PAST PERFECT
News of UIC’s History Department
April 2009
Good Things Come in Fours: Four current or recent UIC History grad students have struck gold
in an otherwise depressed job market this year, having been offered and having accepted tenuretrack jobs:
SARAH ROSE (Ph.D., 2008) at University of Texas Arlington in US Social, Cultural, and
Political History.
BRUCE NYE (Ph.D., 2009) at Utah State University, teaching Modern Europe, France
and Colonial America.
MATT ROTHWELL at University of Southern Indiana, teaching Latin American History.
JOHN FLORES at Case-Western Reserve University, teaching Latino History.
News from Omaha:
Our Nebraska stringer, Prof. Jim Sack, reports that grad student MAX DEARDORFF won
the prize for best paper by a graduate student at the Missouri Valley History Conference with
“They met on the Mediterranean: How the Intersection of Islam and Christianity arrived at the
New World, 1492-1713.”
Since this award seems predestined to go to one of “ours,” other UIC graduate students
who participated must perforce have been runners-up at the same conference in March:
JOCHEN S. ARNDT, “The Battle Tactics of the Mexican War: General Winfield
Scott's Mexico City Campaign, March 9 to September 14, 1847.”
PERRY R. CLARK, “Restoring Citizens: Illinois Prison Reforms, 1880-1920.”
KAREN JOHNSON, “‘Keep your Date with Christ in the Negro’: Ann Harrigan
and Catholic Interracialism, 1933-1948.”
DOUG MILLER, “Red Power, White Collar: American Indian Activism and
Chrstianity Converge in 1960's Chicago.”
JEFFREY NICHOLS, “‘One Cannot Expect a Newspaper to Give Up the Bulk of Its
Editorial Space in Support of the War and then Give Up its Revenue Columns
at the Same Time;’ Chicago Newspapers and the War Economy, 1914-1919.”
WAYNE RATZLAFF, “constructing a Military-Religious Complex: Christian
Fundamentalism and Cold War Anticommunism.”
EXA von ALT, “JOIN Torn Apart: Authenticity, Authority, and the Limits of
the New Left's Community Organizing in Uptown, Chicago, 1965-1968.”
At the OAH in Seattle (March 26-28), the following people possessing some form of DNA from
UIC took part:
Prof. HASIA DINER (Ph.D., 1975) of NYU commented on the panel “Negotiating the
Bounds of Ethnic Identity.”
Prof. BRIAN HOSMER gave a paper on “Working and Belonging, on Wind River.”
ROBERT E. HUNTER (Ph.D., 2008) presented “Doomsday Plus 50: Reconsidering On
the Beach.”
Prof. KURT LEICHTLE (Ph.D., 1982), University of Wisconsin River Falls, participated
on a panel on “Evaluation” in the Teaching American History Grant program.
Ex-UIC grad student, former impresario of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and currently
of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, EILEEN R. MACKEVITCH took part in a
panel on “The Lincoln Legacy: Bicentennial Reflections.”
Prof. JASON SCOTT SMITH (University of New Mexico), son of DAN SMITH, gave a
paper on “A New Deal for Public Works.”
Rutgers Prof. DEBORAH GRAY WHITE (Ph.D., 1979) joined panels on “Graduate
Training in Women’s History” and “Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory
Tower.”
A Little Humanity, Fellows.
Profs. JOHN D’EMILIO and CHRIS BOYER have been awarded UIC Humanities
Institute fellowships for the next academic year.
Other News of the Department:
To these precincts we welcome Prof. SUNIL AGNANI (whom History shares with the English
Department), late of University of Michigan. An article of Sunil’s, translated as “Entre la France
et l’Inde en 1790 : réflexions d’Edmund Burke sur les révolutions en Europe et en Asie,” appears
in Isabelle Gadoin & Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain, eds., _Rêver d'Orient, connaître l'Orient:
Visions de l’Orient dans l’art et la littérature britanniques_ (Lyons: ENS Editions/ École normale
supérieure, 2008).
Prof. MICHAEL ALEXANDER’s “Locating the Trial of Plancius between Rules and Persuasion”
has been published in B. Santalucia, ed., _La repressione criminale nella Roma Repubblicana fra
norma e persuasione_ (Pavia, Italy: IUSS Press).
University of Montana Prof. DAVE BECK (Ph.D., 1994) published "'Standing out here in the
surf:' The Termination and Restoration of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians of
Western Oregon in Historical Perspective," in the Oregon Historical Quarterly (Spring 2009).
At the Midwest Labor and Working-Class History Colloquium (April 3-4) at Purdue University
grad student AARON MAX BERKOWITZ presented “Mr. Khrushchev Goes to Washington: The
Labor and Working-Class Response to Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 Visit to America.”
Prof. JONATHAN DALY published “Government, Press, and Subversion in Russia, 1906-1917”
in The Journal of the Historical Society 9 (March 2009).
LAURA DE LOS SANTOS (BA, 2008) has been awarded a scholarship to study in the University
of Chicago’s MA Program in Social Sciences.
Prof. JOHN D’EMILIO was quoted in an April 7 New York Times article about how New York
City is turning the site of the 1969 Stonewall riot into a site for gay tourism.
Prof. ALY DRAME’ (Ph.D., 2006) of Dominican University published “Migration, Marriage, and
Ethnicity: The Early Development of Islam in Precolonial Middle Casamance” in Mamadou
Diouff and Mara Leichtman, eds, _New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration,
Wealth, Power, and Femininity_ (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
Prof. MALGORZATA (“GOSIA”) FIDELIS has signed a contract with Cambridge University
Press for her book “Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland.”
Grad student JOSH FENNELL received the North Carolina Museum of History’s “Outstanding
Essay” award for “D.A. Tompkins, Mill-builder and Mythmaker of Charlotte, NC.” He presented
“Prodigal Son of the Piedmont: The Formative Failures of D.A. Tompkins” at the North Carolina
Association of Historians Conference at Appalachian State University on March 28. He’s been
appointed to the advisory board for the UIC Commuter Student Lounge. And he reports that he
and grad student JOHN ROSEN have wrapped up another season as the broadcast team for the
UIC women's basketball squad on the Horizon League Network.
There’s an expanded and updated new edition of Prof. LEON FINK and Brian Greenberg's
_Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: 1199SEIU and the Politics of Health Care Unionism_. The proud
publisher (University of Illinois Press) says its three new chapters “convey the promise and
problems of movement-building in the twenty-first century health care industry.”
A Golden Domer for whom we take partial credit: GAVIN FOSTER is a Notre Dame ABD who
will defend his dissertation on the Irish Civil War this June. A fellowship from Notre Dame's
Kaneb Centre for Teaching and Learning has enabled Gavin to work with Prof. Jim Sack at UIC
this year. Last Fall he TA’d in Jim’s modern British history survey and this term taught his own
HIST 421, “Nationalism and Unionism in Britain and Ireland, 1707 to the Present.” This spring
Gavin accepted a tenure-track position in modern Irish and Irish Diasporic history in the School of
Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
Prof RICK FRIED gave the lecture “Cold War on the Home Front” as part of NIU’s TAH
program on April 4. And on March 4 he characterized the Great Depression on CBS Channel 2's
six-o’clock news in a record-setting six-second interview outtake.
Prof. JOHN GLOVER (Ph.D., 1999) of the University of Redlands published “Murid Modernity:
Historical Perceptions of Islamic Reform, Sufism, and Colonization” in Diouff & Leichtman, eds,
_New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal_ (see above).
In April grad student SARAH GOLDBERGER presented “The Worthy Sons of Noble Sires:
Reconciliation and Revolutionary Memory in Post-Reconstruction Virginia” at the Virginia
Forum. In March she took part in a panel on Desegregation and Massive Resistance before the
Virginia Social Science Association. Her contract to teach Virginia History at Old Dominion has
been renewed for next year, and her essay on tourism in Yorktown will be published in “Dixie
Passages: Tourism and Southern History” (University of Florida Press)
KEN HANSON (MA 2008) is an adjunct instructor at Triton College in River Grove, teaching US
History to 1877.
In March Prof. LAURA HOSTETLER participated in a faculty weekend seminar led by Anthony
Pagden at the Folger Shakespeare Library on the topic of “Empire and Cosmopolis.”
BOB HUNTER (Ph.D. 2008), currently on a Guggenheim at the National Air and Space Museum,
gave the paper “The Atom Marches On: The March of Time and Nuclear Energy, 1945-1953" at
the Film and History National Conference in Chicago. He also spoke at the Elmhurst Historical
Museum about airship history. His essay “Expecting the Unexpected: Nuclear Terrorism in 1950s
Hollywood Films” debuted in March as a chapter in G. Kurt Piehler and Rosemary Mariner, eds.,
_The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives_, (University of Tennessee Press,
2009). He topped off his trip to the OAH (see above) with a visit to Hanford, one of the
Manhattan Project “secret cities.”
Prof. RICHARD JOHN has been nominated to be president-elect of the Business History
Conference, an international organization for the study of institutional history in the United States,
Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
RAYMOND LOHNE (Ph.D. 2007) published “Team of Friends: A New Lincoln Theory and
Legacy” in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Lincoln Bicentennial Issue
(Fall/Winter 2008). He also gave a paper titled “The Electric Cord in the Declaration of
Independence: The Secret Behind the Speech” at the Illinois State Historical Society’s March 28
Symposium at Illinois College. He has been elected to the Advisory Board of the Illinois State
Historical Society for the 2009-2010 term.
Prof. JOHN LYONS (Ph.D., 2001) of Joliet Junior College published _Teaching History Online_
with Routledge last December.
Grad student ALLISON O'MAHEN MALCOM has given papers at the 6th Annual Conference on
Citizenship Studies at Wayne State University and at Midwestern Political Science Association's
Annual Meeting. She will do more of same at a conference on the history of Loyalism at the
University of Maine and before the Society for the Historians of the Early Republic this summer.
Recent grad student SAM MITRANI successfully defended his dissertation, “Order in the
Metropolis; The Making of the Chicago Police Department, 1850-1890,” last December.
BRUCE NYE (Ph.D., 2009) has had an article accepted for the International Fraud issue of Cross
Cultural Management, entitled “Merchants and Fraud: the Case of French Merchants against
Napoleon's Continental Blockade.”
Prof. DOMINIC PACYGA (Ph.D. 1981) of Columbia College published a review essay,
"Chicago: City of Big 'Little' Museums," in the Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 2009),
His new book, Chicago: A Biography, is due out this fall.
TIA LAJUIN PARKS, daughter MARY PARKS of the Department’s staff, will receive her
Juris Doctoris degree from Washington University on May 15. Tia worked in the History
Department and in 2003 received her UIC B.A. with several majors, including History.
KEVIN POBST, who got his MAT in History from UIC in the 1980s, is currently principal at
Hinsdale Central. This fall he becomes principal at Naperville North High School. An Oak Park
paper quotes a number of Hinsdaleans as “bereft” at the loss of someone who “has had a profound
effect on our children.” His ex-Superintendent calls him “one in a million.”
Prof. MARGARET POWER (Ph.D., 1997) of IIT has seen her book, _Right-Wing Women in
Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973_, translated and published
by the National Library of Chile. This occasioned two public presentations in Chile in March. At
the AHA in January she gave a paper on the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and the 1950 uprising.
Current grad student DANIEL ROBERT has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at UC
Berkeley, where he will study the industrial revolution in the United States.
Recent Ph.D.’s SARAH ROSE (see above) and JOSH SALZMANN will present “Bionic
Ballplayers: Medicine and the Business of Baseball,” at the American Association for the History
of Medicine Conference in Cleveland this month.
Prof. JIM SEARING’s essay “The Greater Jihad and Conversion: Sereer Interpretations of Sufi
Islam in Senegal” appeared in Diouff & Leichtman, eds, _New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal
(see above). The alums who also published in this collection are former students of Jim’s.
BAR SHIRTCLIFF has been accepted into the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the
University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Since leaving UIC’s graduate program she’s been a
freelance programmer, something she taught herself while studying Russian History.
Prof. BEN WHISENHUNT (Ph.D., 1997), College of Du Page, presented “Lincoln and the
Russians" at COD's Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration. He was also nominated by students there
for the Outstanding Faculty Award.
Prof. DEBORAH GRAY WHITE (Ph.D.,1979) of Rutgers has been awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship for the coming year.
Grad student BENN WILLIAMS gave a talk sponsored by the Koppelman Holocaust Center
(Rider University) and the Adath Israel Congregration in Lawrenceville, NJ on April 19 as part of
Yom HaShoah, entitled “‘ I have the honor of asking you to undertake an investigation....' Letters
of Denunciation in Holocaust France.’”
Please send all news to rmfried@uic.edu