2017-2018 History Newsletter

Three history faculty were recognized for excellence in research at the Distinguished Scholars reception (from left to right, below): Jenn Finn and Bryan Rindfleisch each received Way Klingler Young Scholar awards, and Tim McMahon received a Way Klingler Fellowship. Tim is the first member of the department to receive a Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship—only one is awarded each year, and it provides $20,000 in research funding for three years. The Way Kingler Young Scholar awards provide a semester sabbatical and $2000 of research funding. This is the first time two humanities scholars have won the awards in the same year. Read more about their projects—and other awards earned by history faculty and graduate students.

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Two other members of the department earned major awards from the College of Arts and Sciences: Jolene Kreisler was named “Staff Member of the Year,” while Lezlie Knox was named “Mentor of the Year,” primarily for her work as the Director of Graduate Studies for six years. (In the photo to the left, Jolene is on the left, Lezlie is on the right). “She is an advocate for all of her students and has guided many of my colleagues on to similar achievements,” wrote one student about Lezlie. “We are stronger students and professional academics, and better prepared for the world outside Marquette University because of Dr. Knox’s work on our behalf.” Jolene’s nomination declared that she “She is very, very good at her job, but her demeanor, kindness, professionalism, and good cheer truly separate her from many other administrative assistants on campus.”

The recognition of these scholars and mentors brings to fourteen the number of college and university awards earned by ten different members of the department over the last ten years! But, as I said, much more happened in the department since the last newsletter.

• Dr. Wayne Ryan and the Casper Fund:
  For many years the department has benefited from the generosity of Dr. Wayne L. Ryan of Omaha (left photo), who has endowed the Casper Fund in honor of Fr. Henry Casper, SJ, who was a long-time member of the faculties at Creighton University (Ryan’s alma mater) and at Marquette.  Dr. Ryan died last fall (here is his obituary, but the legacy of the Casper Fund will live on indefinitely in our Casper Lecture, travel grants to MA and PhD students, and public history programming. Below is a summary of the good work done by the Casper Fund.
  
  
• Public History and Internships at the Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear:
  Two MA students had paid internships at the Chudnow in summer 2017. Alex Smith wrote about his summer in a blog posted on Historians@Work while Emily Dattilo’s main project was creating a tour experience for seniors with memory loss. In fall 2017, Patrick Mullins’s Introduction to Public History class (comprised of five graduate students and five undergraduate students) used the Chudnow as a laboratory of sorts; they conceived, researched, and created an exhibit called “Hooves to Tires,” on the agricultural history of Milwaukee County. You can read more about the collaboration in this article on the MU website.
• Graduate Student Research and Conference Travel Funding: A significant chunk of Casper money helps graduate students pay for travel to deliver papers at professional conferences or to do research for MA essays or PhD dissertations. The funding of conference travel and research trips is a major part of our efforts to provide professional development opportunities for our graduate students; without  them, they simply would not be competitive on the job market. The nine conference presentations fully or partly funded by Casper money ranged from international conferences in Great Britain and at Yale University and Western Michigan University to conferences of national organizations like the Southern Historical Association and the Agricultural History Association to regional conferences like the Northern Great Plains and the Midwestern American Conference for Irish Studies. We also committed funded summer research trips in 2017 for two MA students and two PhD students. For 2018-2019, six students will receive a total of about $12,000 to six different students who will travel to archives from Kentucky to Ireland, from Philadelphia to France, and from Baltimore to Great Britain.

The Letter from the Chair featured some of the most important accomplishments by faculty in 2017-2018. In addition to activities and accomplishments mentioned elsewhere in the newsletter, History faculty gave lectures and papers, won awards and grants, and engaged the profession in a number of ways. The following is just a sample:

•  Steve Avella published The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa: A History of the Diocese of Des Moines (Liturgical Press). Steve was also consultant to Archdiocese of Milwaukee for the commemoration of its 175th Anniversary, which included writing articles for Catholic Herald on “The Impending 175th,” “The Lonely Statue,” and “The Great War and a Milwaukee Priest.
  
  
  
  
• Alan Ball published about two dozen original pieces on his SCOWstats blog, dedicated to a statistical analysis of the Wisconsin Supreme Court (http://www.scowstats.com). His work was cited in several decisions and articles and was included in the State Bar's 2018 list of notable law blogs, (March 2018).
• Michael Donoghue published “The Panama Canal and the United States,” Oxford University Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and is currently working on two book-length projects: The United States and Panama: a Postcolonial Alliance, 1964 to the Present, which will be part of the America and the Americas series at the University of Georgia Press, and Ports of Call, Bases of Revolution: the U.S. Military in Cuba 1941-1964.
• Alison Efford served as Newsletter editor and board member for the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and published "The Arms Scandal of 1870-1872: Immigrant Liberal Republicans and America’s Place in the World" in Reconstruction in a Globalizing World, ed. David Prior (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 94-120.
• Jenn Finn published Much Ado About Marduk: Questioning Discourses of Royalty in First Millennium Mesopotamian Literature (De Gruyter). She will spend part of her Way Klingler Young Scholar sabbatical this fall conducting research in Greece on her current book project, History Rewritten: Revisionism in the Age of Alexander the Great.
  
  
  
  
• Kristen Foster received a Summer Faculty Fellowship for “Finding Cato Adams,” which is part of a larger book manuscript entitled Haiti’s Mirror: Reflections of Race, Revolution, and Equality in Early America that sets American ideas about equality in the context of the revolutionary Atlantic World. She served on the Committee on Teaching and was deeply involved with the establishment of honors programs within humanities departments.
• Sergio Gonzalez, who will join the department in fall 2018, published Mexicans in Wisconsin (Wisconsin Historical Society).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Carla Hay is working on an article on the relationship between Catharine Macaulay and George Washington and a book-length project on celebrity in eighteenth-century England.
• Lezlie Knox published Visions of Sainthood in Medieval Rome (co-edited, Notre Dame) and gave several papers and lectures, including "Gender and the Creation of Medieval Vitae Fratrum," at the University of Notre Dame. She finished a six-year term as Director of Graduate Studies last August.
  
  
  
  
• Chima Korieh received a Summer Faculty Fellowship and a Regular Research Grant for a project tentatively called “The Genuine Farmer: Gender and the Dynamics of Agricultural Change in Colonial Southeastern Nigeria,” which will be a history of the gendered nature of colonial agricultural planning and their impact on agricultural transformation in southeastern Nigeria from 1900 to 1960. He was also chair of the 60th Annual Conference of the Igbo Studies Association in Chicago and delivered the keynote address at the Migration and Human Experiences in the 21st Century Conference at The Federal University Ndufu Alike Ikwo (FUNAI), Eboyi State, Nigeria, October 2017.
• James Marten presented a nation-wide webinar for the National Humanities Center on “The Century of the Child: American Children in the Twentieth Century” and delivered "Civil War Veterans and the Emergence of Modern America" at the University of Georgia. This summer he finished a five-year term as editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. He was one of several historians asked to contribute to "Civil War's Bests and Worsts" in The Civil War Almanac. (Kettering, Ohio: Civil War Monitor, 2017).
• Laura Matthew formally launched the website Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America (which received over 10,000 hits in its first few months) and published the Spanish translation of her book Memories of Conquest (Memorias de conquista:De indios conquistadores a mexicanos en la Guatemala colonial). Laura also received $13,000 for “Remembering Madre Rosa: Oral Histories of a Marquette Doctor in Highland Guatemala, 1962-1992.” She is leading an undergraduate student research team to investigate the history of dozens of Maryknoll Sisters who studied at Marquette in the mid-20th century, then ran a rural regional hospital in the middle of the Guatemalan civil war. The Mellon grant will pay for Laura and the students to travel to Guatemala in the summer of 2018.
• J. Patrick Mullins published Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution (Kansas). He has also nearly doubled the size of our internship program, from eight interns in 2016-17 to thirteen in 2017-18.

 

 

 

• Timothy McMahon published Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion (co-edited, Cambridge). He also gave several lectures and papers in the United States, Ireland, England, and Northern Ireland.
  
  
  
  
  
• Daniel Meissner spent the academic year as a Fulbright Scholar at Xiamen University, China.

• Phil Naylor contributed several entries to the Cambridge Dictionary of Modern World History and was one of the organizers of the World History Association Conference in Milwaukee in June. He also delivered “Algeria, France and Post-Colonial Decolonization," Claremont McKenna College in California and continues to serve as editor of the Journal of North African Studies.
• Bryan Rindfleisch delivered a number of papers and lectures and published "The Indian Factors: Kinship, Trade, and Authority in the Creek Nation & the American South, 1700-1800." Journal of Early American History 8, no. 1 (2018): 1-29. He was selected as one of the first cohort at the Bright Institute at Knox College, a three-year program for professors who teach early American history at liberal arts colleges.
• Rob Smith spent most of his time during his first year at Marquette launching the Center for Urban Research, Teaching, and Outreach. He described the work he and Sam Harshner, his assistant, have completed in a Historians@Work post. One project was a booklet called “The Long March to Freedom,” about the open housing marches in Milwaukee in 1967-1968. 7,000 copies of the printed version were distributed to libraries, schools, churches, community organizations and individuals in Milwaukee, as well as to national fair housing organizations.
• Peter Staudenmaier published “Preparation for Genocide: The ‘Center for the Study of the Jewish Problem’ in Trieste, 1942–1944,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 31 (2017), 1-23 and “Nazi Germany and the Occult: From Myth to History,” in Aeon (June 2017).
• Michael Wert delivered invited lectures at the College of William and Mary and at Yale University, and finished the manuscript for Samurai: A Concise History for Oxford University Press.
• Fr. Michael Zeps, SJ, spent part of his year-long sabbatical in Vienna, doing research on his monograph on public housing and cityscape in Vienna between WW I and the civil war of 1934. His compilation of documents related to this project, “Documents of Baudirektion Wien 1919-1941: Notes of Michael J. Zeps, S.J.,” has been downloaded from the MU library website nearly 4000 times.

As always, and as part of our responsibilities to our students, the university, and the larger community, the department hosted and co-sponsored many lectures, panels, and other presentations on a wide array of topics, from a Ancient Greece to an American journalist abroad, from abolitionism to public health in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and from gender rights in Ireland to civil rights in the United States.

This year’s events were:

September

• Bill Fliss and Kendall Cosley: "Dispatches from Nazi Germany: Bringing the Edwin A. Shanke Collection to Life in Digital Format,” co-sponsoredwith Raynor Libraries Special Collections.

October

• Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, NUI Galway: "Inspired by My Grandmother: My Fight for Gender Equality in NUI Galway," co-sponsoredwith English and Gender and Sexualities Studies.
  
  
• Klement Lecture by Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania: "Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument Over Humanity.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Rachael Ball, University of Alaska: "Charitable Comedies and Public Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World," lead co-sponsorwith Languages, Literatures and Cultures and Office of International Education. 

March

• Anatomy of a Fair Housing Case: panel discussion with top administrators at the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council. Part of “200 Nights of Freedom,” the commemoration of the 50h anniversary of the Open Housing Marches in Milwaukee in 1967-1968.
  
  
• Casper Lecture by Anna Clark, University of Minnesota: “Human Rights and Animal Rights: Local Control of Hospitals in the 1890s British Empire.”

April

• Phi Alpha Theta Lecture by Michael Leese, University of New Hampshire: "What's really so special about the modern mind? Insights from Ancient Greece."
• Calibans and Caribbeanisms: Spaces and Topographies: provided $500 funding as co-sponsorof this conference hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.
• Metcalfe Lecture by Albert Raboteau, Princeton University: “A Fire in the Bones,” co-sponsoredwith the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• “MU Protests: Fifty Years Later”: Panel discussion featured alums Albert Raboteau, Art Heitzer, Peggy Kendrigan, and Greg Stanford. Part of “200 Nights of Freedom.” You can watch a video of the panel (which took place in the Haggerty Museum—see photo to the left) here.
  
  
  
• Heather Stur, University of Southern Mississippi: "Saigon's War: Political Activism and the Fight for Vietnam," co-sponsoredwith Office of International Education.

Current Students

Undergraduate Students

The following students were inducted into Phi Alpha Theta, the international history honor society:

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• Cara Caputo, a junior, is interning at the Chicago Historical Society this summer.
• Joe Harding, a 2018 graduate, was the oldest student to earn a BA at Marquette this year; read about him in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story.
• Dolan McGuire (BA) will enter Harvard University Law School in fall 2018.
• Eva Shons Rodriguez (left photo, with her mentor, Prof. Jenn Finn) was named Outstanding Senior by the College of Arts and Sciences and spoke at the college commencement ceremony in May. She will study classical languages at the University of Chicago.
  
  
  
  
  
• Steven Wales, a graduating senior, will be commissioned a 2^ndlieutenant in the US Army and join the 101^stAirborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he will train as an intelligence officer.

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 Graduate Students

• Several graduating MA students will go on to PhD programs with full funding: Kendall Cosley will attend Texas A & M University, Matt Goetz will attend George Mason, and Steve Vickers will attend Marquette University.
• Kendall Cosley, who received who MA this spring,helped coordinate and present a program on the MU archives’ Edwin A. Shanke (a journalist living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s) papers in Raynor University Archives in September. She also presented a paper on war correspondents in WWII at the Society for Military History Conference this month.
• Lucas Greenwalt(MA student)  was awarded a $2,500 research from the Marquette University Center for Transnational Justice to conduct research in Washington.  He was also accepted into Middlebury College’s prestigious Summer language program
• Cory Haala, PhD candidate, gave a public lecture: on "The Many DFLs of Rudy Perpich's Minnesota," at the Minnesota Historical Society in January 2018. He also published "DFL Feminist Caucus" on MNopedia.org, and a chapter drawn on his dissertation research: "South Dakota Politics in the 1980s," The Plains Political Tradition, vol. 3 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, September 2018).  Finally, Cory earned three travel grants that have helped fund his dissertation research during the last year: Minnesota Historical Society Legacy Research Grant; Paul Simon Congressional Papers Travel Stipend; and  Dirksen Congressional Research Grant. 
• Sam Harshner received a $4000 Colonial Dames Fellowship to help fund research on his dissertation, which is tentatively called “Pope’s Day and Masculinity: An Ideology of the American Revolution.”
• Aaron Kinskey, an MA student, presented "The Magdalene Chapel of Assisi: In Defense of Franciscan Humilitas"at the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies' Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, and "The Magdalene Chapel of Assisi: Shaping Penitent Pilgrims" at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University.  He also attended the Digital Editing and Medieval Manuscripts Workshop at Yale University in November, with help from a grant from Yale. 
• Christian Krueger, a first year PhD student, is the Casper Public History Intern at the Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear in Milwaukee this summer.
• Lisa Lamson received two research grants for her dissertation on African American girls in nineteenth century Baltimore: from MU’s graduate school (a summer grant for preparing applications for major grants) and from MU’s Center for Transnational Justice. She gave papers at Duke University and at the Children’s History Society conference at the University of Greenwich.  Lisa was also coordinator for the Writing Center’s "Transcribe-a-thon" in honor of Frederick Douglass's birthday, which she wrote about on Historians@Work.
• Ben Nestor, PhD candidate, presented papers at the European section of the Southern Historical Association, the Council for European Studies, the Society for Military History, the 13th Annual International Holocaust & Genocide Studies Conference, and the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention in Paris, France, with the assistance of a travel grant provided by the Schaeffer Center.  He also  participated in two externally funded fellowship seminars, one through the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure in Lviv, Ukraine, the other at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington D.C.  He also gave a public lecture called “Archival Odyssey: Edie Shafer and the Shanghai Ghetto,” at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee reflecting on my participation designing an exhibit on a family’s journey from Nazi Germany to the Shanghai Ghetto, before settling in Milwaukee. 
• Maggie Nettesheim-Hoffman (PhD candidate) received a travel grant from the Economic History Society at the London School of Economics to present “A Menace to the National Welfare: The Final Report of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations & The Progressive Era Critique of American Philanthropic Foundations,” at the New Directions in American Philanthropy Conference in Sheffield, England, and received the Tilly Award from the Social Science History Association for the paper she presented at their conference in Montreal, “The Philanthropic Factory: Capitalism, Corporate Charity, and Forging New Socio-Economic Worker Identities in Milwaukee,” Social Science History Association.  She was also a member of a panel on “Humanities Without Walls” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Humanities, and was a judge for National History Day events including in Waukesha, Milwaukee, and Madison.
• Sean O’Farrell, an MA student, has written several pieces for the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee this year; “Urban Renewal” was posted on the web version of the EMKE earlier this year.
• Adam Petersen, MA student, published “The Premillennial Menace”: Shailer Mathews’ Theological-Political Battle Against Premillennialism During the First World War,” Journal of Church and State, Volume 60 (May 2018): 271–298.

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Alumni

Undergraduate

• Alexandra Bracken (BA), will begin studies this fall at the Global Human Development program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
• Josh Buege (BA), received an MBA from Concordia University Wisconsin in 2014 and is currently the sales and marketing director of Criterion Barrels Inc. Josh’s company manufactures and distributes match grade barrels for modern precision rifles and vintage military rifle designs.
• Ellen Faletti (BA) is finished her MA in Art History at UW-Madison and is currently an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
• Cathy Frehe (BA) will enter the MA program at Marquette this fall.
• Natalie (Russell) Hill (BA) published “’Useful and Beautiful Things’: Lizzie Black Kander’s Space for Immigrants and Girls in Milwaukee,” in theVanderbilt Historical Review.
• Andrew Sharos (BA), a teacher at West Leyden High School near Chicago, published All 4s and 5s: A Guide to Teaching and Leading Advanced Placement Programs(Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc., 2018).
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Emily Swenson (BA) graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 with a Master of Library and Information Studies with a focus in Archive and Records Management. She is currently a Project Archivist at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan.
• Kylene Woods (BA) is Supervisory Archivist, Archives II Textual Processing (RDTP2),at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington.

Graduate Students

• Four PhD alums took new jobs: Michael Pulido accepted a tenure-track position at Belleview College in Washington, State, while McKayla Sutton will be a full-time adjunct at Clovis Community College in Fresno, CA. Bethany Harding is an instructor and advisor at National Louis University in Chicago.  Finally, Karalee Surface is a part-time advisor in the honors program at Marquette University, this summer is teaching a course on American history through the Office of International Education.
• Kevin Abing (PhD), director of the library at the Milwaukee County Historical Society, won the Gambrinus Prize from the MCHS for best book in Milwaukee history published in 2017 for A Crowded Hour: Milwaukee During the Great War, 1917-1918 (Arcadia, 2017).
• Laura Abing (PhD), Senior Communication Specialist in MU’s office of University Advancement, received an Excellence in University Service Award from Marquette.
• John Callebert (MA) works full time at Quinn’s Auction Gallery in Falls Church, VA, where he prepares their weekly auctions. He also works part-time performing living history at a 1770 tobacco farm in Maryland’s Piscataway National Park.
• Emily Dattilo (MA) worked as a Collections Assistant at the McHenry County Historical Society. She wrote about her experiences in a blog post at Historians@Work.
• Brian Faltinson (MA) was promoted to Major in the Wisconsin National Guard.  He’s spent the last year researching, writing, and making a film about the experiences of Wisconsin’s famed “Rainbow Division” in the First World War.
• Monica Storme Gallamore (PhD), will become a professor of history at Collin College in Frisco, Texas.  She also began a three-year term on the Executive Council for the Western Social Science Association, and published The Incomparable Hildegarde: The Sexuality, Style and Image of an Entertainment Icon(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018).
  
  
  
  
• Tony Guidone (MA), is PhD student at George Mason University studying early American history. This summer he is interning at the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture in the Military History Department. 
• Stephen M. Leahy (PhD) is an Associate Professor of History in the Center for Global Studies at Shantou University, Shantou, Guangdong Province, China. His article, "George Wallace and the Myth of the Polish American Bigot in Milwaukee, 1963-1964," will soon be published in Polish American Studies.
• Claire Marshall (MA) finished her MLIS at the University of Michigan and is working at the Central Intelligence Agency.
• Andrew Mountin (BA, MA) is moving to LA where he will be the worship director at the University of Southern California Caruso Catholic Center and Our SSavior parish.
• Kelly Smale (MA) was selected for a teacher seminar this summer through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at New York University
• Patrick Steele (PhD), an associate professor of history at Concordia University,published Home of the Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Heather Stur (MA, BA—right photo), an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, received the Professional Achievement Award from the J. William and Mary Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University (she was a double major in History and Journalism).
  
  
  
  
• Julie Tatlock(PhD), is Chair of the Department of Justice, Sociology, and History at Mount Mary University, where she is also director of the United Nations Experience Program. She recently published “Conflict and Student Engagement: Reacting to the Past at Mount Mary University,” Peace Review, March 2018, and is a Series Editor for Early Civilizations and the Rise of Empires in World History(Farmington Hills, MI: Gale).  
• Hannah Zimmerman (MA) is Marketing and Communications Director at Historic Locust Grove, a ca. 1790 house and grounds in Louisville, Kentucky.