Department News

Congratulations to Amy Greenberg! Amy was recently interviewed for a show exploring how American wars have ended, which began airing this week. Amy discussed the end of the Mexican-American war, and the role of a "rogue diplomat" - Nicholas Trist. You can listen to her segment, "Bounding Manifest Destiny," here.

Congratulations to Mark Christensen! Mark’s first book, Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) was published last month.  The book is based on his Penn State dissertation.  Mark graduated from our program in 2010 under the supervision of Matthew Restall.

Congratulations to Sean Trainor! Sean was recently awarded a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Short-Term Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA.

Congratulations to Jason Strandquist! Jason has been selected as a participant in the NEH Seminar at Calvin College entitled “Persecution, Toleration, Co-Existence.”

Congratulations to Bill Cossen! Bill’s paper entitled, “Blood, Honor, Reform, and God: Anti-Dueling Associations and the Remaking of Southern Masculinity," has been accepted for inclusion at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in St. Louis, MO, July 18-21, 2013.  The paper is part of a roundtable panel on gender, honor, and violence in the antebellum United States.

Congratulations to Matthew Restall!  Matthew will be a Fellow (Member) of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in Fall 2013, and will also be the John Carter Brown Library Visiting Fellow at Brown University.  In Spring 2014, he will be the National Endowment for the Humanities/Donald L. Saunders Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library.  He will be writing a book titled The Last Emperor: Cortés and Montezuma Revisited. In addition, a Spanish translation of Matthew’s previous book was published last month as Los Conquistadores (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2013).

Congratulations to Michael Kulikowski! Michael’s new book, Mosaics of Time. The Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD, Volume I: A Historical Introduction to the Chronicle Genre from its Origins to the High Middle Ages, the first of a projected four volumes co-authored with Richard Burgess of Ottawa, has just appeared from Brepols.

Congratulations to Karen Younger! Karen (PhD, 2006) has accepted a position as tenure-track Assistant Professor in US History at Waynesburg University.

Congratulations to Hongyan Xiang! Hongyan recently gave a talk entitled “The Invisible Battle: The Contest between the French Catholic Mission and the Late Qing Government over Property Ownership" at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

Congratulations to Antwain Hunter, Kelly Knight, Andrew Prymak, and Sean Trainor! The work of the Richards Center and the research of these graduate students were featured in an article by Doug Stanfield in Research Penn State magazine. The article is available online at http://news.psu.edu/story/268355/2013/03/13/research/richards-center-trains-next-generation-civil-war-scholars, and will appear in print later this month or early next month.

Congratulations to Sean Trainor! Sean has been awarded a nine-month dissertation fellowship by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2013-2014 academic year.

In addition, Sean’s paper entitled “The Cutting Edge of Capital: Straight Razors, Commodified Labor, and the Consuming Capitalist Subject,” has been accepted for inclusion at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in St. Louis, MO, July 18-21, 2013. The paper is part of a panel that Sean organized, entitled “Crappy Stuff, Stolen Goods, and Cutthroat Razors: Consumer Good Lifecycles and New Narratives of Capitalism.”

Congratulations to Chris Hayashida-Knight! Chris received a research grant from Penn State’s Africana Research Center. Chris earned this award for his project titled “‘We Are All Bound Up Together’: African American Women’s Nationalism and Citizenship in Philadelphia, 1865-1900.”

In addition, Chris will be presenting a paper at the Critical Ethnic Studies Association national conference in Chicago this September titled, "Neighborhood Nationalisms: Black and White Womens’ Patriotism at the 1876 Centennial."

Congratulations to Andrea Gatzke! Andrea (CAMS-History Dual Title) has been appointed Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History (tenure-track) at SUNY, New Paltz. Andrea, who defends her dissertation in April, was invited for three on-campus interviews and was offered all three jobs.

Congratulations Katie Falvo! Katie has been granted the Gest Fellowship Award through the Quaker Collections at Haverford College.

Congratulations to Will Bryan! Will won the Alumni Association Dissertation Award for his dissertation, "Nature and the New South: Economic Development in the Age of Conservation, 1877-1929.”

Congratulations to Sally McMurray! Sally has won the Paul E. Buchanan Award for her work on the Pennsylvania Agricultural History Project. The award will be presented at the Annual Vernacular Architecture Forum Conference which is being held in Gaspe, Canada.

Congratulations to Crystal Sanders! Crystal has been selected as a 2013-14 Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Congratulations to Nina Safran! Nina’s book, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia, has just been published by Cornell University Press.

Congratulations to Bryan McDonald! Bryan’s article, co-authored with Donald B. Thompson, “What Food is ‘‘Good’’ for You? Toward a Pragmatic Consideration of Multiple Values Domains” just appeared in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, vol. 26.1 (2013): 137-163.

Grace was awarded a fellowship at the Bill and Rita Clements Center for the Study of the Southwest at Southern Methodist University. The fellowship is awarded for the fall semester, 2013 to complete her book manuscript, Sex and State: Immigration Control and Morals Policing at America’s Early Twentieth-Century Borderlands (University of Arizona Press, 2015). Furthermore, Grace’s book Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion at the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford University Press, 2012) is now available in paperback.