1356 Campus Drive, East Campus, 224 Classroom Bldg., Box 90719, Durham, NC  27708-0719 | (919) 684-3014 | history.duke.edu                            vol. 3, December 2023

Welcome to our third issue, highlighting the accomplishments of the History Department's faculty, graduate students, and alumni, as well as events and other noteworthy topics.  Suggestions and submissions are welcome at history@duke.edu.  Submission is no guarantee of inclusion.

"I have returned to the helm of the Department recharged, partly because I had a wonderful year off doing my own research, but also because of an amazing team of Officers with whom I have the privilege of working: Associate Chair Reeve Huston, Director of Graduate Studies Jehangir Malegam, and Director of Undergraduate Studies James Chappel. Working in concert with the the faculty, it has been a pleasure to think big and make plans for the betterment of our community... (continue reading)

Wesley Hogan was also awarded an NEH grant for her project “SNCC and Grassroots Organizing: Building a More Perfect Union.” This SNCC Digital Gateway initiative, a partnership between the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Legacy Project, Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Duke University Libraries, aims to make the grassroots narratives of the civil rights movement accessible to a broader audience.

Cecilia Márquez has been traveling the coast in support of her new book, Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023).

Simon Partner's latest book, Koume’s World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration, is out this month from Columbia University Press.

On leave through August 2024, Thavolia Glymph has nevertheless been a very busy bee:  Elected president of the American Historical Association; Rogers Distinguished Fellow in Nineteenth Century American History, Huntington Library; Scholars Council, 10 Million Names Project; Co-organizer (with Ari Kelman, UC, Davis) of Contested Commemorations: Public Memory in the South Symposium, Taos, New Mexico (Mellon Foundation grantee); Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Committee; 2025 Francis B. Simkins Award Committee, Southern Historical Association; Nominating Committee, Society of American Historians; Target of Opportunity Diligence Search Committee, History Department, 2023; LAWCHA Working Group for an Earlier Labor History; Speaker, Gettysburg Foundation Gala. (Whew!)

On November 14th, Academic Studies Press published Joseph Shatzmiller's four-volume Collected Studies: The Jews of Provence (v1), Christian Majority-Jewish Minority (v2), Maimonidean Argument in France (v3), and Jews in the Medical Profession (v4)-- a collection that is the result of more than sixty years of commitment to scholarship, mining archival sources, and intellectual history, assembled into essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Jewish communities in medieval Europe.

Nancy MacLean's bestselling Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America was just reissued by Penguin Random House with a new Preface that updates the story from its original publication in 2017.  The addition examines the Koch network’s relationship to the Trump administration and covers the right’s push for an Article V constitutional convention, which could occur as soon as 2025.

Meanwhile, MacLean's first book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford University Press, 1994), is scheduled for a 30th anniversary reissue in the coming year.

Sarah Balakrishnan has published a new article, “Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500-1957” in Comparative Studies in Society and History. With sociologist Hussain Lateef, she has published an article in The Journal of Applied Youth Studies on the educational benefits of teaching Afro-positive history to black American youth. In the spring, The Law & History Review conducted a published interview with Sarah about her process of writing fiction and history.

The University of North Carolina-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and UNC Press have tapped John French to translate Palmares & Cucaú: O aprendizado da dominação (Sao Paulo: Edusp, 2023) for its Latin America in Translation series.  The work is a monograph by Brazilian historian Silvia Lara on the 17th century African Kingdom of Palmares, which survived for almost eighty years in northeastern Brazil.

Adam Mestyan has been appointed the next director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC) and Duke University Middle East Studies Center (DUMESC) for a three-year term beginning July 1, 2024.  Adam’s leadership comes at a critical time for these centers, whose work is ever more important in the present circumstances. More details here.

Recently retired, Professor Emeritus Sucheta Mazumdar nevertheless remains busy on a number of fronts. An exhibit she curated (long-delayed due to COVID) finally saw light on Sept. 28, 2023 at the Jameson Gallery on East Campus. Global Engagements: Asian, African American and Asian American Internationalism and Solidarities, 1918-2018, asked the question, "What does the writing of world history look like when these cultures' global and local presence and engagement are placed at the center of the conversation?" The answer was a visually and intellectually stimulating collection that is now being developed into a user- and teacher- friendly website.

It is with deeply mixed emotions that we report Robin Pridgen, our beloved DGSA, officially retired from Duke University as of 11/30/23.  Robin started with Duke in 1984 and joined the Department of History in April of 2006.  Over the last 17 years, she has impeccably supported the graduate program under the successive leaderships of the late John Thompson, Pete Sigal, Phil Stern, Dirk Bonker, and Jehangir Malegam.  She will be missed by faculty, staff, and students alike. Thank you, Robin!!

Ergo, we welcome Matthew Meyer, our new Assistant to the Director of Graduate Studies.  Matthew brings experience as both a DGSA and a DUSA from his previous position in the Department of Classical Studies.  Please make him feel welcome.

Cecilia Marquez is overseeing a new installation at Franklin Gallery in Classroom Building:  “Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz: Latinés en Duke” // “Our History, Our Voice: Latinés at Duke” documents and celebrates the history of Latiné students at Duke University by examining their contributions, the various ways they have been included or excluded from campus life over time, and how the current generation is imagining a different kind of Latiné future at Duke.  Please join us to celebrate the opening of this exhibit on January 25, 2023, in Classroom Building at 5PM.

On a beautiful Saturday in October, the History Department held a Family Picnic for our staff, faculty, graduate students, and their families.  Significantly more fun than this photo may imply, we had a great turnout at Forest Hills Park in Durham, where we played lawn games, enjoyed delicious food from Mediterranean Deli and Alsies ice cream, and took genuine pleasure in the company of our colleagues and their mostly better halves and offspring.

The 2023 John F. Wilson Research Fellowship was awarded to Jessica Borsellino (Duke University) for dissertation research, titled "Medicine for Generations: Health, Healing, and Religion in Kiowa Country, 1867-1934.”  Endowed by Professor Wilson's former students, the fellowship gives priority to graduate student projects reflecting the interests and work of their mentor: the religious and intellectual life in the American colonies, the relationship between church and state, and religion in contemporary America. 

Duke University Libraries featured Jobi Hill as one of four shining examples of Open Scholarship in the Humanities in a panel discussion that took place on October 5, 2023. The accompanying profile of Hill can be found here, as well as a link to her 2019 Ted^x talk, "When Walls Talk: Hidden & Forgotten Stories of Enslaved People."  Hill's online project, Saving Slave Houses, is located here.  

Rosalind Rothwell won a 2023 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship!  Rothwell's work in the UK during 2024 will examine the history of global intoxicants and material culture in British and French South India, circa 1670 to 1757.  It asks how imports from places as far afield as Virginia and Acapulco shaped the sociocultural development of European settlements in India prior to the advent of formal colonial rule on the subcontinent. 

The Southern Conference on British Studies recently awarded Helen Shears the 2023 Charles Perry Graduate Student Prize for her paper, "'A Caske of Ice’: William Taverner’s Survey of Newfoundland, 1714-1715."

From one class to the next:  Recent graduate, Jacqueline Allain (PhD, 2023), wrote a blog post for the Journal of Women's History entitled "Finding Maria's Story."  Aimed largely at grad student researchers, the brief essay reflects on lessons Allain learned while working on her award-winning article (see Alumni News below), “Maria Griffin, et al.: Slavery’s Intimate World."

Congratulations to James Nealy (PhD, '22), whose dissertation “Making Socialism Work: The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry” has won the Robert C. Tucker - Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The dissertation also received the Southern Historical Association’s Parker-Schmitt Award for best dissertation in European History. James is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University.

Through exhaustive archival research and oral documentation, Bryan Pitts' (PhD, 2013) book, Until the Storm Passes: Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship (University of California Press, 2023), reveals how Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship contributed to its own demise by alienating the civilian political elites who initially helped bring it to power.  The book is available open access here. Podcast interview with the author here; Print interview here.

At the 2023 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities, Jacqueline Allain's (PhD, 2023) “Maria Griffin, et al.: Slavery’s Intimate World” (JWH 34, no. 4 (Winter 2022)) was awarded the 2021-2022 Best Article Prize.  The prize, judged by the Editorial Board of the Journal of Women’s History, recognizes the best articles published in the past three years.  "Allain’s article is a beautifully written and deft analysis of the complexity of “intimacy” through the efforts of one enslaved woman named Maria Griffin to protect and secure her family...," they wrote.

The Winter 2024 issue of our semi-annual undergraduate journal, Historia Nova - featuring exceptional historical analysis from students at Duke, as well as accepted submissions from outside institutions- will be available in January.  You'll find it here.