Students

Ph.D. candidate Szabolcs László was invited to contribute to a Symposium discussing the volume The End of the Liberal Mind: Poland’s New Politics, edited by Jarosław Kuisz and Karolina Wigura (Kultura Liberalna Foundation: Warsaw, 2020). The symposium, convened by IU Professor Jeffrey C. Isaac and hosted by Democracy Seminar, asked authors from Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the U.S. to reflect on the Polish situation from the vantage point of their own experiences. László’s review essay, entitled “Six Appraisals of the Illiberal Mind,” compares the illiberal populist regimes in Hungary and Poland.

László, with Drs. Maria Bucur and Liza Black, joined the international interdisciplinary project entitled “To Be – Named,” organized in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s Recovering Voices program and created to explore the cultural politics of naming and to build mutual understanding between groups around the processes involved in identification through names. On June 17-18, Professor Bucur and László participated in the project’s multilingual workshop devoted to critically examining the question of names traveling across borders — whether geographical, temporal, cultural, gendered, and so on. The organizers plan to publish the contributions to the workshop in a special issue of the journal Cultural Politics. Professor Black will be contributing a piece about the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s crisis and the use of victims’ names as a tool in organizing.

During the summer, László gave online presentations based on his dissertation research about the globalization of the Hungarian Kodály Method during the Cold War at two international conferences: the 27th International Conference of Europeanists organized by the Council for European Studies and the 10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies hosted by Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.

Shouyue Zhang has received the Jerome M. Clubb Scholarship, awarded to graduate students interested in quantitative history, to participate in the 2021 Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Summer Program. Shouyue was also interviewed by Newsweek in this July article, providing a historical perspective on the driving factor of China's economic prosperity.

Faculty

Congratulations to Kalani Craig and Tina Irvine who are recipients of the 2021 Dr. James E. Mumford Excellence in Extraordinary Teaching Award, which recognizes “instructors who have demonstrated notably innovative, creative, and compassionate teaching in response to the past year’s extraordinary events.”

Carl Ipsen has won the 2021 Sophie Coe prize in Food History (from a field of 85 entries). The following is taken from the judge’s report:

"The Sophie Coe Prize 2021 has been awarded to Carl Ipsen for "From Cloth Oil to Extra Virgin: Italian Olive Oil Before the Invention of the Mediterranean Diet." That there’s more to our food than meets the eye is a truism solidly buttressed by this investigation of how southern Italian olive oil, now often among the finest of all extra virgin oils gracing our tables, has developed from an agricultural staple that fuelled industrial processes and life’s necessities such as fuel for lighting to being a food product notable for its artisanal veracity. The judges agreed that the breadth of sources investigated was impressive, the facts elicited surprising, the exposition clear and well expressed. The larger point of the essay is the mobility of foods across continents, but the real interest lies in the mobility of food standards across time."

Michelle Moyd received an award from the Indiana Studies team of Platform: An Arts & Humanities Research Laboratory for her project,  Fighting for Citizenship.

Mark Roseman gave the paper “Rescue from Memory – the postwar metamorphosis of the experience of rescue” in the (virtual) panel “The Rescue Turn. Holocaust Memory, Politics, and Debates” at the annual conference of the international Memory Studies Association, Warsaw, July 5-9.

He also presented in the concluding round table at the virtual conference “Integrating Holocaust Studies”, jointly organized by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hebrew University Jerusalem, July 19-22.

Rebecca Spang wrote about inflation for The Washington Post (May 25, 2021) and reviewed Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth (along with 5 other books) for The TLS. She was also cited in the New York Times (on inflation) and by Bloomberg and The Counter (on restaurants past and future).

Ellen Wu has been selected to participate In the Program for Faculty Assistance in Data Science (FADS) to advance her project, “#StopAsianHate: The Life of a Viral Hashtag.”

Alumni

Cody Foster (BA, 2012) graduated in May with a Ph.D. in History from the University of Kentucky. Trained under Drs. Hang Nguyen and George Herring, he successfully defended his dissertation titled, “To ‘Reawaken the Conscience of Mankind”: The International War Crimes Tribunal and Transnational Human Rights During the Vietnam War, 1966-1967.” Previously, Cody received a Master of Philosophy in Historical Studies in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, and earlier worked with Nick Cullather at IU, where he was a fellow in the McNair Scholars Program. Cody teaches at IU Southeast and Bellarmine University.

Denisa Jashari, Ph.D. 2020, received the University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the University Graduate School for her dissertation,  “Cartographies of Conflict: Political Culture and Urban Protest in Santiago, Chile, 1872-1994”. This is the award for the best dissertation in the Humanities and Fine Arts completed at Indiana University in academic years 2019-20 or 2020-21. Denisa is now Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.