Department News, June 2015

July 24, 2015

Erica Carter, an MA graduate with a Certificate in Public History, is now employed as Program Assistant at the Georgia Historical Society.

Garrett Litton, also an MA graduate with a Certificate in Public History, is an Interpreter at the Telfair Museums in Savannah.

Dr. Michael Van Wagenen has been appointed Chair of the Georgia Historical Marker Committee.

Dr. Mao Lin presented “Sino-American Rapprochement Reconsidered: Economic Diplomacy, Soft Power, and U.S.-China Relations in the 1970s” at the 2015 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Meeting at Washington DC in June.

Melissa Gayan presented “The Periphery Strikes Back: Georgia in the Wake of the Secret Speech” at the 24th Annual World History Association in Savannah, GA at the end of June.  Her paper examined the causes of the 1956 riots in Soviet Georgia as well as the politics surrounding the lack of official memory of the event.

Dr. Jonathan M. Bryant’s Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope (WW Norton) came out in July.  On July 15, 2015, Dr. Bryant was a guest on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show discussing the book.
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2015-07-15/jonathan-m-bryant-dark-places-of-the-earth-the-voyage-of-the-slave-ship-antelope

On Sunday, July 19, the book was reviewed very positively in the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Tribune.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/07/18/dark-places-earth-the-voyage-slave-ship-antelope-jonathan-bryant/F8WnpwJRce2dMGIN9Xtr1M/story.html
http://www.phillytrib.com/lifestyle/the-antelope—-an-untold-story-of-the/article_685ac4b1-5b77-5393-b60b-d3130928be65.html

A Selection from Dark Places appeared in the online Journal Salon.
http://www.salon.com/topic/dark_places_of_the_earth/

Bryant was also elected to a three year term on the Board of the Owens-Thomas House, part of the Telfair Museums in Savannah. On August 5, 2015, Dr. Bryant will do a book presentation and signing at the Ships of the Sea Museum in Savannah.

Dr. Jeff Burson has recently published an article entitled “Unlikely Tales of Fo and Ignatius: Rethinking the Radical Enlightenment through French Appropriation of Chinese Buddhism” in French Historical Studies 38.3 (July 2015). In June, Dr. Burson was invited to give a talk on “The Distinctive Contours of the Jesuit Scholarship in the Eighteenth-Century” at the First International Congress of Jesuit Studies convened at Boston College (10-14 June 2015).  On July 1, he served as commenter on a panel entitled, “From Revolution to Nation: A Changing World” at the World History Association annual meeting in Savannah.