Rachel Podd (PhD candidate, Medieval History) received the NACBS-Huntington Library Fellowship for British Studies to conduct research at the Henry Huntington Library in San Marino, California. During her time there she plans to photograph and transcribe a variety of medieval medical manuscripts, including regimens for health, medical recipes and charms, as part of her larger research project focused on medieval ideas about health management. She will draw on these materials for her Ph.D. thesis on “Health in Late Medieval England: The Impact of Age, Sex, and Income on the Lived Experience.”
Rachel Podd
Comments Off on Graduate Student Rachel Podd receives the NACBS-Huntington Library Fellowship for British Studies.
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.
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.
Nicholas J. DeAntonis
Comments Off on Ph.D. Candidate Nicholas J. DeAntonis’ 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” is Now Out!
Three undergraduate History students were chosen to present their research at the 11th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 11. Dr. Elizabeth Penry, Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the History Department who moderated the panel, reported that the presentations were excellent and that all three were based on extensive original research in primary sources. Here are the abstracts of the papers presented by Josh Anthony, Katherine De Fonzo, and Elizabeth Doty. Continue reading →
Comments Off on History Undergrads Present Their Research at the Undergraduate Research Symposium
This Friday at 3:00 p.m., Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies and the New York Botanical Garden are pleased to host Professor Robin Fleming of Boston College, recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the “genius grant”), for her talk “Vanishing Plants, Animals, and Places: Britain’s Transformation from Roman to Medieval,” which uses material culture and environmental history to reveal heretofore unknown aspects of early medieval Britain. Due to the paucity of contemporary written sources, Fleming’s alternative approach, part of an emerging trend in research on the period, ought to provide truly novel insight. Appropriately, the talk will take place at the Mertz Library in the New York Botanical Garden and will be followed by an exhibit of medieval and early modern herbals. This opportunity is not to be missed! Event details below:
Vanishing Plants, Animals, and Places: Britain’s Transformation from Roman to Medieval
Humanities Institute, Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden
Friday, September 30, 3:00 pm
Comments Off on 9/30/16 (Friday!!): Robin Fleming Presents “Vanishing Plants, Animals, and Places: Britain’s Transformation from Roman to Medieval”
Louisa Foroughi confers with Professor Bruce Campbell
From July 8th to 11th Fordham Professor Maryanne Kowaleski and graduate student Louisa Foroughi attended the XIIth Annual Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society, held this year in Stirling, Scotland. The Anglo-American Seminar is a long-standing gathering of some of the most distinguished economic and social historians in England and America. This year’s presentations drew attention to new directions in research, while its panel discussion featured lively debate about the relationship between government policy and England’s economy in the late middle ages. Professor Kowaleski closed the conference with a fascinating paper on the political participation and consciousness of mariners in late medieval England, part of her larger work on England’s seamen and coastal communities. A highlight of this year’s Seminar was a (rainy!) walking tour of the town of Stirling, all the way from the castle at the top of the hill to the fish stews at its base, led by Professor Richard Oram, who also opened the conference with an excellent talk on the environmental history of Scotland and its neglected relationship to political history. Louisa especially benefited from the opportunity to meet and talk over her thesis with experts in their field, such as Prof. Bruce Campbell, who was also honored with the presentation of a festschrift at the conference.
At a gathering of the History Department on its Spring Open Day, we announced the winners of the Loomie Prize. Each year, 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 judges unanimously selected Tobias Hrynick as the winner for 2014, awarding an honorable mention to Stephen Leccesse. Hrynick’s paper, “The Customs of Romney Marsh: Compromise and Common Interest in Wetland Administration,” was written under the supervision of Maryanne Kowaleski for the Medieval History proseminar “Medieval England.” Leccese’s paper “Emerging From the Sub-Cellar: John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil, and the Rise of Corporate Public Relations in Progressive America, 1902-1908,” was written under the supervision of Christopher Dietrich. For more information about the Loomie prize papers, read on… Continue reading →
Carina Ray with Reggie Yates on BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?
In a recent blog post for Oxford University Press, Carina Ray writes:
As an Africanist historian committed to reaching broader publics, I was thrilled when the research team for the BBC’s genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are? contacted me late last February about an episode they were working on that involved the subject of some of my research, mixed race relationships in colonial Ghana. I was even more pleased when I realized that their questions about shifting practices and perceptions of intimate relationships between African women and European men in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, were ones I had just explored in a newly published American Historical Review article, which I readily shared with them. This led to a month-long series of lengthy email exchanges, phone conversations, Skype chats, and eventually to an invitation to come to Ghana to shoot the Who Do You Think You Are? episode.
When ABC News was looking for an expert to provide historial background to the momentous vote for Scottish Independence this past September, they turned to Fordham historian Chris Maginn. Chris gives us some background:
though I am a Tudor specialist by training, and am interested in the history of state formation, I try to keep abreast of contemporary politics in Britain in Ireland. While on leave in Ireland I was interviewed by America Magazine about the importance of the President of Ireland’s state visit to England: http://americamagazine.org/issue/higgins-visit-suggests-sea-change-anglo-irish-relations. So, the afternoon before the referendum I went up to ABC’s studio on 66th street and did a television interview; the following morning, in the wake of the election result, I was asked to do radio interviews on some of ABC’s national affiliates.
