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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.”

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.”

Dr. Martin V. Melosi, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of History, recently published Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America’s Cities (University of Pittsburgh Press).

In the volume, Melosi examines water resources in the United States and addresses whether access to water is an inalienable right of citizens, and if government is responsible for its distribution as a public good. He provides historical background on the construction, administration, and adaptability of water supply and wastewater systems in urban America. Looking to the future, he compares the costs and benefits of public versus private water supply, examining the global movement toward privatization.

The University of Houston History Department Faculty congratulates Dr. Melosi on this latest accomplishment.

Dr. Susan Kellogg (University of Houston) and Dr. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano (Direccion de Estudios Historicos, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico) recently published their co-edited collection: Negotiation within Domination New Spain's Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State (University Press of Colorado).

The volume examines the formation of colonial governance in New Spain through analysis of the legal interactions between indigenous peoples and representatives of the Spanish Crown across a variety of regions. It stresses the importance of negotiation and mediation within colonial rule, examining how a negotiated legal culture developed in the sixteenth century and changed during the eighteenth. Such negotiation was crucial to the survival and continuity of traditional cultures even as beliefs, economic structures, and family life were significantly affected by colonial rule. The book brings together work by Mexican and U.S.-based historians, and provides an example of bi-national dialogue about important historical issues.

The University of Houston History faculty congratulates Dr. Kellogg on the publication of this important volume.

John Bonnett will present "History in 3-D: The Topographic Revolution in Digital History" on Thursday, April 21st, 2:00-3:00 in 549 Agnes Arnold Hall.

Dr. Bonnett is the Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He was the principal developer of the 3D Virtual Buildings Project, an initiative that had two aims: to teach students to generate models of historic buildings using 3D modeling software, and to use the modeling process to teach students the essentials of historical reasoning and practice. He is currently working on a project titled HistorySpace, which is exploring how virtual worlds can be used to support historical communication and analysis.

Dr. Bonnett's lecture is supported by the Tenneco Lecture Series, the Center for Public History and the History Department.

Dr. Kairn Klieman was recently awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Summer 2011 research in Ghana from the West African Research Association. The Grant is funded through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the U.S. State Department. Dr. Klieman will be researching the role that U.S. oil companies played in establishing the “Takoradi-Cairo Route,” a supply line that provided petroleum and other materiel to the Allies in North Africa during WWII. She will also be gathering information on the current-day approaches Ghana is employing (as a new oil-producer) to avoid the “Oil Curse.”

The University of Houston Department of History faculty congratulates Dr. Klieman on this latest accomplishment.

Dr. Natalia Milanesio’s article “Food Politics and Consumption in Peronist Argentina,” which was published in the February 2010 issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review, was awarded the Sturgis Leavitt Award from The Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS). The article prize is awarded annually for the best article written in any language on a Latin American or Iberian subject with preference for those that have an appeal beyond a single discipline.

The article explores the role of food consumption as both a significant object of state policy and a central component of official propaganda during Juan Domingo Perón’s government. The essay resists the analytical separation between politics and imaginaries by showing the economic and political centrality of food for government planning, commercial culture, and public health as well as for and definitions of national wellbeing and social entitlement.

The University of Houston History Department faculty congratulates Dr. Milanesio for her latest accomplishment.

Hosted by University of Houston - Clear Lake.
Friday, April 22, 2011

As part of its 17th Annual Research & Creative Arts Conference, the University of Houston at Clear Lake is this year hosting, on Friday, 22 April 2011, the Seventh Annual Houston-Area Phi Alpha Theta History Consortium.  Phi Alpha Theta is the international History Honor Society.  Graduate students and upper-class undergraduate students from a large number of local universities and colleges will be presenting scholarly papers dealing with a wide variety of historical themes, geographic regions, and eras in formal sessions chaired by specialists in the relevant fields. 

All inquiries concerning the April 22 Consortium should be addressed to either Dr. Michael Hunt (hunt@uhcl.edu) or Dr. Pilar Goyarzu (Goyarzu@uhcl.edu) at UH- Clear Lake, or to Dr. Bailey Stone (bstone@uh.edu) at the University of Houston’s Central Campus.

Nancy Beck Young's chapter, "Beyond Parochialism:  Modernization and Texas Historiography," was just published in Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations, edited by Walter L. Buenger and Arnoldo De León (Texas A&M University Press, 2011). Her contribution analyzes historical writings on modernization in Texas by exploring the best work produced by scholars of Texas in the last twenty years.

The Department of History congratulates Dr. Young on this accomplishment.

The University of Houston Department of History is announcing the Spring 2011 edition of its Graduate Student Research Colloquium. The Colloquium is jointly sponsored by the UH History Department and the local graduate chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the international history honor society. The Colloquium offers a forum in which some of the Department’s MA and PhD candidates can discuss their current research with fellow students and faculty.  The Department also welcomes the participation of undergraduate history majors and, indeed, of the general public in these scheduled sessions.

The schedule for this semester’s Research Colloquium follows.  Unless otherwise announced, sessions this semester will be held on the UH Central Campus in the History Department in Agnes Arnold Hall and will run from 3 to 4:30 on Thursday afternoons.

February 24:  Reimagining the South: Slave Health and the Legacy of Denmark VeseyCynthia Cowan:  “Charleston: The Legacy of Denmark Vesey”
Savannah Williamson:  “Resisting Reproduction: Slave Fertility and Childbirth On Antebellum Plantations”
Commentator: Dr. James Schafer

March 24:  International Affairs: France and Chile in the 20th CenturyBrenda Broussard:  “Project Camelot: The Social Sciences Used in Statecraft”
Nicole Barnes: Beauvoir and the Body: Gender, Age, and Identity in the Writings of  Simone de Beauvoir”
Commentators: Drs. Howard and Fishman

April 28:  American History: Literacy and Native AmericansAmy Breimaier:  “Instruction with Delight”
Andrew Reiser:  “One Last Hope for Sovereignty”
Commentator:  Dr. Todd Romero

Dr. Kairn Klieman, Associate Professor of African History at the University of Houston, has been awarded an External Faculty Fellowship from the Humanities Research Center at Rice University to work on her book “Before the ‘Curse’: Petroleum, Politics, and Transnational Oil Companies in the Gulf of Guinea, Africa, 1890s-1980s.” The Humanities Research Center, dedicated to the study of cultures across time and around the world, invites four forward-thinking external faculty fellows on a semester basis to work on their individual projects, teach courses affiliated with a humanities department, present research at special symposia or conferences, and contribute to the intellectual life of the center. Through her research on the history of the oil industry in Africa, Dr. Klieman’s presence will foster interdisciplinary dialogue between faculty and students in History, Anthropology, and the Baker Institute.

The History Department faculty congratulates Dr. Klieman on this latest honor. 

Professor Eric H. Walther has just published an essay, “The Fire-Eaters and Seward Lincoln,” in the The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter) 2011. It details how three leading secessionists, Edmund Ruffin, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and William Lowndes Yancey effortlessly shifted their hatred toward the acknowledged front-runner for the Republican Party presidential nomination, William Henry Seward, to Abraham Lincoln.

The History Department congratulates Dr. Walther on this latest publication.

On Friday, January 28, 2011, the UH History Department welcomes Holly C. Shulman, research professor of history at the University of Virginia, to discuss: “‘An Opportunity to Fight Injustice’” Civil Rights as Jewish Women’s Work and Wednesdays in Mississippi.”

The talk will be from 11:00 am.-12:00 p.m. in Room 520 in Agnes Arnold Hall.

Dr. Shulman is the editor of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition, the founding director of documents compass for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and the author or editor of various articles and books, including The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941-1945.

This talk is sponsored by the Tenneco Lecture Series, the Center for Public History and the Department of History.

The University of Houston History Department and Honors College are sponsoring a talk by Louise K. Henriksen, curator of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark.  Dr. Henriksen will discuss the voyage of the Sea Stallion, an extremely accurate replica of a Viking Ship and its modern voyage from Roskilde to Dublin.

The event will be held on Tuesday January 25, from 4:00 to 5:00 in the Honors College Lounge.