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“No Man’s Land” by Steven Stoll

Steven Stoll, Professor of History here at Fordham University specializing in environmental history and the history of capitalism and agrarian societies, recently published “No Man’s Land” in the Orion Magazine.

Professor of History at Fordham University, Steven Stoll

 Steven Stoll, Professor of History at Fordham University

The article, which you can read here, explores how issues relating to  private property, land rights, local interests, and agriculture can often intersect.  Stoll begins the article relating the case of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles. The plot of land was seized by the city of Los Angeles in 1986, however the community resisted the plan to build an incinerator on the site. The plan folded and the land then came under the control of the Harbor Department. In 1994 the Harbor Department invited the local food bank to use the land to construct a community garden. “But in 2001, one of the prior owners filed a lawsuit against the city. The property had never been used to build the incinerator, and so, he argued, Los Angeles had no reason to seize it. The city settled the case in 2003 by selling the fourteen acres back to the prior owner.” The gardeners, who were then accused of squatting, refused to leave the land. In 2003 police arrested forty people, the farm was bulldozed, and the land remains vacant. Stoll writes, “In the case of the South Central Farm, ownership for profit triumphed over use for subsistence, which, of course, is the way of the world.”

To read the rest of Stoll’s article visit the Orion Magazine website.

Steven Stoll has also published Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (2002) and The Great Delusion (2008). He is currently working on a monograph about losing land and livelihood in Appalachia.

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Dr. Nicholas Paul wins the Medieval Academy of America’s 2016 John Nicholas Brown Book Prize

Nicolas PaulThis 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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