History is everywhere! If you find yourself with some free time and are looking to explore the history of our community, the Bronx, then you might enjoy learning about these local museums and historic sites.
Historical Sites and Museums in the Bronx
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Dr. Nicholas Paul wins the Medieval Academy of America’s 2016 John Nicholas Brown Book Prize
This text was originally posted by Alexa Moore and written by Laura Morrale on The Venerable Blog run by the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University.
“Fordham medievalist Nicholas Paul has won the Medieval Academy of America’s 2016 John Nicholas Brown Book Prize, awarded annually for a first book on a medieval subject. His monograph, To Follow in their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages, is based on research first completed for his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University. Further research for the book also took him to Spain and France where he examined family histories, archives, and crusader tombs.
According to the Medieval Academy, To Follow in their Footsteps “offers an original investigation into collective memory in the first crusading century. Paul draws upon widely-ranging sources (texts and material objects) in family history, anthropology, literary theory and sociology to illuminate the historical context and dynastic narratives of the Crusades.”
The Center for Medieval Studies has been fortunate to work with this award-winning author as an instructor in our program and a collaborator on several digital projects. The Oxford Outremer Map Project is based on a map he first encountered while teaching a graduate course on the Crusader States, which was then developed into a digitally-enhanced interactive version, supplemented with geographic, historical, and archaeological data. As a contributing editor to the French of Outremer website, Dr. Paul has taken a leading role in shaping how scholars understand the wide range of French-language texts produced and circulated in the Crusader States. Dr. Paul offered the following observations concerning the connections between his writing, his teaching, and his work on the digital projects at the Center:
“Since the publication of my book, my research horizons have expanded in ways that I could not have imagined due entirely to the exciting developments in digital humanities at the Center for Medieval Studies. The projects that Medieval Studies have already sponsored, such as the Oxford Outremer Map Project, the project to edit and translate the legal texts of Outremer, and the new project to aggregate and map data related to independent crusaders, demonstrate perfectly of how digital approaches, tools, and platforms are making possible completely new modes of presentation and analysis.”
Dr. Paul has suggested that these digital projects will form an important part of his work going forward, for several reasons:
“Each of these projects represents a piece of a much larger puzzle that I’m taking on in my current research: attitudes to the eastern crusading frontier in Medieval Europe. But aside from the data that they offer, the projects have acted as fantastic platforms for our graduate students to hone skills using digital tools and exercise creativity. They are also nodes around which new scholarly communities, such as the translation group working on the legal texts or the international team who contributed to our digital map, have coalesced. For all of these reasons, I look forward to the future of digital humanities at Fordham, and in particular with my friends, colleagues, and students at the Center for Medieval Studies.”
We congratulate our colleague on winning such a prestigious award, and look forward to working with Dr. Paul on current and future projects here at the Center for Medieval Studies.
By Laura Morreale
To find out more about the Center for Medieval Studies be sure to visit The Venerable Blog
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This Week in Fordham History
Curious about the history of Fordham University? Enjoy a ‘blast from the past’ and read on to find out why both The Washington Post and the Times Herald featured articles about Fordham University on February 16, 1962.
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The Dynamics of Pligrimage: Lecture by Dee Dyas (York) 2/23 5-7PM
Considering our many undergraduate and graduate courses related to pilgrimage (including our current team-taught course “Medieval Pilgrimage” and the annual study tour of the Camino de Santiago in Spain) Fordham is a great place to study pilgrimage. We are particularly excited, therefore, to announce this upcoming lecture by Dr. Dee Dyas director of the Center for the Study of Christian Culture at the University of York.
About the presenter: Dee Dyas obtained her BA in literature from the University of London, and completed her PhD, as well as an MA in theology, at the University of Nottingham. She has written several books including Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700-1500 which was published in 2001.
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Meet the Winners of the Loomie Prize for 2015
Winners of the 2015 Loomie Prize: Rachel Podd (left) and Christine Kelly (right)
Each year the History department awards its highest honor for excellence in graduate scholarship, the Loomie Prize. The Loomie prize is awarded to the best seminar paper produced during the previous academic year. All M.A. and Ph.D. students who have taken the proseminar/seminar sequence or a research tutorial are eligible. The prize for 2015 was awarded to Rachel Podd and Christine Kelly.
Rachel Podd‘s paper “Interrogating the Guaridoras: Women, Medicine and Magic in Catalonia before the Plague” was written under supervision of Alex Novikoff. The Loomie judges noted that it was based on rich source material, and offered a convincing argument about why and how these sources could be useful to scholars beyond those who specialize in 14th century Catalonia. Rachel wrote that “these documents offer a window… into a vibrant and dynamic world. Within them, one may find Saracens and Christians, men and women, as well as spells and incantations for the health of people and of animals. Through close reading and contextualization, they can elucidate the lives of individuals performing curative activities outside of the major civic centers of Catalonia before the arrival of the plague – what types of diseases did they treat, and how? If caught, what punishment could they expect from the ecclesiastical judicial structure?” Hence, Rachel demonstrated how these records sit at the juncture of vernacular medicine, episcopal control, and inquisition.
Christine Kelly‘s paper “Gender, the Popular Front, and the Folksong Revival through Sing Out! Magazine, 1950 – 1968″ written under supervision of Kirsten Swinth. Her essay is an outstanding example of cultural analysis built from the gritty work of data collecting. By categorizing hundreds of articles in the folk music periodical, Sing Out!, Christine developed a highly original thesis about the discourse of gender in the 1960s folk music revival. She overturned a conventional division between the leftist cultural movements of the 1930s, and those of the 1960s, showing that folk revivalists in the 1960s resurrected familiar tropes and narratives of gender from the 1930s. These were ultimately highly traditionalist, premising an anti-capitalist utopia on an idealized view of the American past where women remained tied to “traditional domestic and reproductive spaces” and “men were more responsible for carrying out the daily operations of political thought and cultural innovation that constituted the engine [of the] folk song revival.”
We reached out to Rachel and Christine for details about their work and how they developed the ideas and research for their papers.
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“I LOVE HISTORY, BUT SURELY I HAVE TO MAJOR IN…”
“WELL, IDEALLY I WOULD MAJOR IN HISTORY, BUT ISN’T THAT ONLY FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GO TO DO HISTORY IN GRAD SCHOOL?”
CONSIDERING A MAJOR? IS IT SOMETHING OTHER THAN HISTORY?
Before you make such a momentous decision, stop by the History Department Major Fair. It will be in KE 105 between 1 and 3 pm, Friday January 29th.
Pizza will be provided.
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A Look Back at History Day: Speakers and Talks as they Happened
We created a Storify version of the live-tweeting of History Day 2016. Keep reading to check out who spoke and find out about the subjects of their talks.
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History Day 2016!
It has become an annual tradition to take a cold winter day to celebrate History at Fordham. This event, History Day, offers an opportunity to learn some of the interesting things that the Department is doing. Organized into panels, faculty, graduate students and history majors share their work with the wider Fordham community. We will be meeting this year in the Campbell Multipurpose Room (with coffee and donuts).
This year we have some exciting events. The day kicks off with a 10:00am panel discussion of Jerusalem in History. Jerusalem is perhaps the most significant place on earth. It is central to three faith traditions, has been the site of enormous conflict and remains an object of political conflict at this very moment. Our panel will try to give a sense of the historic depth of Jerusalem’s significance.
At 11:30 we will have a group of majors presenting their research from the last semester: Kyle Stelzer, Daniel Salerno, Alison Blitz, and Arthur Mezzo.
At 1:00, we will have a panel to discuss how migration has shaped the historical experience of the United States and Europe. This group will grapple with different types of migration, how it has impacted the host society, and how the the memory of migration can be used.
Finally, at 2:30 we will have another group of majors presenting their work: Cecilia Morin, Sarah Lopez, Joe O’Brien, and Melanie Sheehan.
Come join us and discover what is happening here at Fordham! If you have to step away, you can follow highlights on Twitter: @FordhamHistory.
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Fordham Undergraduates Attend Undergraduate Conference in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Moravian College
On Saturday, December 5th, Professor Alex Novikoff took four Fordham Students to the 10th Annual Undergraduate Conference in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Moravian College. The four students, all History majors, each presented a paper. Erin Collier presented, “The Role of Menstruation and Impurity in the Characterization of Jews as ‘The Other’ in Medieval Soceity,” Arthur Mezzo presented, “God and Kind: Biographies of Medieval Frankish Kings,” Rita Orazi presented, “The Emperor as Classical Hero in Ana Komnene’s Alexiad,” and Kyle Stelzer presented, “The Tibyan: One Ruler’s Account of Christian-Muslim Relations in Eleventh Century Iberia.”
Nice work, Fordham historians!
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Esther Liberman Cuenca Awarded Prestigious Schallek Fellowship
Esther Lieberman Cuenca, recipient of the Schallek Fellowship
Fordham History Department’s own Esther Liberman Cuenca was recently awarded the Schallek Fellowship, a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline (art history, literature, history, etc.) dealing with late medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). Not only is this a prestigious honor but it will allow Esther to conduct research critical to the completion of her dissertation.
Esther’s research focuses on the development and evolution of borough customary law in medieval Britain. Borough customs were practices or traditions that over time acquired the force of law within the town. Her analytical goals are twofold: to contribute to a deeper understanding of the place of urban customary law within the British legal system, and to reveal custom’s role in the emergence of a distinct bourgeois identity in medieval Britain. Borough customary law has received little scholarly attention because of its scattered distribution in many local and county archives; the need for multi-lingual expertise in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English; and the difficulty of dating customary clauses and ordinances from multiple iterative copies.
SROI C/4/1/1, f. 9a: The table of contents for the French Ipswich custumal, contained in the codex they call the ‘Black Domesday.’
Since she reached ABD status at Fordham in 2012, Esther has been teaching multiple courses at Marymount California University and this fellowship will give her the opportunity to focus fully on completing her dissertation. She plans to spend the 2016-2017 year living in England where she can complete her research at the Bristol Record Office and London Metropolitan Archives. In 2013, Esther was also the recipient of the Schallek Award, which is a small grant of $2,000 to help students cover research expenses. “The Medieval Academy/Richard III Society have been very kind to me! And I’m very grateful that they’re supporting my research,” says Esther. The History Department is grateful as well, and very excited for Esther to seize this opportunity!
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