Check out what the incredibly accomplished faculty members of the UTC Department of History have been up to!
Julia Cummiskey received a Holmberg Grant for Faculty Excellence, which she will use for a course release to spend time developing her second book project on the history of health marketing in East Africa. She’ll be consulting physical and digital archives and working on applications for grants to support additional research in Europe and East Africa. Dr. Cummiskey is attending the African Studies Association meeting in November, for which she served on the committee that selected the presentations for the health and medicine subtheme of the program.
Fang Yu Hu received the 2022 University of Tennessee Alumni Association Outstanding Teaching Award. She was also on the CAS Dean’s List for Outstanding Faculty Advising and Mentoring for 2021-22.
Mark Johnson was promoted to associate lecturer.
Will Kuby was appointed Associate Dean of the UTC Honors College.
Carey McCormack was promoted to associate lecturer. She is presenting a teaching demo on paleo skills at the Southeast World History Association conference in November.
Kelli Nelson was promoted to associate lecturer.
Kira Robison is on faculty development leave for Fall 2022. She is beginning work on her next major book project that explores the medico-magical practices of face- and palm-reading, which were used by medieval physicians for various purposes such as developing long-term prognoses for patients, or providing the means of identifying evil through examination of exterior bodily features and associating those features with the state of the soul.
John C. Swanson spent last semester (January-June 2022) as a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Freiburg, Germany, where he was also a Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union. He published a book chapter, “Explaining German Expulsions through the Lens of Postcatastrophy: New Discussions concerning the Shoah and the Expulsions,” in the book The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central Eastern European Cultures: Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetic of the Postcatastrophic Narration (2022), edited by Anna Artwinska and Anja Tippner. In the last few months he finished articles concerning the German minority in Hungary, Hungarian-Ukrainian relations, as well as a photo-essay about “people and places.” In May 2022 he led a group of UTC students on a Holocaust study tour in Germany. He also continues to give talks and write articles about the Russian war against Ukraine.
Kathryn Taylor completed a monograph entitled Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice, which will be published in spring 2023 by The University of Delaware Press.
Mike Thompson will be attending two conferences this fall semester. In early September he will travel to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to chair a panel at the biennial meeting of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Mike serves on the SLSA executive board, and will be organizing its next conference scheduled for 2024 in Chattanooga. Later in September Mike will visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum to present content from his chapter in the book Sailing to Freedom: The Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. This conference coincides with the “Sailing to Freedom” museum exhibition, which is available from May-November 2022.
Annie Tracy Samuel was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor. Her short article, “Iran’s Nuclear Diplomacy,” was published in Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective (The Ohio State University) in June 2022. She discussed her book, The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (Cambridge University Press, 2022), available on Amazon, in a New Books Network podcast interview in July and in a Conversation Six podcast in August. She was featured in a BBC Persian special on the 40th Anniversary of the Liberation of Khurramshahr (a battle during the Iran-Iraq War) in May (Clip 1, Clip 2, Clip 3, Clip 4). She delivered an invited expert briefing to the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in July and book talks at the University of Pennsylvania in April and at Princeton University in March.