Research

Karin Rosemblatt was awarded a Faculty-Student Research Award from the UMD Graduate School. The grant will support travel to Mexico during Summer 2023 for Karin and a graduate student to conduct research for a book project exploring how 20th century anthropologists, archaeologists, and ethnohistorians established truths regarding the pre-Columbian history of Mexico. This grant will support archival research for Karin's current book project, a book of essays examining public controversies in which archaeologists and anthropologists debated the contours of pre-Columbian history and the effects of the Spanish Conquest. The book seeks to understand the value of the past for the Mexican state and Mexicans more broadly.

Stefano Villani has won a UMD Graduate School Faculty-Student Research Award for a project with PhD student Jordan S. Sly. The project is titled "Narrating a massacre. Samuel Morland and the Waldensian slaughter of 1655 between propaganda, religion and diplomacy." The project investigates the 1655 massacre of the Protestant Waldensian minority in the Piedmontese valleys of Northern Italy by troops of the Duke of Savoy. These communities claimed a direct continuity with the Waldensians, a medieval heretical group. Still, the Dutch Republic, the Protestant Swiss cantons, and England reacted in defense of the persecuted Waldensians. Oliver Cromwell sent diplomat Samuel Morland to stop the massacres and re-establish toleration for these communities. After returning to England, Morland published the History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piemont in 1658, which served as a record of his diplomatic mission and a celebration of the Waldensian church's ancient history.

St efano Villani has published two book reviews: on Mathilde Monge and Natalia Muchnik's Early Modern Diasporas: A European History (Routledge, 2022), in Società e Storia 179 (2023): 176-177); and on Hannah Marcus's Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020), in Rivista di Storia e letteratura religiosa, 58 (2022): 326-330.

Julie Taddeo edited a Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Television (April 2023) on the Netflix series, Bridgerton. She and her fellow contributors examine how the popular period TV series interrogates race, feminism, sexuality, and gender issues in Regency England, as well as the fandom culture that surrounds Bridgerton and how academics can use Bridgerton for public history purposes.

Shay Hazkani has received a 2023-2024 NEH Fellowship for Scholars Conducting Field-Based Humanities Research in Palestine. The Fellowship is administered by the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC). PARC promotes academic research on Palestine by US researchers and assists in disseminating those research findings. 

Shay has also been awarded the Concordia University Library/Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies Best Book in Israel Studies Award for his recent book Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford University Press, 2021).

The May 2023 issue of Commonweal Magazine includes Piotre Kosicki's new article about the weaponization of historical memory of Pope John Paul II in Poland. The article also addresses the suppression of research into his ties to clerical abuse in Poland. The digital version is available HERE.

On May 25, 2023 Julie Taddeo published a review of "This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s," a recent photo Exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The exhbit included 46 photos, most of them in black and white. Julie writes: "The exhibit gives us multiple versions of what it means to “be British” as a generation of socially conscious photographers expose issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality that threaten inclusivity during these two tumultuous decades." The exhibit also includes an hour-long film, Handsworth Songs, made in 1986 by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah for Channel Four’s series, Britain: The Lie of the Land. The newsreels and still photographs from the 1985 riots featured in Handsworth Songs provide context for the racism directed against the Black community in Birmingham in the 1980s. 

From the review: "This Is Britain is a powerful visual reminder that trash and runoff, like proudly displayed Union Jacks on bikes, furtive kisses, and power suits on posh Londoners, are just some of the “bits and bobs” that make this history worth revisiting."

The exhibit runs until June 11, 2023. Read the full review HERE.

Marlene Mayo's essay is among six which have been selected for publication in a recent e-book, Project Muse issue, University of Hawaii Press, 2022, entitled Celebrating 60+ Issues of "U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, edited by Alisa Freedman.

Her essay is "A Friend in Need:  Esther B. Rhoads, Quakers, and Humanitarian Relief in Allied Occupied Japan, 1946-1952," U.S.-Japan Women's Journal  50 (2016): 54. 

Find the e-book here.

Julie Taddo edited a special issue on Bridgerton for The Journal of Popular Television (Intellect, April 2023).  The issue contains her Introduction and articles on Bridgerton's interrogation of race, sex, and feminism in  Regency  England as well as contemporary fan culture's relationship to the Netflix TV series and the Regency romance genre as a whole.

See the issue here!

Co-edited with Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, and Joo-Cheong Tham, Julie Greene has published Global Labor Migration: New Directions with the University of Illinois Press. According to the publisher, "Around the world, hundreds of millions of labor migrants endure exploitation, lack of basic rights, and institutionalized discrimination and marginalization. What dynamics and drivers have created a world in which such a huge--and rapidly growing--group toils as marginalized men and women, existing as a lower caste institutionally and juridically? In what ways did labor migrants shape their living and working conditions in the past, and what opportunities exist for them today?

Global Labor Migration presents new multidisciplinary, transregional perspectives on issues surrounding global labor migration. The essays go beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians contributing research that extends comparison among and within world regions. Looking at migrant workers from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the contributors illustrate the need for broader perspectives that study labor migration over longer timeframes and from wider geographic areas. The result is a unique, much-needed collection that delves into one of the world’s most pressing issues, generates scholarly dialogue, and proposes cutting-edge research agendas and methods."

See the publisher's website here for more information.