Professor Taylor delivered her Presidential Address at the 2012 meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association in Chicago on January 7th on Joan of Arc, the Church, and the Papacy, 1429-1920. She now becomes President Emerita for 2012.
Professor Josephson spent Autumn 2011 at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munchen, Germany, during which time he worked on a book on the environmental costs of Soviet arctic conquest, 1930-1990, and began a book on the history of Jamaican technology. Josephson visited a different European city nearly every weekend, and ran 6 marathons.
Professor Leonard has been named co-winner of the 2012 Lincoln Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in American Civil War history. She received this award for her biography of Joseph Holt, Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky (2011). Professor Leonard has been nominated for president of the Society of Civil War Historians (http://scwh.la.psu.edu/), a prestigious national organization of Civil War scholars, graduate students, and others with a serious interest in the Civil War. The election will take place some time in the spring. Her new (and fifth) book, Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky, was released by the University of North Carolina Press in October 2011. Those interested in seeing or hearing her discuss the book can do so by going to http://www.virtualbooksigning.net/archive.html and clicking on the November 12, 2011, link. Professor Leonard will also be giving talks about the book in March 2012 in Clinton, Maryland, and in Orlando, Florida. She will be giving additional talks about the book in Lexington, Kentucky, in June 2012, and at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in July 2012.
Raffael Scheck is finishing a book manuscript of French colonial prisoners in German captivity 1940-1945. In the course of his archival research for the book, he discovered an unknown report of captivity from eminent poet, philosopher, and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor (president of Senegal, 1960-1980, theorist of “négritude,” and member of the prestigious Académie française), who spent twenty months in German POW camps and whose career was profoundly influenced by his captivity experience. The French daily newspaper Le Monde interviewed Scheck and published an article about this discovery on 17 June 2011, and the magazine Jeune Afrique published Senghor’s report together with an interview with Scheck on 24 July 2011. Scheck was also interviewed recently for the French documentary “Les 43 Tirailleurs” by Mireille Hannon, which traces a massacre in Clamecy (Burgundy) that he had covered in his book Hitler’s African Victims (Cambridge University Press, 2006; in French: 2007; in German: 2009). The Musée de la Résistance in Saint Brisson organized a conference on this massacre, inviting Scheck to give the keynote lecture. The film was released at the end of the conference.
The History Department currently has three seniors (Class of 2012) working on their history theses:
James Hubbard’s research is about a wave of Irish immigration to nearby Whitefield, Maine, that took place roughly between 1800-1820. Whitefield, particularly the northern section of the town, became one of the first Irish rural communities in New England. Irish immigration at this time primarily stemmed from the southeast of Ireland, or Leinster Province, including counties such as Kilkenny, Wexford, and Kildare. His research places particular emphasis on the origins and assimilation of immigrants from County Kildare. James believe that their experiences can shed light on both pre-famine Irish immigration and rural assimilation, two aspects of Irish-American history that have been somewhat neglected by historians. As such, he hopes to see how this wave of immigration fits into the fabric of the Irish-American immigrant story.
Susannah Hufstader is writing about the role of typography in German culture and politics until 1941. In Germany, there have traditionally been two typographic styles in book printing: gothic typeface, called fraktur, and roman typeface, called antiqua in German. She is examining the role of fraktur, known by some as “the German typeface,” in the formation of conservative identity leading up to the National Socialist regime. Her focus is on the relationship between modernity and tradition in Weimar and Nazi Germany and the long-standing debate over typeface as representative of larger trends in conservative thought. Susannah seeks to offer one view of the Nazi break with Weimar culture and explain the question of typography in terms of historical dichotomies in German culture.