Prof. Ronald Calinger retired in May, becoming Professor Emeritus. His biography of the great eighteenth century mathematician, Leonhard Euler, will be published by Princeton University Press next year.
Prof. Thomas Cohen presented a paper "Antonio Possevino on New Christians, Jews and Judaism," on the panel entitled "Jesuit Encounters with Heretics, Jews and New Christians," at the meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Washington in March. In July, he delivered a paper, "António Vieira on Paul's Letter to the Romans," at a conference at Boston College on "The Tragic Couple: Jesuits and Jews." In his capacity as Director of the Oliveira Lima Library, he is currently deeply involved in raising funds for a renovation of the library.
Prof. Jennifer Davis spent the 2011-12 academic year at the American Academy in Rome. She presented papers on "The Place of Italy in Charlemagne's Empire" at the Medieval Studies Seminar at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland on December 5, 2011, and "Ideology and Authority in Charlemagne's Empire" at the Davis Center, Princeton University, on April 14, 2012.She is at work on two books, one on Charlemagne’s practice of empire, a second on the capitularies of the Frankish era. She was appointed to the advisory board for a European project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council called “Charlemagne's Europe,” which will result in a database of all known individuals from the reign of Charlemagne. During the current academic year, she will be a fellow at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.
Prof. Katherine Jansen presented "Penitential Peace-Making: A Case Study from San Gimignano" in a panel she organized for The New College Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Studies in Sarasota, Florida in March, 2012. She chaired the John Gilmary Shea Book Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association, and served as juror in the selection of Rome Prize winners for the American Academy in Rome.
Prof. Michael Kimmage gave a paper in February, 2012 on Philip Roth's "Newark Trilogy" for a conference on Roth at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy. He was interviewed by Bavarian radio about the German-American relationship in March. He was awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant, to spend the summer of 2012 at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where he was a fellow at the LMU's Center for Advanced Studies, and (together with Prof. Ernest Suarez of the Department of English) organized a conference on “The Cold War and American Music, 1945-2000.” He has two books coming out this fall: In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy (Stanford University Press) and his translation of Wolfgang Koeppen, Journey Through America (Berghahn Books). He was named a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund for academic year, 2012-2013, as a part of their research project on "The Future of the Liberal Western Order."
Prof. Laura Mayhall conducted archival research in England for her book in progress on celebrity in interwar Britain. She will serve as Acting Chair of the Department for the spring, 2013 semester.
Prof. Timothy Meagher spent the academic year 2011-2012 as Fulbright fellow in Ireland. He offered courses at Dublin City University, and lectured on topics in Irish-American history at universities in England, Ireland, Germany and Scotland. He is currently working on a history of Irish America, to be published by Yale University Press.
Prof. Nelson Minnich continues to serve as editor of the Catholic Historical Review, and as a member of the Pontifical Committee on the Historical Sciences. He was on sabbatical leave during 2011-2012, during which he published a number of articles on the Fifth Lateran Council and related matters, spent a month in Italy gathering materials for his book in progress on the Renaissance Papacy (to be published by Longmans), and developed plans for an edited volume on The Reformation Period, 1475-1625 in the Cambridge University Press series A History of Theology.
Prof. Jerry Muller’s book, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton University Press, 2010) was published in Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian translations. He was appointed to a second term as chair of the department. He will be on leave during the spring, 2013 semester to complete his book, The Transgressive Rabbi: The Life and Times of Jacob Taubes.
Visiting Prof. Jennifer Paxton’s lecture course on “1066” was released by The Teaching Company.
Prof. Lawrence Poos continues to serve as Dean of the Arts and Sciences. Together with J.E. Oeppen and R.W. Smith, he published “Re-assessing Josiah Russell’s measurements of late medieval mortality using Inquisitions Post Mortem”, in Michael Hicks, ed., The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem: A Companion (Boydell, 2012). During August, he served as a consultant to the Archbishopric of York’s project to digitize its medieval archives.
Philip Rousseau, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity, collaborated with Dr Janet Timbie (Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures) in organizing a conference at the Center on “The Christian Moses: From Philo to the Qur’an,” May 31-June 3, 2012.
Prof. Jason Sharples presented a paper on "Discovering Slave Conspiracies: New Fears of Rebellion and Old Paradigms of Plotting in the Seventeenth Century," to the Washington Early America Seminar at the University of Maryland in September, 2011; and published “Hearing Whispers, Casting Shadows: Jailhouse Conversation and the Production of Knowledge during the Antigua Slave Conspiracy Investigation of 1736,” in Michele Lise Tarter and Richard J. Bell, eds., Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). He will spend the 2012-2013 academic year at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, working on his book on progress, Mastering Fear: Imagination, Rebellion, and Race in Early America and the Atlantic World, 1640-1783.
Prof. Caroline Sherman presented "Practical Atheism: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?" to the Biennial Boston College Conference on the History of Religion in March; and presented, “Jacques Godefroy’s Florilegium and its Afterlife,” at the DC Legal History Roundtable in April, 2012. Her book, The Genealogy of Knowledge is nearing completion.
Prof. Leslie Tentler published "Generations: American Catholics Since the 1950s," in James D. Bratt, ed., By the Vision of Another World: Worship in American History (Eerdmans, 2012); and a chapter "Catholicism in America" in Paul Harvey and Edward Blum, eds., The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History; as well as, "'To Work in the Field of the Lord': Roots of the Crisis in Priestly Identity,” in U.S. Catholic Historian. Her piece, “A Decidedly Personal Look at the Field: American Catholic History Today,” was published in the March 2012 issue of Catholic Library World. She will be on sabbatical leave for the 2012-2013 academic year, working on a project on the impact of Vatican II, sponsored by the Cushwa Center at Notre Dame.
Prof. Stephen West continues to serve as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies. His article, “’A Hot Municipal Contest’: Prohibition and Black Politics in Greenville, South Carolina, after Reconstruction” will appear in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (October, 2012). He is at work on a book about the Civil War amendments to the US constitution and their place in American political culture in the decades around 1900.
Prof. Julia Darling Young published “Cristero Diaspora: Mexican Emigrants, the U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexico’s Cristero War, 1926-1929,” in the April 2012 issue of The Catholic Historical Review. She is organizing a conference on Catholic lay political activism in the twentieth century.
The department is pleased to welcome Prof. Arpad von Klimo, who is joining us as associate professor. He will teach courses on late modern Europe, and especially eastern Europe. He is currently revising and updating his book Ungarn seit 1945 (2006), which will appear in English translation as Hungary and the West: History of a Complex Relationship since 1945; and is co-editing The History of East Central Europe since 1700, to be published by Routledge. He participated in the summer research workshop “Confronting the Holocaust in Postwar Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
