval Bologna (1250-1550), part of Brill’s The Medieval Mediterranean Series, will be published in 2021.
She also published an article, “For the Benefit of Students: Memory and Anatomical Learning in the Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Centuries” in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 75:2 (2020), 135–150.
Prof. Mike Thompson’s Summer Research
Prof. Mike Thompson reports on the research he did over the summer:
This Summer I joined several History Department colleagues for a 12-week virtual writing group, during which I made significant progress on a journal article tentatively titled “The Wages of Acclimation: Presumed Black Immunity to Yellow Fever and the Politics of Burial Labor in 1855 Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia.” This article chronicles the labor and life of Bob Butt, an enslaved gravedigger in late antebellum Portsmouth, who parlayed the purported immunity of his black body to seize privileges ranging from substantial wages and geographic mobility to local celebrity and nearly his freedom. This noteworthy episode demonstrates that black labor—though not always black suffering or lives—mattered more than ever to distressed white officials managing ravaged and depopulated crucibles of mass illness and death. Black workers like Bob Butt were no mere tools for safeguarding besieged white wealth and health, however, as they often risked torment and death to capitalize on urban employers’ desperation for their essential labor. Laid bare is a long national history of racial and socioeconomic divergence between those who possessed the liberty and means to take shelter or flight from infection, and those compelled to remain exposed and exploitable. As we begin the Fall 2020 semester, I’m looking forward to completing and submitting this journal article!
Prof. Annie Tracy Samuel’s Presentation
Prof. Annie Tracy Samuel delivered an invited talk to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office in July 2020.