Chabraja Center Happenings
The Chabraja Center for Historical Studies
In 2021-22 the Chabraja Center, like the rest of the university, moved back to campus. Our major lectures and the two Spring graduate conferences were launched in hybrid form—in person, but also livestreamed. In this endeavor our Digital Media Fellow, Gil Engelstein, proved invaluable for a second year. Guest speakers addressed a wide range of topics, from animal-human relations in 15th-century Amazonia (Marcy Norton) and the lives of native Hawaiians intersecting with native Californians in the early 20th C. (David Chang) to police violence and urban uprising in the United States (Elizabeth Hinton) and “Decolonizing the Civil War” (A. Zimmerman).
Our annual collaborative lectures included Danielle Christmas on “Auschwitz and the Plantation” in the Fall (with the Holocaust Education Foundation of NU) and Martha Jones on “Thick Women and the Thin 19th Amendment” in the winter (with the Center for African American History). In the Spring Fiona Griffiths gave the Gray Boyce Memorial Lecture in Medieval History on “Priestly Husbands and Fathers in the 11th C.” (a collaboration with the History Department), and Stephanie Newell offered her talk on “Ephemeral Texts and Local Creativity in Colonial Nigeria” as the History of the Book lecture (an annual joint CCHS/University Libraries event).
The CCHS graduate conferences, on Zoom last year, went hybrid this April, allowing some participants to meet in person and others to join the conference from distant locations, like Nigeria and India. “The Prison and Systems of Punishment” and “When They Became Pests: Human and Nonhuman Species as Vermin in History” proved very successful, bringing together graduate students and faculty from several American and foreign universities for thoughtful and stimulating discussions.
In the winter and Spring quarters Northwestern historians had the opportunity to participate in faculty work-in-progress workshops by Melissa Macauley, David Shyovitz, and Martha Biondi, as well as one by a Danish visiting scholar, Anders Bo Rasmussen. Fourteen History professors worked with a total of 23 Leopold Fellows throughout the year. These undergraduate researchers—selected from a pool of applicants from various schools and programs within Northwestern—helped historians with their projects and in the process learned how to navigate virtual and actual archives.
Under the aegis of CCHS Professor Benjamin Frommer and graduate student Katya Maslakowski designed a new history course, taught in the Spring Quarter, on “A Global History of Prisons and Camps,” as part of the CCHS Teaching Initiative. The class of 45 undergraduates even got to meet three former Illinois prison inmates, who were part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program.
The Center fostered a robust community of four graduate T.H. Breen and Quinn Fellows, two Chabraja Teaching Postdoctoral Fellows, and an exceptional four Chabraja Postdoctoral Fellows in Public Service/Public History, doing work in such institutions as the U.S. Congress and the Newberry Library. In addition, ten graduates received 2021 summer fellowships to work in a variety of non-profit organizations, from the Arizona Historical Society and the Chicago History Museum to the virtual Colored Conventions Project.
More on all these activities can be seen on the CCHS website.
Last but certainly not least, this year we bid farewell to CCHS Director Jonathon Glassman and prepare to welcome Amy Stanley as the new director in 2022-23. Many thanks to Professor Glassman for leading the Center during challenging pandemic times!