GREETINGS FROM THE CHAIR

Spring 2008

James Marten

Welcome to the fourth edition of Timeline, the history department's annual newsletter!  Thanks to Lezlie Knox for compiling the information, to Joyce Hunkel for putting it on the website, and to our colleagues and students for submitting reports of their activities. 

The newsletter contains tons of news, but I want to highlight just a few items:

--Thomas Jablonsky earned promotion to full professor. 

--Kristen Foster received the Faculty Excellence in Advising Award from the College of Arts and Sciences.  

--We successfully hired two new faculty members:  Alison Efford of The Ohio State University, who just defended her dissertation on “New Citizens: German Immigrants, African Americans, and the Reconstruction of Citizenship, 1865-1877,” will develop courses on immigration, ethnicity, and the Gilded Age.  She’s a native of New Zealand and has already published an article and several book reviews and given papers at numerous conferences around the country.  Andrew Kahrl finished his PhD at Indiana University this spring.  Although he will be revising his dissertation with a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University in 2008-2009, he will join us in the fall of 2009 to teach courses on African American history.  He worked for three years as an editorial assistant at the Journal of American History; in March 2008 his Pelzer Award-winning essay, “’Why the Police at No. 4 “Get Busy” When They Hear the Whistle of the “Razor Beach” Boat’: Steamboat Excursions, Pleasure Resorts, and the Emergence of Segregation Culture on the Potomac River, 1890-1920,” appeared in the Journal of American History. 

--The department will host two visiting chairs in 2008-2009.  Thomas Worcester, S.J. of the College of the Holy Cross will fill the Wade Chair and teach courses on the Jesuits and on Church History.

--Sherri Harper Charleston, a PhD candidate in history at the University of Michigan, will be a Mitchem Fellow in the department in 2008-2009.  Mitchem Fellowships support members of underrepresented ethnic groups during their last year of dissertation writing.  Sherri will also teach a course in African American history in the spring 2009 semester. 

--Our two endowed lectureships will feature internationally known scholars in 2008-2009.  Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago will speak on modern Korea on November 5, while Patricia Limerick, a historian of the American West at the University of Colorado will deliver the Klement Lecture on March 24.  Watch this website for more information.

--Finally, the department underwent its first external review in almost a decade.  Allan Winkler of Miami University of Ohio and Barbara Rosenwein of Loyola University-Chicago spent two days on campus and much longer reading a massive set of documents prepared by the university and the history department.  You can read some of their complimentary report here. 

You’ll find much more of interest in this newsletter.  And you can keep up to date on department news throughout the year at our website (at http://www.marquette.edu/history/)

Please feel free to pass the website address along to friends and classmates; we obtained email addresses from the Alumni Relations office, so only history grads with up-to-date files received the email linking alumni to this newsletter. With your help, we can reach even more former students. If you are a former undergraduate or graduate student and have something you’d like to share in the next newsletter, please contact us at MUHIST@marquette.edu.

For information on donating to the history department, or to Marquette University, please contact Kelley McCaskill, Director of Development, at kelley.mccaskill@marquette.edu.  Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss department needs and programs.

Have a great year!

 

Jim Marten, Professor and Chair

james.marten@marquette.edu