Publication Date

September 1, 2004

Perspectives Section

News

Editor's Note: The purpose of this column, which is published in Perspectives as space permits, is to recognize and honor the accomplishments of AHA members. Submissions are welcome; entries will be published in alphabetical order. To submit an entry, write to David Darlington, Associate Editor, AHA, 400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003-3889.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU) has won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Harvey J. Graff (Univ. of Texas at San Antonio) is joining Ohio State University in fall 2004 as eminent scholar in literacy studies and professor of English and history.

Allen C. Guelzo was appointed the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and professor of history at Gettysburg College. Guelzo will coordinate the college’s Civil War Era Studies Program; direct “The Gettysburg Semester,” which brings students from across the country to Gettysburg College for a semester of intensive interdisciplinary study of the Civil War era; and serve as associate director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.

Jay Hatheway (Edgewood Coll.) was the 2004 recipient of the James R. Underkofler Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in recognition of his “outstanding contributions to undergraduate education and encouragement of student achievement and growth.” The award is sponsored by the Alliant Energy Foundation in cooperation with the Wisconsin Foundation for Independent Colleges, Inc. In late 2003, Hatheway’s book, Gilded Age Construction of American Homophobia, was published by Macmillan/Palgrave, and in 2002, his memoir, Guilty as Charged: The True Story of a Gay Beret, was the winner of the Digital Literature Institute’s Independent e-Book Award in the category of autobiography. In July 2002, Hatheway was also the recipient of the University of Wisconsin at Madison Distinguished Alumnus Award for his more than 25 years of work in support of GLBT communities at the local, regional, and national level.

Melvin G. Holli (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago) is the co-author of a new book, Images of America: World War II Chicago and an article in the International Skiing History Association publication on how America formed the 10th Mountain Division in World War II, and gave a lecture on May 7, 2004, on “Celtic Politics in America’s Big Cities” at the University of Helsinki, Finland’s “Celtic Connection to North America” conference.

Charles King (Georgetown Univ.) has recently been elected chair of the faculty of the School of Foreign Service. His new book, The Black Sea: A History, was published in early 2004 by Oxford University Press.

W. Barksdale Maynard (Johns Hopkins Univ. and Univ. of Delaware) published Walden Pond: A History (Oxford Univ. Press).

K.P.L.G. (Carool) Kersten (Payap Univ., Chiang Mai, Thailand) has published Strange Events in the Kingdoms of Cambodia and Laos (1635–44) (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2003), an annotated translation of a 17th-century Dutch book on Dutch East India Company activities in mainland Southeast Asia.

M. C. Mirow (Florida International Univ.) published Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Univ. of Texas Press).

Emil J. Polak (Queensborough Community Coll., CUNY) published A Medievalist's Odyssey: Helene Wieruszowski, Scholar, Uomini e Dottrine, 41. (Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004) viii, 43pp.

Londa Schiebinger has been appointed professor of history of science and the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. She has three books coming out this autumn. The first,Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard Univ. Press), includes the story of the exotic abortifacients used in the 18th century in Europe’s West Indian colonies by Arawaks, Tainos, and African slaves to abort their offspring so that they would not become slaves. This work recounts the history of the movement, mixing, triumph, and extinction of different knowledges in the course of encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Caribbean. Research for this book work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Max-Planck Geschellschaft, the National Institutes of Health, and the Humboldt Foundation. Also scheduled to appear this autumn is Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics, co-edited with art historian Claudia Swan (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press) and a reissue of her prize-winning Nature' Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Rutgers Univ. Press).

John David Smith (North Carolina State Univ.) has been appointed the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

The Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America (PIASA), jointly with the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, D.C., created an award to honor the memory of the first ambassador of the Third Republic of Poland to the United States, Kazimierz Dziewanowski. It was also designed to recognize American graduate students who write doctoral dissertations on Polish topics that are judged the best in any given year. The 2004 Ambassador Kazimierz Dziewanowski Dissertation Award was presented at PIASA's 62nd annual meeting to Patrick G. Vaughan (West Virginia Univ.) for his doctoral dissertation “Zbigniew Brzezinski: The Political and Academic Career of a Cold War Visionary,” accepted by the Department of History at West Virginia University in 2003. His advisor was Robert E. Blobaum.

The trustees of the American Academy in Rome announced the winners of the 108th Rome Prize Competition in April 2004. Each Rome Prize is a residential fellowship lasting from six months to two years. American artists and scholars compete from all over the United States for this prestigious award which provides room and board, a stipend, and studio, to live and work at the academy facilities in Rome. The following winners of the 2004–05 Rome Prize are AHA members:

David Foote (Mississippi State Univ.) and A. Katie Harris (Georgia State Univ.).

The following AHA members received prizes at the Business History Conference (BHC), held in Le Creusot, France, on June 17–19, 2004:

Mira Wilkins (Florida International Univ.), Lifetime Achievement Award; Steven Usselman (Georgia Institute of Tech.), Harold Williamson Prize for achievement by a mid-career scholar; Jennifer Klein (Yale Univ.), Hagley Prize for best book in business history for For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton Univ. Press, 2003); Tiffany Gill (Univ. of Texas at Austin), Herman E. Krooss Prize for best dissertation in business history for “Civic Beauty: Beauty Culturists and the Politics of African American Female Entrepreneurship, 1900–65” (Rutgers Univ., 2003); andHyungsub Choi (Johns Hopkins Univ.) and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor (San Jose State Univ.), both receiving the K. Austin Kerr Prize for the best first paper presented to a BHC meeting. Choi received the award for the article “Between Research and Production: Making Transistors at RCA, 1948–60” and Hartigan-O’Connor won for “The Ties that Buy: Shopping Networks of the Atlantic World.”

The National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, provides grants to the fellows to enable them to take leave from their normal academic responsibilities in order to pursue research at the center. The following AHA members are fellows for 2004–05:

Roger Chickering (Georgetown Univ.), Julia Ann Clancy-Smith (Univ. of Arizona),Lynda Leigh Coon (Univ. of Arkansas), Deborah E. Harkness (Univ. of California at Davis), Margaret Ellen Humphreys (Duke Univ.), Alexander Keyssar (Harvard Univ.), Lisa Ann Lindsay (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), andPeter H. Sigal (California State Univ. at Los Angeles). Margaret Ellen Humphreys was also named a Burkhardt Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

The North Caroliniana Society granted Archie K. Davis Fellowships to the following AHA members for 2004–05:

Stephen D. Feeley (Coll. of William and Mary), Dixie Ray Haggard (Univ. of Kansas), and John Thomas McGuire (SUNY, Oneonta). Designed to encourage research in North Carolina history and culture, the Archie K. Davis Fellowships cover a portion of travel and subsistence expenses for fellows researching documentary sources of North Carolina’s history and culture.

The following AHA members are Scholars in Residence at the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission for 2004–05:

Judith Giesberg (Villanova Univ. ) and M. Alison Kibler (Franklin & Marshall Coll.). The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission’s Scholars in Residence Program is a competitive fellowship that provides short-term support for full-time research in commission research collections on topics broadly related to Pennsylvania history.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission.