Amir Idris, Professor of History, has published an op-ed entitled “Recognizing and Mitigating the Risk of Expansion of Sudan’s Conflict to South Sudan” in Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker. You can find the op-ed at this link.
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The early eleventh-century Miraculorum sancti Maioli libri duo narrated accounts of more than four dozen miracles that took place at the shrine of Maiolus of Cluny in the town of Souvigny, where the abbot died in 994. This article examines the evidence of this little-known source to reconstruct the social life of a popular pilgrimage destination at the turn of the first millennium. It presents a profile of the kinds of people who visited Maiolus’s tomb, including their names, genders, and occupations. Next, it analyses the maladies for which these pilgrims sought relief through the healing power of the saint. Finally, it explores the social networks that facilitated the movement of pilgrims with motor and sensory disabilities from their homes to the abbot’s shrine.
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Dr. Scott Bruce, Professor of History, and Dr. Lucy Barnhouse, Fordham history department alum (2017) and currently Assistant Professor of History at Arkansas State University, both had featured articles appear in the February issue of the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. Both their articles deal with the theme of ghosts.
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This article revisits the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution to argue that amendment adversaries fought over the future of women’s economic security. Post-war US economic growth stalled in the 1970s, bringing the family-wage ideal of male breadwinning and female homemaking down with it. In these unsettled years, how female economic dependence would be addressed was an open question: would it be by propping up male breadwinning, as ERA opponents wanted, or by combining good jobs with fairly compensated domestic labour and government assistance, as supporters believed the ERA promised? A revisionist interpretation of the ERA battle, this article shifts attention from conflict over gender identity and cultural values to economics and capitalist transformation. It examines arguments presented in pamphlets, the media and to Congress about how homemaking women could achieve security in the face of changing economic reality. The ERA’s defeat was a Pyrrhic victory for conservatives. The threat to government-sanctioned male breadwinning appeared to have been vanquished. But the family-wage system was truly on the rocks, and supporters’ vision of a working-family norm, with roles based on function, not gender, won out. Without the ERA, however, working mothers shouldered the consequences.
Cover of Gender & History
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You can access their article here. Below is the abstract:
Monastic reading communities in early medieval Europe had a voracious appetite for the works of the Greek church fathers in Latin translation. This article examines the evidence for the availability of translated Greek patristics in western abbeys from the fifth to the ninth centuries through a survey of surviving manuscripts and monastic library inventories. While there was not yet a canon of officially recognized ‘fathers of the eastern church’ in early medieval Europe, this article shows how western monks favoured five of the six Greek patriarchs singled out as authoritative in the sixth-century Decretum Gelasianum. In terms of genre, they strongly preferred the homiletical writings of eastern Christian authors over their polemical works, because sermons and biblical homilies had greater utility as tools for teaching and preaching. Lastly, this article highlights the fact that the most widely copied Greek church father in early medieval Europe was also the most notorious and suspect thinker in the eastern church: Origen of Alexandria, whose skill as an author of biblical commentaries outweighed his notoriety as a condemned theologian in the eyes of western monks.
Cover of the Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies
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This article examines artisanal employment agreements from the Catalan town of Castelló d’Empúries from 1260–1310, the period before and just after the formation of the first craft guild in that town. It addresses why craft guilds formed and what advantage guilds offered medieval artisans in contrast to pre-guild systems, with a focus on the market for artisanal training. The pre-guild artisanal labour market in late thirteenth-century Castelló was highly flexible, with a variety of terms and contract types under which craft training could be acquired. Artisans were free to make any agreement they found mutually satisfactory, but they were also at the mercy of the market. Trained artisans were not always the ones with higher resources and power compared to prospective learners. The cloth-finishers’ guild of Castelló closely monitored the market for training in their craft, and standardised the terms and contract formats under which training was offered.
Front Cover of the Journal of Medieval History
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Dr. Elizabeth Penry was recently awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for her project “The Italian Renaissance in Diaspora: Jesuit Education and Indigenous Modernities.”
Dr. Penry (second from left, middle row) with Rome Prize winners
From the announcement: “The American Academy in Rome announced today the winners of the 2022–23 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships. These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, the gift of “time and space to think and work” was awarded to thirty-eight American and four Italian artists and scholars. They will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, starting in September 2022.
Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition. The eleven disciplines supported by the Academy are: ancient studies, architecture, design, historic preservation and conservation, landscape architecture, literature, medieval studies, modern Italian studies, music composition, Renaissance and early modern studies, and visual arts. The selected candidates were ratified by the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome.
Nationwide, the Rome Prize competition received 909 applications, representing 47 US states and territories and 19 different countries. Thirty-three Rome Prizes were awarded to 37 individuals (four prizes are collaborations), representing an acceptance rate of 3.6 percent.”
For more information on the American Academy in Rome and the Rome Prize, click here.
Dr. Nana Osei-Opare received the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors in the School of Historical Studies for the 2022–2023 academic year. He also received the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Fellowship for their Scholars-in-Residence Program for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Dr. Nana Osei-Opare
His book project, Socialist De-Colony: Soviet & Black Entanglements in Ghana’s Decolonization and Cold War Projects, is described as “the first monograph to unpack, rethink, and tie Ghana’s Cold War and political-economic projects within larger socialist and Marxist debates from multiple ideological and geographic vantage points.” More information about the project can be found on Dr. Osei-Opare’s faculty profile. Congratulations!
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Cover of The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England
In The Cambridge Connection, Susan Wabuda’s essay, “‘We walk as pilgrims’: Agnes Cheke and Cambridge, c. 1500–1549” is about the career of Agnes Cheke as a prosperous vitner. She was one of the few pillars of the emerging evangelical establishment in Cambridge in the sixteenth century. Her financial success in selling wine allowed her to advance the career of her son, the famous humanist scholar Sir John Cheke, and her son-in-law William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I. Agnes Cheke died in 1549, much lamented in a sermon by the famous preacher Hugh Latimer, and her resting place is in the University Church, Great Saint Mary’s, where she was a parishioner.
Susan Wabuda’s previous books include Thomas Cranmer in the Routledge Historical Biographies Series (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), and Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: University Press, 2002, 2008).
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We are thrilled to announce that the American Historical Association has awarded Dr. Yuko Miki’s, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018), the Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history. Please reach out to Dr. Yuko Miki at ymiki1@fordham.edu to send her your heartfelt congratulations on receiving this wonderful achievement!!!
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