Faculty News Bits

Submitted by Nick Grall on

History faculty continue to excel in their respective fields of study. We are proud of the accomplishments of each of our faculty and hope you'll join us in celebrating the following achievements:

Professor Emeritus Frank Conlon was presented with the Distinguished Service Award by the South Asian Studies Association of Australia.

Hannah Frydman (Assistant Professor of French Studies, Adjunct Assistant Professor of History)  was recently awarded the Bailey Prize for best journal article in the last three years from the New York State Association of European Historians for her article “Freedom’s Sex Problem. Classified Advertising, Law, and the Politics of Reading in Third Republic France” (French Historical Studies 44. no 4 (2021): 675-709.)

Susan Glenn’s article “`Suppose the Mother Were Jewish’: Leo Pfeffer, the American Jewish Congress, and the Problem of Religious Protection Law,” was published in American Jewish History. The article focuses on Constitutional law expert Leo Pfeffer, the twentieth-century’s most prominent defender of a high “wall of separation” between church and state. Pfeffer is largely remembered for challenging the constitutionality of religion in the public schools, state aid to parochial schools, tax exemptions for religious institutions, and discriminatory Sunday closing laws. Glenn’s article  focuses on an arena of his church-state jurisprudence that has largely been ignored by historians and legal scholars: his daring and controversial forays into the religious minefield of child adoption and custody and his First Amendment challenges to laws and judicial practices that made it difficult, if not impossible, for couples to adopt children born to mothers whose religion differed from theirs. 

Mark Metzler published an ecological-economic study entitled “Japan: The Arc of Industrialization” in Laura Hein, ed., The New Cambridge History of Japan, Volume III (2023). He also has two book chapters that will appear shortly: “The 1970s Macrocycle: Eurodollars, Petrodollars, Credit Booms, and Debt Busts, 1973–1982” in Shigeru Akita, ed., The Oil Crises and the Transformation of the International Economic Order in the 1970s, and “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Birth of the Business Cycle” in Robert Ingram and James Vaughn, eds., Capitalism: Histories.

Scott Noegel (Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, Adjunct Professor of History) recently had a book chapter published: “Hidden Waters: The Sounds of Sinking in the Song of the Sea” in Vincent Beiler and Aaron Rubin, eds., Linguistic and Philological Studies of the Hebrew Bible and its Manuscripts in Honor of Gary A. Rendsburg (Studia Semitica Neerlandica; Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 228-238. He also had an article published last year, “Near Eastern Poetics in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 1113 (2022), in press, co-authored with James J. Clauss.

Vincent Rafael recently published Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: The Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023) with co-editor with Phrae Chittiphalangsri; “Indigeneity and the Debts of Settler Translators,” forthcoming, Translation Studies (2023); and “The Long 1970s and Beyond: Cultural Politics during the Marcos
Years and in the Age of Duterte,” in Edilberto de Jesus and Ivyrose Baysic, eds., Martial Law in the Philippines: Lessons and Legacies, 1972-2022 (Ateneo de Manila Univ. Press, 2023).

Benjamin Schmidt published three articles related to his research on early modern ’things’ and material globalism: "From Hot Reverence to Cold Sweat: Christian Art and Ambivalence in Early Modern Japan,” appeared in Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period; "Material Geography: Meißen and Early Modern Europe's Production of China” in Dinge unterwegs: Objects in Early Modern Cultural Transfer; and "La pesanteur des icônes: Les objets d’apostasie au Japon et leurs itinéraires à l’époque moderne," in Objets Nomades: Circulations matérielles, appropriations et formation des identités à l’ère de la première mondialisation, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles.

Emerita Professor Robin Chapman Stacey presented the James Lydon Lectures in Medieval History and Culture for 2023 at Trinity College, Dublin on November 13-16, 2023. Her topic was "Putting Ireland at the Centre: Rethinking the "Social Imaginary of the Early Medieval West," which will appear later as a book published by Cambridge University Press. Otherwise, she is enjoying the benefits of retirement, such as late(r) mornings and traveling for fun as opposed to work.

Charity Urbanski recently published an article "How to Make a Monster," medievalists.net, October 2023.
 

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