Teresa Foster ’09, gender and women’s studies and history, ’11 M.A. historical studies, and a LLC Ph.D. candidate, is the winner of the 2013-2014 Wing Graduate Fellowship in Colonial Chesapeake History from the Maryland Historical Society. The purpose of the Wing Fellowship is to assist a graduate student in undertaking a significant project in Chesapeake colonial history.
Constantine Vaporis, professor of history and director of the Asian studies program, has been invited to attend “India’s Past and the Making of the Present,” a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute for college and university faculty sponsored by the Community College Humanities Association. This four-week institute, which will take place in Delhi, Agra, and Varanasi this July, is designed to be an intense, interdisciplinary engagement with Indian history and culture, providing participants with a rich interplay of resources, seminars, and site visits. It will introduce participants to the most current scholarly perspectives on India, broadening and deepening their… Continue Reading Constantine Vaporis, Asian Studies, Invited to Summer Institute
“Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters” by Kate Brown, associates professor of history, was recently reviewed by Nature. “A multitude of…harrowing accounts fills the pages of Plutopia, a ‘hidden history’ of two communities — one American, one Soviet — that fuelled the nuclear arms race. Unusually, historian Kate Brown interviewed dozens of frontline workers for her meticulously researched account of how these two remote towns became indelibly linked by plutonium, and by catastrophic radioactive contamination,” the reviewer writes. “Plutopia has important messages for those managing today’s nuclear facilities, arguing for caution and transparency,”… Continue Reading “Plutopia” by Kate Brown, History, Reviewed in Nature
Amy Froide, associate professor of history, has been elected President of the Middle Atlantic Conference on British Studies (MACBS). The MACBS is the Mid-Atlantic regional affiliate of the North American Conference on British Studies, which is a scholarly society dedicated to all aspects of the study of British civilization. The NACBS sponsors a scholarly journal, the Journal of British Studies, online publications, an annual conference, as well as several academic prizes, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate essay contests. The MACBS annual conference will be held at Lehman College of the City University of New York on March 23-24, 2013.
James Grubb, professor of history, is the recipient of a 2013 USM Regents’ Faculty Award for Teaching. Regents’ Faculty Awards publicly recognize distinguished performance on the part of faculty members. This award is the highest honor presented by the Board of Regents to exemplary faculty members. The awardees are selected by the Council of University System Faculty and submitted to the Board of Regents for approval. Teaching awards are given to faculty who have have demonstrated accomplishments in areas such as course development and pedagogy, faculty development, mentorship of faculty, direction of student research projects, and leadership in teaching improvement.… Continue Reading James Grubb, History, Receives USM Regents’ Faculty Award for Teaching
Denise Meringolo, associate professor of history, has won this year’s National Council on Public History Book Award for her book Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History. The National Council on Public History is an organization dedicated to making the past useful in the present and to encouraging collaboration between historians and their public. In Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, Meringolo traces the roots of the public history field, showing that the roots of public history reach back to the nineteenth century, when the federal government entered into the work of collecting and preserving the… Continue Reading Denise Meringolo, History, Wins NCPH Book Award
The online journal Aeon has published an excerpt from associate professor of history Kate Brown’s forthcoming book Plutopia, which is due out in 2013. “For the past seven years, I have spent a great deal of time in the radiated traces of the world’s first plutonium plants — the Hanford factory in eastern Washington State and the Mayak plant in the southern Russian Urals. As countries from the Middle East to the Baltics gear up for a new generation of nuclear power reactors, it is worth taking another look at how scientists laid claim to the ‘truth’ to dismiss the… Continue Reading Kate Brown, History, in Aeon
Anne Rubin, associate professor of history, has been named the president of the Society of Civil War Historians. Rubin is the author of A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 The Society of Civil War Historians (SCWH) is an association of scholars dedicated to exploring slavery, the sectional crisis, Civil War, emancipation, and reconstruction roughly from the 1830s through 1880. SCWH’s goal is to bring greater coherence to the historical field by encouraging the integration of social, military, political, and other forms of history and generally to promote the study of the Civil War era. In… Continue Reading Anne Rubin, History, Named President of the Society of Civil War Historians
An op-ed by George Derek Musgrove, assistant professor of history, recently appeared on The Root DC blog on the Washington Post website. In the piece, Musgrove and co-author Chris Myers Asch discuss why current discussions of gentrification in the Washington D.C. region can be so heated. “Simply put, people do not want to be gone or forgotten,” they write. “Displacement and struggles over who “owns” the city have a long history in Washington. Ours is a city both Southern and transient, where the constant churn of newcomers has amplified the importance of place and rootedness.” The authors conclude that “We… Continue Reading George Derek Musgrove, History, on The Root
History professor George Derek Musgrove spoke The Greene County Democrat for aSeptember 26th story entitled “Newswire: Cong. Maxine Waters cleared of House ethics charges.” The story concerned Congresswoman Maxine L. Waters (D-Calif.) and her recent acquittal on violating ethics codes in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Waters ws investigated by the House Ethics Committee for advocating for inclusion of minority-owned banks in the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) while her husband Sidney Williams was still invested in one such bank, OneUnited Bank. Musgrove, a ’97 alumnus of UMBC, recently published the book Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials… Continue Reading George Derek Musgrove, History, in Greene County Democrat
Amy Froide, Associate Professor of History and Director of UMBC’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Minor, was invited to give two talks on her current book project, “The Silent Partners of Britain’s Financial Revolution: Women as Investors in Public Stocks, c. 1690-1750,” over the summer. She presented her research to the History Department at Princeton University in May and the European Women’s History Seminar at the University of London in June.
On July 13, George Derek Musgrove ’97, history, and new addition to UMBC’s history faculty, was a guest on “Tell Me More,” where he spoke with guest host Maria Hinojosa about the history of government investigations into African-American politicians. Musgrove is the author of Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics, and spoke of his investigations into the increasing numbers of legal investigations of black elected officials from the 1960s and 1970s onward, or what he calls “harassment ideology.” “When I sat down to a study of post-Civil Rights Era black politics when I first entered graduate school, I was interested in figuring out what happened when… Continue Reading George Derek Musgrove, History, on NPR
