Winter message from Professor Glennys Young, Department of History Chair:
Dear History Department Community,
It’s been a busy and productive quarter in Smith Hall. Our undergraduate courses have been in high demand, and we’ve welcomed a new cohort of talented graduate students. In this issue, you can also read about the accomplishments of one of our current graduate students, Jessica Bachman, as well as about the career of an alumnus of our graduate program, Ali Iğmen, who is now professor of history at California State University, Long Beach.
Fall quarter has also been filled with events, and we look forward to kicking off the new year with even more. As you’ll read in this newsletter, Harvard historian Phil Deloria, a distinguished historian of the Native American experience, visited the department for a seminar and gave a talk. We launched books by Arbella Bet-Shlimon (City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk) and Margaret O’Mara (The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America). Thanks to the efforts of Joel Walker and Hamza Zafer, a faculty member in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, the Horn of Africa Initiative has offered the university and broader Seattle community several talks and events. On January 22, the annual History Lecture Series, whose theme this year is “Life, Death, and the Gods,” will launch with a lecture by Adam Warren (Aztecs), followed by talks on subsequent Wednesdays by Mira Green (ancient Rome), Patricia Ebrey (early China), and Joel Walker (ancient Iran). We look forward to seeing you there, and at other departmental events in winter quarter, 2020!
On behalf of the History Department, I would like to wish you a joyous holiday season, and send my best wishes for the New Year. I look forward to updating you in 2020 about the accomplishments of our undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, and to chatting with you at one of the many events we will host in the New Year.
Glennys Young
Chair
Faculty News
- George Behlmer won the 2019 Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. This prize is awarded for the best book by a North American scholar “on any aspect of British studies since 1800.”
- Patricia Ebrey won the 2020 Association for Asian Studies Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies.
- James Felak was appointed the Newman Center Term Professor in Catholic Christianity for a five-year term.
- Robin Stacey received the Vernam Hull Memorial Prize 2018 from the Center for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at the University of Wales for the volume Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). This prize is given "for completed work dealing with Welsh Prose before 1700."
- Daniel Waugh, Professor Emeritus, was on the advisory board and contributed two lead essays and some photographs for Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes, ed. Susan Whitfield, foreword by Peter Sellars (Thames and Hudson, 2019). Waugh also contributed the lead essay for a three-volume collection Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, ed. Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena (Ledizioni, 2019-2020).
Graduate Student News
- Jessica Bachman won a 2019-2020 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Award. The Textual Studies Program also awarded her the Raimonda Modiano Graduate Student Research Award.
- Alika Bourgette won the Frank Jenkins Jr. Fellowship in Labor Studies from the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies.
- Madison Heslop received a Short Term Fellowship from the Newberry Library for a residency this spring.
- Roneva Keel won the Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Fellowship for 2019-2020.
- Hongxuan Lin received a scholarship from the National University of Singapore (NUS) to fund a one-year visiting postdoctoral fellowship at LSE's Southeast Asia Center. The postdoc will commence May 2020.
- Brendan McElmeel won a 2019-2020 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Award to support his doctoral research in Russia.
Undergraduate News
All four best paper awards for labor history and labor studies went to History majors at the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies awards banquet November 10. Cameron Molyneux (“Industrial Suicide: 1923 and the Split of the Industrial Workers of the World”) and Zuzanna Wisniewska (“Women’s Union Label League and Women’s Unions: Bridging Together the Feminist and Labor Movements in the Years Prior and During the Seattle General Strike of 1919”) won the labor history paper prizes. The labor studies paper prizes went to Katherine Cavanaugh (“The Immigrants’ Rights Movement of Spring 2006 in Washington State”) and Kathryn Karcher (“Pursuing Social Justice: How Might a Universal Basic Income or Federal Jobs Guarantee Help Women?”).
Alumni News
- Ali Iğmen (PhD 2004) received the International Public Service Award from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
- Patrick Lozar (PhD 2019) joined the faculty at the University of Victoria in a tenure-track position.