It’s been a busy semester in the SUNY Geneseo Department of History! Here’s some of what our faculty has been up to over the past few months.
Catherine Johnson Adams (Associate Professor, U.S. History) was appointed to a term as co-chair of the Black Studies program, together with Maria Lima (Professor, Department of English).
Jovana Babović’s (Assistant Professor, European History) book, Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia, was awarded the 2018 Mihajlo Miša Đorđević Prize for the Best Book in Serbian Studies from the North American Society for Serbian Studies. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the city’s middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the 1920s and 1930s.
Ryan Jones (Assistant Professor, Latin American History) was a globe-trotter, attending an international conference on the global history of sexual sciences at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain, where he presented some of his latest research in a paper entitled, “Marta Olmos, the Mexican ‘Christine:’ Sex-Reassignment, Global Sexology, and the Politics of National Development in 1950s Mexico.”
Jordan Kleiman’s (Associate Professor, U.S. Environmental History) work was quoted in this piece in Green Living commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Love Canal Disaster, a massive environmental pollution disaster in Niagara Falls which harmed the health of hundreds of residents, culminating in an extensive Superfund cleanup operation.
Amanda Lewis-Nang’ea (Visiting Assistant Professor, African History) published an article, “Africanizing Science in Post-colonial Kenya: Long-Term Field Research in the Amboseli Ecosystem, 1963–1989,” in the Journal of the History of Biology. This article examines the intersection of African history and field science through the post-colonial Africanization of Kenyan politics, the broadening of scientific practices in Amboseli in previously Western-occupied spaces to include Kenyan participants, and an increasing awareness of the role of local African contexts in the results, methods, and implications of biological research. She also wrote an article for Environmental History Now on her research into the history of the Ilkisongo Maasai.
Ling Ma (Visiting Assistant Professor, East Asian History) contributed a piece to the website Nursing Clio on the social history of abortion in early twentieth-century China.
Kathleen Mapes (Associate Professor, U.S. Labor History) was the historical consultant for a series of student-organised meals which sought to bridge the generation gap between Geneseo undergrads and seniors in the local community through meals themed around the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. She gave a short talk at each event.
Michael Leroy Oberg (Professor, Native American History) continued to blog actively, both on his own site and for Age of Revolutions where he contributed this piece on Texas and the great white-washing of the American Revolution. He was also interviewed for this piece in the Syracuse New Times on the movement to abolish Columbus Day, and was part of a panel discussion on an episode of WXXI’s Connections with Evan Dawson about Native American identity. In September, he was the keynote speaker at the Washington’s Trail Summit 2018 in Pennsylvania, where he discussed George Washington’s career in Indian policy.
Yvonne Seale (Assistant Professor, Medieval History) continued to blog at her own site. She was also interviewed by Forbes for a piece about why we should see the Middle Ages in all their garish colour, and contributed an article to The Public Medievalist entitled “My Fair Lady? How We Think About Medieval Women.”
The History Department organised two successful panels over the course of the semester. In our October panel on 1968, Professors David Tamarin, Jordan Kleiman, Jovana Babović, and Ryan Jones discussed how the momentous events of 1968 profoundly shaped the world in which we live today. In our December panel, “1918 in Global Perspective”, Professors Ryan Jones, Jovana Babović, Joe Cope, and Amanda Lewis-Nang’ea weighed in on the importance of this year from their various areas of expertise, ranging from the Great War and colonialism in Africa to the Spanish Flu, Russian Revolution, political developments in the US and Europe and much more.
We hope to organize more such roundtable panels in 2019—keep an eye out for them in the New Year!
