Former undergraduate student Melanie Sheehan (class of 2017) has been offered the Harvard-Newcomen Post-Doctoral Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year. She is a current PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Melanie Sheehan (Rose Hill, class of 2017)
Melanie is currently finishing her dissertation, titled “Opportunities Foregone: US Industrial Unions and the Politics of International Economic Policy, 1949-1983,” which demonstrates the critical but underexplored role of trade union leaders in shaping US international trade and investment policy. The project draws on research from business archives at Hagley Museum and Library and labor archives at the Walter P. Reuther Library, the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive, Penn State University, and the International Institute of Social History, as well as several presidential libraries. Congratulations, Melanie!
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Fordham PhD candidate Glauco Schettini was awarded the 2022 John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award by The American Catholic Historical Association for his “promising, but not-yet-completed” dissertation “The Catholic Counter-Revolution: A Global Intellectual History, 1780s–1840s.”
According to the prize committee, consisting of Robert W. Shaffern (Scranton University), James McCartin (Fordham University), and Mary Dunn (St. Louis University): “We are delighted to bestow the John Tracy Ellis Award 2022 upon Glauco Schettini, a graduate student at Fordham University. His dissertation, ‘The Catholic Counter-Revolution: A Global Intellectual History, 1780s–1840s,’ examines the Catholic responses to the intellectual turmoil released by the enlightenment and French Revolution in Iberian Europe and the Americas, regions that until now have received little attention in the historiography. Schettini plans on using the award to visit the archives of Augustin Barruel, a key antirevolutionary polemicist, and Henri Gregoire, a bishop in the French Constitutional Church.”
Glauco Schettini
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PhD Student Spencer Tompkins will participate in the Society for the History of Technology’s Annual Conference (“SHOT”) on November 20, 2021, from 4:30–5:30pm (CST) online. Spencer will give his presentation, “From Autonomous Electronic Data Processing to Statewide Information System: Lockheed Missiles and Space Company’s Analysis of California’s Earthy Problems”, as part of a panel titled “Computational Infrastructures”.
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PhD candidate Glauco Schettini is the winner of a Farrar Memorial Award of the Society for French Historical Studies. The award, which consists of a prize of $5,000 and recognizes outstanding dissertations that deal with French history broadly conceived, will support research for Glauco’s in-progress dissertation project, titled “The Catholic Counterrevolution: A Global Intellectual History, 1780s-1840s.” In his dissertation, Glauco looks at networks of counterrevolutionary Catholic intellectuals spanning from Europe to Latin America to trace the emergence of Catholicism as a new, distinct ideology in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Glauco’s “exciting doctoral research,” write the members of the Society’s Award Committee, which included Profs. Daniel Sherman, Rebecca Spang, Robin Mitchell, and Paul Cohen, “will change how we teach both the history of ideas and the history of religion.”
You can follow him on Twitter at @GlaucoSchettini.
Glauco Schettini
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Fordham University undergraduate Abby Delk wrote the featured piece. Delk writes in part: “Lisa Betty, a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow in Fordham’s history department, has put a great deal of time and energy into her research on modern health and wellness movements and their ties to colonialism and white supremacy. Much of her research focuses on critiquing the modern veganism movement for its inherent racism.”
You can find Lisa Betty’s full article in the Medium here.
You can follow Lisa Betty on Twitter @almostdrlisabetty
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PhD candidate Glauco Schettini was awarded a Research and Writing Award from the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). The award, which is offered to graduate students and contingent faculty, will fund research and writing time for an article entitled “A Star Is Born: Pius VI and the Invention of Papal Celebrity,” which springs from Glauco’s dissertation, “The Catholic Counterrevolution: A Global Intellectual History, 1780s-1840s.” Drawing on recent scholarship that traces the birth of modern forms of celebrity and charisma back to the Age of Revolution, the article intends to show how popes, starting with Pius VI (1775-99), refashioned themselves as charismatic leaders and used their newfound popularity as a political tool in their fight against reforming sovereigns and revolutionary regimes that advanced a secularizing agenda. This eighteenth-century “reinvention” of the papacy, which paralleled the consolidation of papal power within the Catholic church, represents a crucial chapter in the emergence of charismatic forms of power at large—and perhaps helps explain why people by the millions interact with Pope Francis’s tweets today!
Glauco Schettini
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Between the years of 1113-1116, Prior Nicholas and the monks of St. Mary’s, Worcester, petitioned Eadmer of Canterbury to re-write the vita of their monastic founder St. Oswald. The years preceding this request were a period of hardship for the community of St. Mary’s, as the brethren coped with the burning of their church, the death of monastic elders, and the installation of a royal clerk as bishop of Worcester. In the face of such trials, the monks of Worcester turned to St. Oswald to justify their continued existence and consolidate their corporate identity. Yet, their decision to solicit Eadmer raises questions about the devotional function of the new Vita S. Oswaldi for the brethren of Worcester. While Eadmer modelled his text on Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s eleventh-century biography, he altered the nature of St. Oswald’s sanctity by subordinating the saint’s virtuous development to the leadership of the archbishops Oda and Dunstan of Canterbury. Eadmer incorporated St. Oswald into a new sacred hierarchy, whereby the saint’s virtuous life served to support Canterbury’s contemporary claims to English episcopal primacy. The monks of Worcester had maintained an amiable relationship with Canterbury since the Norman conquest, and Nicholas’s decision to commission Eadmer likewise reflects how the chapter of St. Mary’s perceived itself in relation to Canterbury. Nicholas and the monks of Worcester hoped to benefit from Canterbury’s predominance in the English Church, especially regarding the preservation of their corporate rights and influence in future episcopal elections. This article explores the reception of sacred history in the community of St. Mary’s, Worcester, and the manner in which the brethren used the memory of their corporate past to reaffirm their place, identity, and continuity as a monastic body. It further argues that the episcopal priories of Worcester and Canterbury maintained a historical support network, in which members of each community recast information about St. Oswald and England’s ecclesiastical past to reaffirm bonds of monastic friendship and share in sacred prestige.
William Tanner Smoot
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History graduate student Rachel Podd published her first essay, “Reconsidering maternal mortality in medieval England: aristocratic Englishwomen, c. 1236–1503,” in Continuity and Change.
Below is an abstract of the article:
“The characterisation of medieval childbirth as profoundly dangerous is both long-standing and poorly supported by quantitative data. This article, based on a database tracking the reproductive lives of 102 late medieval aristocratic Englishwomen, allows not only for an evaluation of this trope but also an analysis of risk factors, including maternal youth and short birth intervals. Supplemented with evidence from medieval medical tracts and osteoarchaeological data related to pubertal development and nutrition, this study demonstrates that reproduction was hardly the main driver of mortality among elite women.”
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