We would like to offer our heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Stephen Leccese. He successfully passed his dissertation today: “The Discovery of the Consumer: Economic Regulation and Social Policy, 1865-1905.” Please congratulate him when you see him!
You can follow him on Twitter @srleccese
Filed under Doctoral Defenses, Grad Student News, Uncategorized
We are pleased to announce that graduate student Tobias Hrynick, who received a Distinguished Research Fellowship for his research on medieval environmental history.
Bravo and congrats to graduate student Nicholas DeAntonis, who received an Alumni Dissertation Fellowship for his research on human rights and U.S. diplomatic history! His dissertation is entitled, “The Struggle to End the Suadi Arabian Slave Trade: The United States, the United Nations and Transnational Non-Governmental Organization, 1953-1963.”
Many congratulations to graduate student Rachel Podd, who received an Alumni Dissertation Fellowship for her research on health and disease in medieval England! Her dissertation is entitled, “Health in Late Medieval England: The Impact of Age, Sex, and Income on the Lived Experience.”
You can follow Tobias Hrynick on Twitter @elmermalmesbury
You can follow Nicholas DeAntonis on Twitter @NDeAntonis
Filed under Fellowships, Grad Student News
On Monday, February 10, 2020, Fordham’s History Department hosted its annual History Day celebration. The event brought together some fascinating research from Fordham undergraduate and graduate students and Fordham faculty. The day’s keynote speaker was Prof. Amanda Armstrong. Below is just a snippet of the fascinating work and images we heard from our participants. You will hear from Brian Chen, Hannah Gonzalez, Grace Campagna, Emma Budd, Christian Decker, and Kelli Finn.
Brian Chen discussed Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy during the South Asia Crisis of 1971. He argued that given the geopolitical constraints of the Cold War and the limits of U.S. influence in the region, his response to the genocide in East Pakistan was not unreasonable. Kissinger’s policy of “quiet diplomacy” improved the prospects of peace between the United States and the Communist world, while also providing necessary humanitarian relief to the Bengali people. 
Hannah Gonzalez’s paper, “Natives, Naturalists, and Negotiated Access: William Bartram’s Navigation of the Eighteenth-Century Southeast,” examined how the naturalist William Bartram negotiated access to native territories and knowledge while constrained by colonial politics and a climate of cross-cultural hostilities. This navigation of the Southeast involved the utilization of imperial and colonial structures, from treaties to white traders. As recorded in Travels, Bartram’s journey demonstrates how naturalists negotiated the cultural landscape on levels beyond the scientific.
You can follow her on Twitter @hannahegonzalez. 
Grace Campagna’s presentation, “The Quern: The Biography of a Medieval Object,” traced the lifecycle of an artifact, including its production, operation, and repurposing, using both historical and archaeological methods. The quernstones that archaeologists discovered in the Thames river came from a quarry in Germany in order to undergo the final stages of manufacturing in a London workshop. The presentation examined how communities assign value to everyday items and addressed the challenges of analyzing objects for which there are few primary sources. You can access the full link to her article here: https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/exhibits/show/medieval-london-objects-3/quern
Emma Budd’s presentation analyzed intersecting power dynamics in colonization, humanitarian intervention, and sexual assault. Through the lens of the Algerian War of Independence, she argued that the three aforementioned phenomena are intrinsically connected by their roots in a desire for power without concern for humanity.
Christian Decker’s presentation talked about Polish immigrant networking from 1900 to 1945. It included discussion of family and labor networks, religious networks, all the way up to the formation of the Polish American Congress.
You can follow Christian Decker on Twitter @PCGamingFanatic 
Kelli Finn’s presentation, “We survive. We’re Irish:” An Examination of Irish Immigration to the United States, 1840 -1890,” examined how the systemic poverty that Irish immigrants faced from the 1840s-1880s shaped their immigrant experience. It argued that the extreme poverty that the Irish faced lead to harsh stigmatism of Irish immigrants even in the workforce which in turn lead to poor living conditions for the Irish when they got to America and the highest mortality rates among immigrant groups at the time.
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Filed under Conferences, Department Events, Events, Faculty Profiles, Grad Student News, Undergrad News, Undergraduate Research
Ph.D. Candidate Nicholas J. DeAntonis just published an article, “The Transnational Fight to End the Saudi Arabian Slave Trade: The British Anti‐Slavery Society, the African American Press, and the American Jewish Congress, 1953‐1960” in Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research.
Below is the article abstract:
This article examines the transnational efforts of the British Anti‐Slavery Society to end the Saudi Arabian slave trade, highlighting the liveliness of human rights activism throughout the 1950s. The Society’s abolitionist efforts both succeeded and failed at the UN’s Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery in 1956. The Society failed to pass effective enforcement to end the slave trade, due to the growing concern for sovereignty amid decolonization throughout the Global South. Ironically, as decolonization spread, the Society’s abolitionist efforts were hampered. The Society’s own government avoided assisting them, fearing the imperialist perception of such actions. Nonetheless, the Supplementary Convention internationalized the cause and produced essential allies across the Atlantic: the African American press and American Jewish Congress. In the ensuing years, these journalists and activists denounced the burgeoning US–Saudi alliance and assured the continuity of the abolitionist message in the United States and globally. Although it is beyond the scope of this article, significant evidence exists that this new critical coalition helped shape human rights policy in the Kennedy administration.
Here is the link to the article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pech.12395
Peace & Change publishes scholarly and interpretive articles on the achievement of a peaceful, just, and humane society. International and interdisciplinary in focus, the journal bridges the gap between peace researchers, educators, and activists. It publishes articles on a wide range of peace-related topics, including peace movements and activism, conflict resolution, nonviolence, internationalism, race and gender issues, cross-cultural studies, economic development, the legacy of imperialism, and the post-Cold War upheaval.
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Filed under Global History, Grad Student News, Publications
Louisa Foroughi, a 2020 Ph.D. candidate, will be starting a tenure track job in Medieval and Early Modern History in the history department at Lafayette College (Eaton, PA) beginning in the 2020-21 academic year.
Working under Professor Maryanne Kowaleski, Louisa Foroughi specializes in the social and cultural history of late medieval England. Her dissertation, “What Makes a Yeoman? Status, Religion, and Material Culture in Later Medieval England,” explores identity construction among the English peasantry, c. 1348-1538. The yeomen were a group of affluent farmers who appear throughout English records from the early fifteenth century onward, but who have previously attracted little attention from medievalists. As Foroughi argues, the documentary records and manuscripts yeomen left behind provide rare insight into how medieval English peasants crafted and expressed their sense of self. Her analysis focuses on material culture, religion, office holding, and literacy as key aspects of yeoman identity, and integrates methods drawn from anthropology, archaeology, literary criticism, and religious studies in order to access the activities and mentalité of this little-studied group.
Foroughi is also eager to share her wide-ranging interests in gender studies; material culture theory; food history; medieval medicine; fiber arts; and household books and miscellanies with the students at Lafayette College. She can’t wait to join the faculty in August.
Congratulations, Louisa!
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Filed under Grad Student News
Louisa Foroughi, a Ph.D. candidate in medieval history, was awarded the 2019 Dissertation Fellowship by the National Conference of British Studies (NACBS), a competition open to all those doing dissertation research in the British Isles on any topic of British (including Scottish, Irish and Imperial) history or British Studies. Fordham University). The citation at the annual meeting of the NACBS in November 2019 in Vancouver reads as follows.
Foroughi’s dissertation, “What Makes a Yeoman? Status, Religion, and Material Culture in Later Medieval England,” examines the English yeomanry from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. Yeoman, she explains, occupied a middling rank in late-medieval England, above the peasantry but beneath the gentry, and its numbers and significance rose throughout the fifteenth century. Through the examination of court records, wills and testaments, and case studies, Foroughi reveals the role of both material culture and religious belief in the making of this social group previously more familiar to early modernists.
Most importantly, Foroughi has developed a series of questions – and ways to go about answering them – that recover the role of women and gender in the yeomanry’s making – something that was not high on the list of historians’ priorities in 1942, the last time the yeomanry figured as the subject of a comparable monograph. Yet the yeomanry’s position, Foroughi shows, was only made possible through the dowries brought by wives and daughters, the values transmitted from mothers to children, and the maintenance of households that partly depended upon women’s labor. To recover these aspects of late medieval and early modern social history, Foroughi’s dissertation ingeniously draws upon literary studies, religious studies, and anthropology, in order to make visible the role of women and of gender in the making of the English yeoman class.
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Filed under Grad Student News, Student Awards
On November, 5th, 2019, History’s Technology and Pedagogy (TAP) hosted a workshop facilitated by Lisa Betty (Teaching Fellow, History). The session, entitled Creating an Antiracist, Inclusive, and Transformative Classroom Environment, demonstrated how to actively incorporate antiracist pedagogy in the classroom through language-use and writing. With inspiration from bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy and Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, graduate students discussed strategies for decolonizing language and writing in the classroom through the use of collaborative group work sessions and compulsory critical thinking. Lisa, Amanda, Patrick, and Toby would like this session to be the first of a larger workshop that aims to support GSAS Teaching Fellows in creating and implementing similar antiracist pedagogical strategies within the classroom and their teaching practice.
The History Department sponsored graduate group Technology and Pedagogy (TAP) meets weekly on Thursdays to discuss ways to incorporate technology in the classroom. Please contact Patrick, Toby, or Amanda for more information.
The History Department sponsored graduate group Technology and Pedagogy (TAP) meets weekly on Thursdays to discuss ways to incorporate technology in the classroom. Please contact Patrick, Toby, or Amanda for more information.
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Filed under Digital Resources, Grad Student News, Teaching, Workshop
The Fordham History Department, through its O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism, is accepting abstracts for its Graduate Student Workshop. The workshop will take place on Friday, April 3, 2020 at the Rose Hill Campus. The purpose of this workshop is to provide a space for graduate students to present, read, and receive valuable feedback from other graduate students and Fordham faculty on projects they are planning on publishing.
Our goal is to foster conversations across a wide variety of topics. Concepts such as power, politics, and society can be interpreted broadly across time periods and geographies. Submissions can include topics on race, gender, class, political and social structures as well as economic, cultural, and religious institutions from antiquity to the modern era. We especially welcome papers exploring the following questions: How are culture and political power intertwined? How did gender, race, or class shape involvement in political institutions? How have class and race intersected with political power? How has the authority of religion affected social relations? How did the power structures of trade and colonialism function? What is the relationship between knowledge and power in social domains such as education, science, and/or medicine? Papers can investigate, but are not limited to, the question of power and:
Deadline & Submissions:
We invite submissions for individual papers from advanced MA and PhD students. Titles and abstracts (250-300 words) should include a working title and a main argument and be sent to fordhamgradworkshop@gmail.com by the deadline of December 13, 2019. All submissions should include a separate document containing the author’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information.
Chosen participants will be notified by email no later than February 3rd, 2020. The final papers should be full-length drafts, about 20-35 pages in length (c. 5,000-9,000 words, double-spaced) with full citations. Papers should not have been published elsewhere. Presenters should plan to circulate their papers at least two weeks before the meeting. At the workshop, we will ask all contributors to not present their papers but introduce and frame their arguments with a 10-12-minute introduction leaving the bulk of the session to a detailed discussion of the paper among participants.
Financial Support:
Fordham will offer up to $250 per accepted participant to defray travel costs. The day’s schedule will also include a light breakfast, lunch and closing reception.
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Filed under Conferences, Department Events, Grad Student News, O'Connell Initiative, Workshop
Glauco Schettini’s article, “Confessional Modernity: Nicola Spedalieri, the Catholic Church and the French Revolution, c.1775-1800,” published in Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press), reconsiders the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution and more broadly to the emergence of what we usually term “modernity.”
The article focuses on Nicola Spedalieri’s On the Rights of Man (1791) and on the debate that its publication sparked in Italy and beyond. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the polarization of public opinion between the supporters of the new regime and its relentless opponents convinced Spedalieri (1740-95), a well-reputed Catholic theologian, of the need to find a via media between these two extremes. Assuming the re-Christianization of the postrevolutionary world as his goal, Spedalieri argued that some aspects of revolutionary political culture (representative institutions, the idea of a social contract, the notion of human rights) were acceptable from a Catholic standpoint as long as the revolutionaries, in turn, agreed to abandon secularization and to uphold the traditional confessional organization of the state, recognizing Catholicism as the official state religion. It was not modernity itself, Spedalieri claimed, that should be rejected, but secularization, for a different modernity from that conceived by the revolutionaries was possible—a confessional modernity, combining revolutionary politics and confessional states. Far from gaining immediate acceptance, Spedalieri’s ideas were harshly criticized during the 1790s and then set aside by the triumph of reactionary Catholicism during the Restoration. However, they resurfaced later in the nineteenth century and ultimately played a decisive role in the development of the church’s attitudes toward modern culture, for they carved a path for Catholics to fight secularization from within and to reshape modernity accordingly.A free online version of the article is available here.
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Filed under Fordham News, Grad Student News
“Dissecting an Article: the Writing and Publishing Process”
Wednesday, October 16th, 1:00pm
“Digital Humanities Presentation”
“Siege of Antioch Project” A collaborative project between scholars in the United Kingdom and Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies.
Thursday, November 14th, 5:00pm
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Filed under Digital Resources, Events, Grad Student News
