Department News, April 2015

April 21, 2015

Ashley Ellington, who earned her MA in the Department, plans to attend Kellogg College, Oxford University next year.

On Wednesday, April 15th the students in Anna Alexander’s Global Environmental History course presented their senior seminar papers in a poster session. This public presentation was part of the Center for Sustainability’s “No Impact Week.

History Major Dylan Mulligan successfully presented his work at the 2015 Undergraduate Honors Research Symposium. His paper was entitled, “The Original Progressive Farmer: The Agricultural Legacy of Thomas Spalding of Sapelo.” His Honors mentor was Jonathan Bryant.

The Georgia Association of Historians annual meeting was held on the Georgia Southern Campus on February 19-21, 2015.  The meeting was very successful, with more than 120 registered participants.  The opening night reception was held at the new Statesboro Convention and Visitors Bureau.  There, Brent Tharp, Director of the Georgia Southern Museum and adjunct professor of History, addressed the audience about the creation of the “Museum on Main.” Housed in the new SCVB building, it as a joint venture among the History Department, The Georgia Southern University Museum, and the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau.

Jonathan M. Bryant became the President-elect of the Georgia Association of Historians at the annual meeting. Bryant’s Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope a Pre-Publication pick by the Library Journal.

http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2015/02/prepub/picks/fredrik-backman-c-j-box-shirley-jackson-the-voyage-of-the-slave-ship-antelope-jul-2015-pt-4/   Bryant also spoke to the Savannah City Employees on April 15, 2015.  His topic was “Savannah and the Illegal Slave Trade.”

The Department of History hosted a student conference on “The Great War that Changed the World, 1914-1918” on Thursday, April 2, 2015. The event was part of Georgia Southern University’s ongoing commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the First World War. The conference featured three research panels and a poster session composed of graduate and undergraduate students from the Georgia Southern University’s Departments of History and Foreign Languages, as well as students from Armstrong State University. The event also included a keynote address from Dr. Charles Thomas, Professor of History Emeritus, which was attended by over 150 students and faculty. Dr. Thomas lectured on the introduction of poison gas to World War I, the Brusilov Offensive, and German use of unrestricted submarine warfare, in his talk “Blowback: Calculation, Miscalculation, and Unintended Consequences in the First World War.”  Sheila Boone, a History MA student who coordinated the exhibit, was featured in a front page article in the Statesboro Herald. http://www.statesboroherald.com/section/1/article/67185/

Kathleen M. Comerford, organized five sessions at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Berlin (March 25-28, 2015) and presented the paper “Jesuit Colleges in the Early Seventeenth Century” at a sixth session.  She is now the Associate Editor of the Journal of Jesuit Studies, published by Brill (Leiden, The Netherlands) and based at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College.

Emerson McMullen gave a paper at the Annual Meeting of the Georgia Academy of Science on 14 March 2015, and chaired the History and Philosophy of Science Section.

Anna Alexander was invited to give a public lecture at the University of Kansas for its “Latin America and its Diaspora Series.” The talk was delivered on April 28th and entitled, “Healing the Hazardous City: Hygiene Experts and the Fight Against Fire in Mexico City, 1860-1910.” Alexander also presented a paper entitled, “Healing in the Bark: Biocolonialism, Indigenous Knowledge, and Social Protest in Mexico, 1980-present,” at the American Society for Environmental History in Washington D.C., March 18-22.

Brian K. Feltman published The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond with the University of North Carolina Press. He gave a public lecture titled “Confronting the Stigma of Surrender: Soldierly Virtue, Manhood, and German Prisoners of War during the Great War” at The University of Alaska at Anchorage on March 26. The following day, he delivered a key note lecture titled “Assembling the Fragments: Discovering the German Soldiers of the Great War through Archival Sources” to the Phi Alpha Theta Alaska State Conference in Anchorage. Feltman also presented “We too Should Lay Down our Lives for our Brothers: The Material Culture of Memory in WWI Germany” at the meeting of the Society for Military History in Montgomery, Alabama on April 12, 2015

Christian Abreu published Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino/a New York City and Miami, 1940-1960 with the University of North Carolina Press.

Bill Allison discussant for a 3-paper panel on “Preparation, Adaptation, and Instruction in the US Army” and participated on a 4-person round-table on “De-Mystifying the Hiring Process: The View from the other Side of the Table” for graduate students at the meeting of the Society for Military History in Montgomery, Alabama on April 12, 2015.

Jeff Burson presented papers at the French Historical Studies Annual Meeting in Colorado Springs (17 April 2015), the Renaissance Studies Association in Berlin (26 March 2015), the South Central Conference of Eighteenth-Century Studies in Point Clear, Alabama, and the Georgia Association of Historians in Statesboro (21 February 2015).

Michael VanWagenen participated on a three-person panel at the National Council on Public History Annual Conference in Nashville which discussed the merits of the 2014 Visual History Summer Institute held at Georgia Southern.

Johnathan O’Neill gave an invited presentation on “Constitutionalism and American Conservatism in the Twentieth Century” at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, UK, in March.