Faculty News

Spring 2009

The History department is pleased to welcome Mary Roldan, who will be joining the faculty in Fall 2009 as Epstein Professor of Latin American history. Professor Roldan has a Ph.D. from Harvard and comes to Hunter from Cornell University.

Prof. Benjamin Hett has won a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship as well as an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship. Congratulations! Professor Hett has also just published Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand (Oxford University Press, 2008), a book which has also just been translated into several different languages. Professor Hett spoke about his book at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York on 9 February 2009. He has also published: "'And Only Where There Are Graves Are There Resurrections': Hans Litten Between East and West," European Studies Forum 38 (2), 2008

The Department is pleased to announce that Professor Emerita Nancy Siraisi has won a 2008 MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius award." Learn more here: http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.4537287/k.84A7/Nancy_Siraisi.htm. Congratulations!

Professor Donna Haverty-Stacke published an op-ed entitled "Can Obama Change America’s Understanding of Class and Dissent?" on the History News Network, January 19, 2009: http://hnn.us/articles/59966.html. She is also the recipient of a Spring 2009 Presidential Travel Award.

Professor Manu Bhagavan is serving as the 2009 President of the Society for Advancing the History of South Asia (SAHSA), the national organization of South Asia historians subsidiary to the American Historical Association.

Professor Karen Kern presented “Gender, the Law, and Milk Marriage in late Ottoman Birecik,” at Gender and Power in the Muslim World, a Conference at Sarah Lawrence College, March 6-7, 2009 and at New Perspectives on Gender and Legal History – European Traditions and the Challenge of Global History (Middle Ages to 20th Century), Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, April 2-4, 2009.

Spring 2008

Karen Kern published two articles: "Women, Gender and Family Law: Modern Family Law, 1800-2000," Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures (EWIC), Volume VI, (Leiden: Brill), December 2007; and "Rethinking Ottoman frontier policies: marriage and citizenship in the province of Iraq," The Arab Studies Journal, xv. no. 1 (Spring, 2007): 8-29. She also presented two conference papers: "Ottoman-Iranian relations in late Ottoman Iraq: colonialism, marriage and citizenship" at the Symposium on Iranian-Ottoman Relations, Middle East Center, University of Pennsylvania, April 4, 2008; and "I will slander you and you will be imprisoned for fifteen years: gender, the law, and milk marriage in Ottoman Birecik," at The 41st Annual Middle East Studies Association Conference, Montreal, November 17, 2007.

Julie Miller has been awarded a 2008 Gilder Lehrman Fellowship.

Manu Bhagavan has published "A New Hope: India, the United Nations, and the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," in Modern Asian Studies, 13 June 2008, copyright Cambridge University Press. Click here.

Tom Head completed "Sainthood Defining Sin: The Cult of the Martyrs and the Enemies of 'Orthodox' Christianity in Asia Minor, 100-400 CE." In Marcel Sarot and Jan Willem van Henten (eds.), Icons of Sainthood and Sin (Studies in Theology and Religion, in press). He also published 3 other articles: "Naming Names: The Nomenclature of Heresy in the Early Eleventh Century." In Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds.), History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person (Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 91-100; "The Ambiguous Bishop." In John Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones (eds.), The Bishop Reformed (Ashgate, 2007), pp. 269-85; "Early Medieval Piety and Its Transformations." In Michael McCormack and Jennifer Davis (eds.), New Directions in Early Medieval History. (Ashgate, 2007).

Florence Asher has won a Presidential Student Engagement Co-Curricular Activity Initiative award.

Manu Bhagavan published two books, both co-edited with Anne Feldhaus: Claiming Power from Below and Speaking Truth to Power, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Helena Rosenblatt was honored with a 2008 Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Her book, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion will be published this summer with Cambridge University Press. She recently published "On the Intellectual Sources of Laicité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion" in French Politics, Society and Culture 25, 3 (Winter, 2007). This summer, an article entitled "Rousseau the anticosmopolitan?" will be appearing in Daedalus.

As part of his current research on the relationship between the culture of classical music in the United States and twentieth-century international affairs, Jonathan Rosenberg has written an essay on Leonard Bernstein's Cold War tours with the NY Philharmonic, which will appear in Leonard Bernstein: An American Original (Harper Collins, 2008). In conjunction with this research, CNN International, the BBC, and the Boston Globe asked Professor Rosenberg to discuss the NY Philharmonic's recent tour to North Korea and, more broadly, the history of American cultural diplomacy. Rosenberg has also written essays on the transnational dimensions of western classical music and on the symphony orchestra, which will appear in The Dictionary of Transnational History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Daniel Hurewitz won the Herbert Hoover Award for his book, Bohemian Los Angeles.

Marta Petrusewicz has been awarded the "Citta di Cassano Prize" for the book that she edited and introduced - Kazimiera Alberti, L'Anima della Calabria, Rubbettino Editore 2008.

Donna Haverty-Stacke's book, America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867 - 1960, will be published in the American History and Culture Series at NYU Press, forthcoming fall 2008.

Marta Petrusewicz has obtained a grant of 10,000.00 euro towards the publication of a book Come studiare i Sud?/ How to study the Souths? ed. by M. Petrusewicz, Bologna: il Mulino 2008 (forthcoming).

Donna Haverty-Stacke has contracted with the Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc. to co- edit the Continuum Companion in U.S. Labor History with Daniel J. Walkowitz (NYU).

Donna Haverty-Stacke will be presenting a paper on "Labor Anticommunism and the 1941 Smith Act Trial" at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2009.

Julie Miller's book, Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City, was published in April 2008 by New York University Press. Click here to learn more about the book.

Julie Miller published the following article: "Transatlantic Anxieties: New York's Nineteenth-Century Foundling Asylums and the London Foundling Hospital," Annales de Demographie Historique , 2007, no. 2, pp.37-58. She also presented the following paper: "Jane Broadway and William Unknown: Naming Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City," European Social Science History Conference, Lisbon, March, 2008. This June, she will present: "Amelia Norman and the Criminalization of Seduction in Antebellum New York City," Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Minneapolis.

Fall 2007

Helena Rosenblatt has organized a conference to examine the contemporary meanings of the work of Benjamin Constant, a founding figure of liberalism. Speakers include US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, and Université de Paris II Professor of Political Science Philippe Raynaud. Dec 10, 4-6pm, CUNY Graduate Center. For more information, click here.

The History Department announces a tenure-track search in the History of Latinas/os in the United States. For details see here.

Florene Memegalos published George Goring (1608-1657): Caroline Courtier and Royalist General in October 2007 with Ashgate Publishing Ltd. of the UK.

Benjamin Hett has won the pretigious Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for 2007, awarded by the Weiner Library in London. The prize is for Hett's book, Crossing Hitler: Hans Litten’s Legal Struggle Against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

The History Department announces a tenure-track search in African American history. For details, see here.

Donna Haverty-Stacke's book, America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism 1867-1960, is forthcoming from NYU Press.