Dr. Romero Wins UH Teaching Excellence Award
Dr. Todd Romero was recently named a 2011-2012 recipient of a University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award. The Teaching Excellence Awards are the highest form of recognition for teaching at the University of Houston, and reflect the University’s continuing commitment to excellence in teaching. Dr. Romero was recognized for excellence in teaching University Undergraduate Core Curriculum courses. His nominating letter declared, “Teaching by example, Romero models for students how to live the life of the mind. He engages students with penetrating and provocative questions related to both the historiography of the topics being taught and the original sources that can be used to study a past that is often all too remote. . . . [H]is lectures to the large survey courses are dynamic and interactive while his small seminars—undergraduate and graduate—build from sophisticated conversations about texts and sources read in common.”
The award will be presented at a ceremony on April 26, 2012 at the Hilton on the University of Houston Campus.
Dr. Romero teaches the first half of the American history survey as well as undergraduate and graduate courses on colonial American, Native American, Atlantic world, and public history.
The Department of History Faculty congratulates Dr. Romero for this accomplishment.
Food for Thought presents Dr. Rebecca Sharpless, April 5
Dr. Rebecca Sharpless, Associate Professor of History at Texas Christian University, will discuss "Southern Fusion: African American Women and an Evolving Regional Cuisine" as part of the Food For Thought Speaker series on Thursday, April 5 at 3:00 pm in Michael J. Cemo Hall, room 109.
Southern cooking has long been an evolving fusion of Native, African, and European foodways. After the Civil War, expanding markets provided even greater choices of foodstuffs to southerners. New types of food changed the ways that African American cooks prepared meals for their employers and their families. Some cooks resisted change and others embraced it, but it affected almost all of them and the families that they fed at home and at work.
"Food for Thought" is a speaker series promoting the scholarly study of food. Presenters highlight the latest research on the multiple ways food shapes business and economy, nutrition and health, the environment, and social relations. Our aim is to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration through the examination of the food that sustains the cultural, economic, and physical lives of our diverse communities.
The series is sponsored by the El Paso Corporation Lecture Series, the Center for Public History, and the Department of History. The talk is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Welcome Center Parking Garage located on Calhoun Drive near Entrance 1.
For a campus map, visit: http://campusmap.uh.edu/cgi-bin/campusmap
For directions to campus, visit: http://www.uh.edu/visit/directions/index.php
Cohn Wins Dissertation Completion Grant
Julie Cohn, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, has been named the recipient of a CLASS Dissertation Completion Grant for the 2012-2013 Academic year. The grant is awarded to outstanding Ph.D. students in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences who have made timely progress toward the completion of their degrees. The grant provides financial support and a release from teaching responsibilities in the last two semesters of doctoral study, allowing the recipient to focus attention on the completion of the dissertation.
Cohn will complete work on her dissertation project titled, "Biography of a Technology: North America's Power Grid Through the Twentieth Century."
"All of our Dissertation Completion Fellows are outstanding students working on significant research or creative projects in their disciplines," said Dr. Catherine Patterson, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in CLASS. "Only the most highly qualified students from a department may be nominated for these awards, so the application pool is highly competitive."
Cohn is one of six students selected to receive this grant.
The History Department congratulates Cohn on this achievement.
History Department, Phi Alpha Theta to host 8th Annual Houston-Area History Consortium, April 14, 2012
The University of Houston History Department, in conjunction with the Zeta Kappa chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the international honor society in History, will host the Eighth Annual Houston-Area History Consortium on Saturday, April 14, 2012. The Consortium will take place in the University Center Underground on the UH Central Campus. For a campus map, please click here. All sessions are open to the public.
Outstanding graduate and undergraduate students from the UH-Central Campus, UH-Clear Lake, Rice University, Houston Baptist University, Sam Houston State University, and Texas Southern University, will present scholarly papers covering a wide range of topics, geographic regions, and historical eras. Please click here for a detailed schedule and list of presentations.
For more information, please contact Dr. Bailey Stone at bstone@uh.edu or 713-743-3115.
Dr. Young's Book Featured on White House Historical Association Website
Dr. Nancy Beck Young’s book, Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First Lady (University Press of Kansas, 2004), has been excerpted for a new webpage that the White House Historical Association compiled. “‘A Tempest in a Teapot’: The Racial Politics of First Lady Lou Hoover’s Invitation of Jessie DePriest to a White House Tea” can be accessed at http://www.whitehousehistory.org/whha_shows/depriest-tea-incident/index.html.
Hoover was a modern first lady operating in traditional Washington, D.C. Among her duties was the hosting of a tea for congressional wives. Because an African American, Oscar Stanton DePriest, had been elected to Congress from a Chicago, Illinois district, the first time an African American had held such a post since 1901, questions arose about how Hoover should handle her responsibility for entertaining the congressional spouses.
Instead of hosting one large affair, as was the norm, Hoover divided the guest list so as to protect DePriest from the racial fulminations of congressional wives with racist sentiments. Hoover also used the tea to make a statement about the importance of racial justice and to support her husband’s political efforts to realign southern politics along class not race lines. In the aftermath of the tea, criticism from across the country revealed the racist thinking in the United States in the late 1920s. The controversy over the tea exposes just how difficult it was to challenge racial and gendered norms.
The University of Houston History Department faculty congratulates Dr. Young on this latest recognition.
Violence on the U.S.Mexico Borderlands Talk, January 23
Dr. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, will speak about her new book Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries on Monday, January 23, at 2:30pm in Agnes Arnold Hall 108.
Unspeakable Violence addresses the epistemic and physical violence inflicted on racialized and gendered subjects in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Arguing that this violence was fundamental to U.S., Mexican, and Chicana/o nationalisms, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández examines the lynching of a Mexican woman in California in 1851, the Camp Grant Indian Massacre of 1871, the racism evident in the work of the anthropologist Jovita González, and the attempted genocide, between 1876 and 1907, of the Yaqui Indians in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Guidotti-Hernández shows that these events have been told and retold in ways that have produced particular versions of nationhood and effaced other issues. Scrutinizing stories of victimization and resistance, and celebratory narratives of mestizaje and hybridity in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and borderlands studies, she contends that by not acknowledging the racialized violence perpetrated by Mexicans, Chicanas/os, and indigenous peoples, as well as Anglos, narratives of mestizaje and resistance inadvertently privilege certain brown bodies over others. Unspeakable Violence calls for a new, transnational feminist approach to violence, gender, sexuality, race, and citizenship in the borderlands.
The talk is made possible through the generous support of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Latin American Studies Programs.
Dr. Perales wins 2010 Urban History Association Book Award
Dr. Monica Perales has been awarded the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History from the Urban History Association for her book Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2010). Smeltertown tells the story of the creation, evolution, demise, and collective memory of the Mexican American working-class community that formed at the base of the American Smelting and Refining Company’s copper smelting operation in the border city of El Paso, Texas.
According to the award committee, “Not only does Monica Perales place their story, the story of thousands of Mexicans, at the center of 20th century U.S. urban history, but she also asks scholars to consider far more seriously than they yet do how closely linked the worlds of work and those of city and community building were for the majority of those who lived in, and built, this nation.”
The formal award presentation will be made at the biennial meeting of the Urban History Association to be held in New York City in October 2012.
The University of Houston History Department faculty congratulates Dr. Perales on this latest accomplishment.
Dr. Holt Publishes New Essay Collection, Honored for Distinguished Leadership in Teaching
Dr. Frank Holt has recently published The Alexander Medallion: Exploring the Origins of a Unique Artifact (Imago Lattara, 2011), co-edited with Osmund Bopearachchi, Director of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Greece and the Near East, National Center for Research, Paris, and Professor of History at the Sorbonne. One of the world’s leading authorities on Alexander the Great, Hellenistic Asia, and numismatics, Dr. Holt authored a chapter in the volume on the methodology of analyzing unique historical objects that lack a controlled archaeological provenance.
In addition, Dr. Holt was awarded the University of Houston's first Distinguished Leadership in Teaching Excellence Award. A distinguished and highly respected teacher, Dr. Holt plans to use this opportunity to establish Project TEACH (Teacher Evaluation And Classroom Help) as a campus-wide consultation service for faculty wishing to improve their teaching effectiveness.
The Department of History congratulates Dr. Holt on his latest accomplishments.
Romero Book Symposium, September 8
On September 8, 2011, the UH Department of History will host a symposium celebrating the recent publication of Professor Todd Romero’s new book, Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion and Colonialism in Early New England (University of Massachusetts Press). The symposium will be held at 4 p.m. in the Rockwell Pavilion at the M.D. Anderson Library.
The Tenneco Lecture Series, the Center for Public History, Latin American Studies, and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies are co-sponsors of this event.
The symposium will feature two distinguished scholars who will comment on Dr. Romero’s book and his contributions to the field. Ann Little (Colorado State University) is the author of Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Pennsylvania, 2007) and a number of articles that address the intersection of borderlands history, women’s and gender history and the history of the body in colonial America.
The other commentator, Ann Marie Plane (UCSB), specializes in Colonial North American history, with an emphasis on gender, colonization, and the lives of Native Americans in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. She is the author of Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriages in Early New England (Cornell, 2000) and other publications.
James Kirby Martin, Cullen University Professor of History at the University of Houston, observes, "Todd Romero's new book is already having a significant impact on early American history and Native American Studies more generally.” Martin adds, “Todd is an emerging star in his respective academic fields."
For more information, please contact Kristin Deville at kdeville@uh.edu or 713/743-3087.
Dr. Kathleen Brosnan Appointed Associate Dean of Faculty and Research
Dean John Roberts has created within the leadership team of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences the position of Associate Dean for Faculty and Research and appointed to the job Kathleen Brosnan, associate professor of history and the associate director of the Center for Public History.
“To enhance our profile as a research faculty in line with the expectation of being a Tier One university, we need to increase external research funding, the production of high quality scholarship, and the number of doctoral graduates annually,” Dean Roberts said. “I believe that in order for us to achieve these objectives we must provide faculty with the kind of support that they need to be successful.”
The primary responsibility of the Associate Dean for Faculty and Research is to work with the College’s faculty to promote research excellence.
The Department of History congratulates Dr. Brosnan on her appointment to this key administrative position in the university.
Dr. Deyle Wins Prestigious Post-Doctoral Fellowship
Dr. Steven Deyle received a Post-Doctoral Fellowship for the fall 2011 semester from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He will be researching and writing his current book project, entitled “Honorable Men: Isaac Bolton, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the Murder of James McMillan.” Deyle’s study explores the causes and consequences of a prominent 1857 murder trial in Memphis, Tennessee. This case involved several slave traders, including Nathan Bedford Forrest, the future Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan leader, whose fortunes rose in the trial’s wake.
The faculty of the Department of History congratulates Dr. Deyle on his latest accomplishment.
Theriot Earns Harvard Post Doc
Jason Theriot has received a postdoctoral fellowship from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University for the 2011-2012 academic year. At Harvard, he will be part of a Consortium on Energy Policy addressing offshore development and coastal restoration in the Gulf of Mexico following the 2010 oil spill.
While at Harvard, Theriot will conduct research on “Economic and Ecosystem Sustainability in the Gulf Coast Region as Energy Policy.” His faculty host is Professor Alison Frank.
Theriot’s research topic at Harvard is closely related to his dissertation, “Building America’s Energy Corridor: Oil and Gas Development and the Louisiana Wetlands,” completed in April 2011. His dissertation advisor Joseph Pratt observes, “Jason’s dissertation is very good. I have no doubt that it will become a major university press book after revisions.” Read more
Theriot recently received the John O. King Award as the history department’s outstanding graduate student. John King was the long-time chair of the history department and the author of an excellent biography of Joseph Cullinan, the first president of Texaco. He is fondly remembered by his former colleagues for his scholarship and collegiality.
Theriot has been a particularly productive graduate student at UH. He published an article drawn from his masters thesis on Cajuns in World War II in The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association. A revised and expanded version of the manuscript is now under review for publication by the University Press of Mississippi. He also co-authored an article "Who Destroyed the Marsh" with Professor Tyler Priest for the Economic History Yearbook.
While working on his dissertation, Jason also worked closely with Dr. Priest on a series of exceptionally ambitious projects sponsored by the Environmental Studies Program of the Mineral Management Service of the Department of the Interior. These grants involved extensive oral history interviews, primary research, and the writing of historical reports published on the internet. Theriot appreciates Priest’s mentorship on these projects and Priest’s recommendation of Theriot for the Harvard fellowship.
Jason’s work on offshore oil and the wetlands of Louisiana has given him an increasingly prominent voice in the history profession. He was the only graduate student chosen to contribute an essay to the Journal of American History’s forthcoming special issue on “Oil in American History.” At UH, he was the primary organizer of an outstanding conference in the fall of 2010 on the Macondo oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
See web site: University of Houston Oil Spill Symposium Webcast
http://www.history.uh.edu/oilspillsymposium/schedule/
Pratt adds, “All in all, Jason is the sort of graduate student we should hold up as a model to our incoming students.”
