Faculty News
The Winter 2020 Newsletter will include more Faculty News.
Lydia Barnett completed her first book, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe, which was published in July 2019 by Johns Hopkins University Press. She also published a chapter in the edited volume Empires of Knowledge titled “Giant bones and the Taunton Stone: American antiquities, world history, and the Protestant International.” In spring 2019, she developed a new graduate seminar, “The Anthropocene and the Environmental Humanities," which was jointly offered by the History Department and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She recently completed an article related to her second book project on the marginalized laborers who sourced fossils from underground for elite European naturalists, forthcoming in History of Science.
Hollis Clayson (affiliate faculty member) is pleased to announce that her new book, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art And Lighting in the Belle Époque, was published by the University of Chicago Press in May (2019). She has enjoyed book launches in Evanston (Bookends and Beginnings), London (The Institute for Advanced Study at UCL), and Chicago (The Arts Club). Two launches in Paris are coming up: on October 3 in the Salle Labrouste of the Bibliothèque Nationale and on March 25 at the American Library of Paris.
Adjunct Professor Daniel Greene was appointed President and Librarian at the Newberry Library in 2019. He curated Americans and the Holocaust, an exhibition that opened in April 2018 at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, to commemorate the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary.
For Peter Hayes, the highpoint of recent years has been the success of his Why? Explaining the Holocaust. Kirkus named it a best non-fiction book of 2017; translations into German and Spanish appeared; the Auschwitz State Museum undertook to publish a Polish translation in the near future and a Chinese one is also in the offing; and a documentary film based on the book is now in development. With Christopher Browning, Hayes also finished a book called German Railroads/Jewish Souls, a collection of documents and essays, including two by the late Raul Hilberg, concerning deportations during the Holocaust that Berghahn will publish in October 2019. Six new essays by Hayes appeared in various volumes, and he also lectured at conferences in Berlin and Warsaw, at universities in Calgary and Madrid, at community and state colleges in California, Florida, New Jersey, and New York, and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he completed his service as chair of the Academic Committee in May 2019.
Laura Hein has started drinking a lot more coffee now that she occupies the Department Chair’s office right across the hall. She spent most of her scholarly attention in the past year on supervising the translation into Japanese of Post-Fascist Japan, which is due out from Jinbun Shoin Press in 2020. She is now the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of History.
Kate Masur was on leave last year thanks to an NEH fellowship. Her book, which is about race, rights, and federalism in the United States from the early republic to the 14th Amendment, is under contract with Norton. In 2018, Oxford Univ. Press published her new edition of John E. Washington’s They Knew Lincoln (1942), a classic in Lincoln studies and African American history that had been virtually forgotten. In the last several years she’s enjoyed and learned enormously from working on the public history of Reconstruction. That work included co-authoring, with Gregory P. Downs at UC-Davis, a major report on Reconstruction for the National Park Service, writing op-eds, and testifying before a House subcommittee in summer 2018. Happily, President Obama declared the Reconstruction Era National Monument in Beaufort, SC, days before leaving office, and last spring, Congress converted the monument into a National Park and laid the groundwork for a national network of Reconstruction sites.
Lauren Stokes has been typing away at her book manuscript, now tentatively titled Fear of the Foreign Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany. Should you be unable to wait for her to finish the book, you can preview some of the material in her recently published article: “‘An Invasion of Guest Worker Children’: Welfare Reform and the Stigmatisation of Family Migration in West Germany,” Contemporary European History Vol. 28 (2019): 372-389. She also published on “The Permanent Refugee Crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949—,” Central European History Vol. 52 (2019): 19-44. She has also logged several hours in archive reading rooms, including her first visit to the archives of the East German Stasi for a future article on the Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin.