News & Events
 

ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES

The History Faculty is delighted to welcome to campus Professor Hiromu Nagahara, Assistant Professor of History, who specializes in Japanese history, and Lerna Ekmekcioglu, McMillan-Stewart Career Development Assistant Professor of History, specializing in women and gender issues in the Middle East and North Africa. Congratulations to Tsolin Nalbantian on her appointment at Leiden University. We also welcome the new Undergraduate Administrator, Chuck Munger and congratulate Mabel Chin on her appointment as Administrative Officer of the History Faculty.

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS

The 2011 Bruce Mazlish Undergraduate Prize in History winners were Manishika Agaskar, First-Place (tie): "From Pacifism to Patriotism: Motherhood in American Popular Music During World War I," and Ethan Solomon, First-Place (tie): "Intentions Matter: How India's Landmark Women's Legislation Was Not About Women," Sara Ferry, Second Place: "Paris on the Eve of Revolution: Looking for Clues in Primary Source Documents."

Pauline Maier's new book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 is the winner of the 2011 George Washington Book Prize, co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and George Washington's Mount Vernon, honoring the year's best book about America's founding era. Pauline's book has also received the 2011 Henry Paolucci/Walter Bagehot Book Award given by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award and the Ruth Ratner Miller Award for Excellence in American History from the Concord Free Public Library. John Dower's book Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, Iraq, was a 2011 National Book Award finalist.

WORKSHOPS, CONFERENCES, SYMPOSIA

The section hosted a one-day symposium in May 2010 to honor the long career of Bruce Mazlish at MIT, and as one of the founders of the now burgeoning field of Global History. The symposium was titled “World into Globe: History for the 21st Century.” It featured scholarly presentations by Everett Mendelsohn, Harvard University, Dominic Sachsenmaier, Duke University, John Headley, University of North Carolina, Akira Iriye, Harvard University, and Wolf Schäfer, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The second Comédie-Française Registers Project Workshop, a follow-up to the meetings held in Cambridge MA in September 2010, took place in Paris June 14-15, 2011. A group of MIT scholars and digital humanists met at the Sorbonne with counterparts from the Sorbonne's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Literature, the University of Paris-Nanterre, and the Comédie-Française theater troupe to continue work on the Comédie-Française Registers Project (CFRP). The goal of the CFRP is to make available online high resolution facsimiles of over 30,000 daily receipt records for the Parisian theater troupe from its founding in 1680 to the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The CFRP will also offer users access to a fully searchable database of receipt and performance information extracted from the Registers. MIT participants included History Professor Jeff Ravel, HyperStudio Director Dr. Kurt Fendt, and HASTS graduate students Melissa Edoh and Marie Elizabeth Burks. They were joined by Comédie-Française Archivist Agathe San Juan, Sorbonne professors Georges Forestier and Pierre Frantz, and Nanterre Professor of Theater Studies Christian Biet. Both workshops were funded by a generous grant from the MISTI-France Seed Funds Program, and supported by the MIT History Faculty and MIT's HyperStudio.

IAP IN ANCIENT ITALY

IAP in Ancient Italy will be offered again in January 2012. MIT undergraduates and members of the MIT History Faculty traveled to Rome and the Bay of Naples for a first-hand experience of Roman and Greek archeology - urban topography, architecture, public and private monument.

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