THE NEWSLETTER DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY Number 55 Chapel Hill, North Carolina Autumn 2006 History Department Faculty and Staff Fall 2005 CAROLINA ALUMNI RECEPTION Please join us for an Alumni Reception at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Birmingham, Alabama. The event is scheduled for Friday, November 17, 2006, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. in the Birmingham Ballroom 1, which is located on the first floor of the Sheraton Birmingham Hotel, off the main lobby. We look forward to seeing you there. GREETINGS FROM THE CHAIR History Departments build their identities upon deep structural continuities that connect the work of each year and the labor of each generation of historians—teaching, conducting research, writing books, advising students. Although we now draw on technologies, resources and historical themes that our predecessors could not have imagined, we still face questions that would be familiar to every previous generation: how do we actually know what happened in the past, how do we convey what we know to students or a wider public, and how do we provoke others to ask their own analytical questions about the incredibly diverse history of people and cultures? The faculty and students of the UNC History Department have devoted another productive year to the pursuit of such questions. We have not found the final answers, of course, but the processes of inquiry and historical reflection have generated stimulating classes, imaginative publications, and wide-ranging contacts with a public that extends far beyond the University. The significance of this work cannot be accurately measured in numbers, yet the quantitative measurements alone suggest the Department’s dynamism: the publication of nine new books, three edited books and more than 60 scholarly articles, essays, and chapters in edited collections; faculty presentations at more than 100 conferences and public events; a distinguished teaching award for one of our colleagues (Professor Kathryn Burns) and the election of another (Professor Christopher Browning) to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and the receipt of highly competitive grants and fellowships from prominent foundations and centers for advanced research. The faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates of the UNC History Department, in short, remain extremely busy and productive in every sphere of academic life. Our future growth and creativity, however, requires the revitalizing perspectives and energy of new faculty colleagues, five of whom are joining us in 2006. These new appointments will help us expand and renew our programs in fields such as East Asian, African, and Russian History as well as US History, so I would like to provide a brief summary of the expertise that these new colleagues bring to UNC. Professor Dani Botsman is a specialist in 19th-century Japanese History who received his PhD at Princeton and has taught at Harvard since 1999. His work has focused on the issue of law and punishment, a theme that appears prominently in his book Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, 2005). Professor Crystal Feimster works on the history of women and race in the late 19th-century American South. She completed her PhD at Princeton in 2000 and spent a post-doctoral year at Yale before joining the faculty at Boston College, where she has taught since 2001. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching in the American South, which will be published by Harvard University Press. Professor Christopher Lee works in the field of modern African History, with a particular emphasis on southern Africa and Malawi. He received his PhD at Stanford and later served as a lecturer in the History Department there and at Harvard. He held a post-doctoral fellowship during this past year at Dalhousie University, where he worked on a book that examines the politics of race and ethnicity in colonial Nyasaland [Malawi] during the period between 1915 and 1939. Professor Wayne Lee comes to our department with a joint appointment in the interdisciplinary Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense. He specializes in early American history, with an additional interest in the comparative military history of Native Americans, early modern Europeans, and ancient Greeks. He received his PhD at Duke in 1999 and has taught for the last six years at the University of Louisville. His publications include a book on eighteenth-century America, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: the Culture of Violence in Riot and War (University Press of Florida, 2001). Professor Louise McReynolds works on the history of late imperial Russia. She completed her PhD at the University of Chicago and taught for more than twenty years at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her publications include a recent book, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Cornell University Press, 2006); and she joins our Department after a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. We were also pleased to make an appointment this year in the field of Chinese History, but our new colleague, Michelle King, will not come to Chapel Hill until 2007 (she is completing a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley). And we have benefited over the past year from the presence of two outstanding post-doctoral fellows: Shaun Lopez (modern Middle Eastern History, PhD, University of Michigan) and Adrianne Lentz-Smith (Modern African American History, PhD, Yale University). Another talented post-doctoral fellow, JoAnna Poblete-Cross (Modern American and Transnational Labor History, PhD, UCLA), has come to the Department this fall. Among the many Departmental events and activities that might be highlighted in this report, I would like to emphasize the success of the second annual African American History lecture in February, which featured Professor Robin D. G. Kelley of Columbia University speaking on “The Education of Thelonious Monk.” The Department also initiated a lively, interactive faculty lunch colloquium at which we discuss the current work of our colleagues; we expanded our plans for new Departmental exchange programs with Kings College in London and the National University of Singapore (which includes a new joint degree program for undergraduates); we re-established the UNC chapter of the national History undergraduate Honor Society, Phi Alpha Theta; and we developed a recently funded plan to collaborate with UNC’s School of Education in reviving the Department’s program of seminars for High School History teachers, the Project for Historical Education. We expect all of these initiatives to develop and expand in the coming year. As always, the Department also marked a number of milestones in the careers of our faculty and staff. Professor John Wood Sweet (early American History) was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. Professor Richard Pfaff (medieval 1 English History) entered retirement after a festive celebration of his long UNC career (see the section on this event after the news of the faculty). And three other long-serving, valuable members of the Department entered into “phased retirement” in July 2006: Don Higginbotham, Michael Hunt, and Jim McCoy. Each of these colleagues will continue to teach during one semester of the academic year, so they will be part of Departmental life—but in a changing role. And we bid a regretful farewell to Pamela Fesmire, a much-admired member of our staff who moved on to another position in the University after more than twenty years in the Department. Although the diverse accomplishments of our faculty and graduate students are described in later pages of the Newsletter, I want to recognize those colleagues who received prestigious fellowships for one or two semesters in the 2006-07 academic year: Christopher Browning and Sarah Shields (National Humanities Center); Kathryn Burns and Sarah Shields (National Endowment for the Humanities); Konrad Jarausch (Wissenschaftszrentrum Fellowship, Berlin) Lisa Lindsay (American Council of Learned Societies); Theda Perdue (John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars); Yasmin Saikia (Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation); Jerma Jackson, Don Reid, and John Wood Sweet (Institute for the Arts and Humanities, UNC-CH); Kathleen DuVal, Jerma Jackson, Lisa Lindsay, Terrence McIntosh, and John Wood Sweet (Spray-Randleigh Fellowships, UNC-CH). It should also be noted that The Ancient World Mapping Center, which is directed by Richard Talbert, received a prestigious grant of almost $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop an on-line “workspace” that will provide digital access to a wide range of information and commentaries on ancient geography; and the Southern Oral History Program, which is directed by Jacquelyn Hall, received a grant of more than $ 500,000. from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to digitize many of the interview it has recorded over the past 30 years. The Department continued to rely on the excellent leadership of our Associate Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Professor Miles Fletcher, our Director of Graduate Studies, Professor Fitz Brundage, and our Administrative Manager, Nadine Kinsey; and Rhonda Whitfield designed the attractive new layout for the Newsletter you are now reading. Equally important, however, the Department continues to depend on the remarkable generosity of our alumni and friends, who give us the resources we need to sustain and develop our many programs for faculty and students. These generous donors are listed later in this Newsletter, and I thank every one of you for the support that enables us to pursue our ambitious visions for historical education and scholarship. Lloyd Kramer, Chair Dani Botsman Crystal Feimster Christopher Lee Wayne Lee Louise McReynolds SOME NEWS OF THE FACULTY CHRISTOPHER BROWNING was a fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities in the fall semester of 2005. Next year he will be a fellow at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle, where he plans to complete his manuscript on the Starachowice factory slave labor camps.