Faculty News
Department faculty report that they have been especially busy during this unusual year. Below are brief updates from several of them.
Ken Alder was on academic leave as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2021-22. He has been working there on his unorthodox project: a global history of technology in the form of 10 autobiographies by artificial beings. Meanwhile, he follows up on former projects, including an upcoming PBS American Experience documentary on the history of the lie detector. And he’s still biking hither and yon.
Henry Binford will retire at the end of this academic year, after 49 years at Northwestern. Following publication of his book, From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade in fall, 2021, he is now considering several possible new research projects to work on in the near future. He plans to spend the first year of his retirement figuring out how to be retired. In the meantime he is teaching and enjoying a final version of his course on the history of Chicago.
Kevin Boyle was very happy to see his new book, The Shattering: America in the 1960s, appear late last fall. Since then he's gotten to do some cool book talks with scholars and writers he really admires -- among them Northwestern's own Peter Slevin -- along with some exciting talks on his own, including three lectures as Eastern Michigan University’s 2021-22 McCandless Distinguished Professor. The best part of The Shattering's appearance, though, may have been the celebratory Detroit-style pizza he and his wife shared on the day the first copies showed up and the celebratory cupcakes his co-teacher brought into their first-year class on the book's publication day. Books, cheese, and frosting: the perfect combination.
Deborah Cohen’s long entanglement with a group of Lost Generation-era foreign correspondents has finally ended, or at least entered a new stage. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial Hotel was published this spring by Random House in the US and William Collins in the UK.
Dyan Elliot was hard at work during the winter and spring quarters of 2021 on her study “The Quick and the Dead: The Medieval Church and the Exhumation of Christians” supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship that I was awarded in 2020. Clearly morbidity has a lot of traction: in 2021 she was fortunate enough to receive a NEH fellowship for the same project, which she is planning to take advantage of during the next academic year (2022-23). She completed an article entitled “My Body, Myself: The Afterlife of the Cadaver in Christian Thought” which will appear in an edited volume published by Brepols Press (Turnhout.) She also gave a Zoom-lecture entitled “The Polluting Dead: Sanctity, Sin, and Uncertainty in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages” for the Research Group on Purity and Pollution in Late Antique and Medieval Culture” sponsored by the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, 28 March 2022. In the past year, her recent book The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) has been the subject of a virtual panel at the American Academy of Religion in November 2021 and the focus of a couple of podcasts. Finally, as bizarre as it may sound for a medievalist who is not a historian of medicine, her course “The Black Death and Other Pandemics” has received some attention outside the NU classroom. She was invited to give a key note lecture at the Indian Medical Association Gala on 13 November 2021. It was entitled: “A Tribute to Our COVID Heroes: Pandemics Then and Now.” She have to admit, it felt rather strange to be lecturing to doctors about disease, so she hewed closely to the theme of historical parallels.
Caitlin Fitz published articles in the Journal of American History and the William and Mary Quarterly. Parts of this research were cited in The Washington Post and BBC News, and her talk at the Museum of the American Revolution aired on C-SPAN. Partnering with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Newberry Library, Brazil’s Associação Nacional de História, and the Mexican Cultural Institute and the Mexican Embassy in the United States, she has enjoyed participating in public-facing symposia, exhibitions, and initiatives regarding the 200th and 250th anniversaries of Brazilian, Mexican, and U.S. independence. She and her family also survived a scary Thanksgiving house fire—the second such fire to strike a History faculty member in recent years. She warns all Harris Hall associates and alumni to beware the ides of November, and she hopes that Daniel Immerwahr’s new research on fires may somehow break the curse.
Paul Gillingham used a CCHS course development fellowship to give the first version of “The End of Citizenship” course with Andrea Rosengarten and several colleagues who were kind enough to drop in: Sarah Maza, Ed Muir and Sean Hanretta, uniformly excellent. He published a monograph Unrevolutionary Mexico: The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship with Yale and publicized it in a couple of podcasts; the first review called the book, among other things, “odd”.
Benjamin Frommer has created a new 200-level course, "A Global History of Prisons and Camps," in cooperation with History PhD candidate, Katya Maslakowski, whose work focuses on special forces in the British empire. He and Katya developed the course thanks to a Teaching Initiative Grant from the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. The two are co-teaching it in spring quarter 2022 and plan to make it a regular offering both at Northwestern and the University of Southern Mississippi, where Maslakowski will start as an Assistant Professor later this year. They were fortunate to be able to feature a guest lecture from Chernoh Bah, also a PhD candidate in our department, about his groundbreaking research on prisons and forced labor in colonial Sierre Leone.
Brett Gadsen received a Faculty Fellowship from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Sean Hanretta was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for 2022-23.
Leslie M. Harris has been appointed The Newberry Library's inaugural David L. Wagner Distinguished Fellow for the academic year 2022–2023. The Wagner Distinguished Fellowship and Lectureship for Humanistic Inquiry is dedicated to advancing research in the humanities on broad questions that deepen our collective understanding of ourselves and our world. The fellowship reflects the Newberry's commitment to using inquiry in the humanities to engage and invest in a vibrant democratic society. Leslie was also appointed to membership in the Society of American Historians "in recognition of the narrative power and scholarly distinction" of her historical work.
Peter Hayes has been lecturing via zoom a lot in the past year: for Holocaust studies centers in Buenos Aires and Oslo, for Trinity College Dublin, for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, and for the delegations to the United Nations and Unesco, among other venues. He also wrote an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that its subsequent decision completely ignored and contributed to another such brief that is pending. One of the less happy aspects of this point in life is that he was asked to write memorial essays for two treasured colleagues, Eberhard Jäckel and Richard Levy, and a reflection on the career of another, Raul Hilberg. Along the way, he did a number of interviews that yield snippets in the upcoming Ken Burns documentary on "The U.S. and the Holocaust," which will air on PBS in September.
Laura Hein finished up a six-year project in 2021, as the general editor of the New Cambridge History of Japan, herding 88 authors, translators, and volume editors, delivering her own volume, on modern Japan, to the press in early January 2022. During the summer, she gave a keynote address at a conference on Japan Studies at Osaka University and another lecture at the European Association of Japanese Studies, both unsatisfyingly in the form of early morning zoom appearances. Much more fun was participating in a workshop at the University of Southern California on “Japan in the Long 1940s: A New History” in the brief lull between Delta and Omicron. She also taught a new course in the fall on the world of Japan’s empire – in both graduate and undergraduate versions – and chaired the search for the next Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian.
Daniel Immerwahr has spent the year researching the history of catastrophic fires in the United States. This has made him a joy to those around him, who uniformly delight in his unsolicited assessments of the combustibility of their homes and offices. When not dispensing much-appreciated fire safety tips, Immerwahr occupies himself by writing essays on such riveting topics as wheat tariffs.
Bennett Jones was awarded two fellowships for next year: the Omohundro Institute’s NEH-ARP fellowship to support four months of research (remote) and a long-term Huntington fellowship (a Dibner fellowship in the history of science) for one year. Both organizations agreed to let her hold the fellowships concurrently to cover her relocation costs and adjusted cost of living as she will be moving to Los Angeles in the fall.
Doug Kiel has been working as an advisor and co-curator at the Field Museum for the last four years, as part of a team that has been developing a new permanent exhibition on Native North America. Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories finally opens to the public on May 20th! Back in March, Kiel testified before the House Committee on Natural Resources, speaking on the topic of co-managing federal public lands with tribal governments.
Robert Lerner was pleased to learn that Princeton Press will be publishing his Humanities and History: The Unpublished Essays of Ernst Kantorowicz in the fall. Given that Kantorowicz is acknowledged as one of the greatest historians of the twentieth century, the appearance of eight hitherto unknown works of his is likely to be treated as a publishing event. Lerner is pleased as well that his book, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, will be the topic of a session in the fall of the Chicago area medieval studies seminar on the occasion of its fiftieth year in print. (Lerner continues to think of himself as a heretic, but not necessarily a free spirit.)
Melissa Macauley arrived in Taiwan just as a Covid surge engulfed the island and a strict lockdown sank her hopes for a productive year of research. Libraries, archives, research institutes, restaurants, beaches, and even the bubble tea shops were closed for several months. Her somewhat dreary sabbatical was brightened by a lecture she gave at her Taiwanese alma mater, National Chengchi University. She was introduced by a young Assistant Professor of History, Jack Neubauer (WCAS, 2010), a former history major at NU who went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Chinese history at Columbia and now teaches Chinese history, in Chinese, at one of the leading universities in Taiwan. It was a heartwarming experience and deeply rewarding to see the sophomore she first met in one of her modern Chinese history courses succeed so spectacularly in the field. She otherwise gave lectures, under less sentimental conditions, at the National University of Singapore, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Yale University, the Chabraja Center for Historical Research and, more recently, the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, which was held, in-person, in Honolulu. She reminds the reader that this latter adventure is what academics refer to as “work.”
Kate Masur’s 2021 book, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, was named a New York Times Critics Pick, one of NPR’s top 100 books for 2021, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It will be out in paperback in June. Her collaborative project on Black life and activism in antebellum Illinois came to fruition this spring with publication of the web exhibit Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice. Undergraduate and grad students’ work was sponsored by the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, the Office of Undergraduate Research, and the Baker Faculty Fellowship from WCAS. With support from the Kaplan Institute for Humanities, she was able to pay honoraria to teachers at Evanston Township High School who are creating lessons, suggestions, and activities for high school teachers interested in adapting the project to their classrooms. One of the many fun things about the project was connecting with historians, librarians, and genealogists all over Illinois and beyond.
Sarah Maza struggled along with everyone else in the brave new world of zoom classes, online talks, and webinars. But there are upsides to this new world, one of which is that it’s easy to drop in on other people’s classes. This allowed her to visit a number of classrooms across the country which are using her 2017 introduction to the discipline, Thinking About History, and to chat with undergraduates and graduate students at a wide variety of institutions. Also on screens she has started to give talks about her new project, a joint study of how Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was received in nineteenth-century France and Les Misérables (1862) in the United States. She hopes to move the project along next year when she will hold a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, and also hopes next year will involve more “in real life” people.
Ed Muir’s term as president-elect of the American Historical Association began in January with the non-event of the convention in New Orleans, which was minimized by Covid. The job has become quite political, he has discovered, which means we face challenges to free speech and the freedom to teach from all over the world: from the Hindu nationalists, to Japanese apologists for World War II atrocities, to the Polish government's assault on academic historians, to the Chinese government's laws against insulting Chinese "heroes" whoever they may be, and, of course, to legislation in several states against the teaching of Critical Race Theory. In response the AHA has begun an initiative called "The Freedom to Teach." Wish us luck.
Susan Pearson published her new book, The Birth Certificate: An American History this year. She also took over as Director of Graduate Studies in the department. With such illustrious predecessors as Kate Masur, Scott Sowerby, and Sean Hanretta, she has big shoes to fill.
Carl Petry’s The Mamluk Sultanate, A History (Cambridge University Press) is scheduled for May, 2022. He was advised against listing his entry in the author's blurb as emeritus, even though that is his status as of 1 September 2021. He was in the active faculty category when he finished it.
David Schoenbrun's creative nonfiction essay on mobility and seeking new geographical and cultural knowledge--Afropolitanism--in southeastern Africa's 14th century will be published in the Radical History Review this October. In March, he delivered a Keynote Address to the "Rethinking Gender and Time" workshop held at Gent University, Belgium.
Michael Sherry keeps modestly busy as a retiree with book reviews, prize competition, and a bit of writing, while enjoyably observing the changes to Harris Hall (pleased to see the post-pandemic return of people) and the Department.
Over the past year, David Shyovitz developed several new courses, including a first-year seminar on "The History of Heaven" and an advanced undergrad seminar titled "What is Antisemitism?" He published an article in the journal Jewish History and continued working on his second book-in-progress, which explores the overlapping ways in which medieval Jews and Christians conceptualized the boundaries between humans and animals. His first book, A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz, was awarded the 2021 John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America.
Lauren Stokes published Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany with Oxford University Press in February 2022. She also taught a new course for the department, "History of the Present," alongside co-teacher Aram Sarkisian. While profoundly displeased about the amount of overlap between that course and her course on "Comparative Fascism," she was very pleased to win the Distinguished Teaching Award from Weinberg College in Spring 2022.
Scott Sowerby: juggled three publications this year that all managed to stagger across the finish line within a few months of each other. The first was Revolutionising Politics: Culture and Conflict in England, 1620–1660, a tribute to his PhD advisor, Mark Kishlansky, co-edited with Paul Halliday and Eleanor Hubbard and published by Manchester University Press. The second was The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England, a volume of essays from a conference at the Newberry Library, co-edited with Brian Cowan and published by Boydell & Brewer. The third was The Memoirs of Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall from 1633 to 1688 (co-edited with Noah McCormack and published by the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society), a doorstopper clocking in at 552 pages that has been the bane of Sowerby’s existence for the past twenty years. He is mostly relieved that the three books are finally done. He is now engrossed in writing yet another book, this one for Harvard University Press, entitled Absolution and Arms: The Violent Origins of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Research for this book, which has required learning German and Dutch, will soon take him to libraries in Haarlem, Delft, Utrecht and The Hague, where he will try out his dreadful pronunciation of “Goedemorgen” on unsuspecting archivists.