RECENT NEWS

Class of 2019-2020 Graduation and Recognition Ceremony

Congratulations to the UNCG History Graduates and Award Winners of 2020! Special thanks to history major Azariah Journey for putting together our online ceremony. In this combination video and slide show, you'll see addresses from department head Dr. Greg O'Brien, director of graduate studies Dr. Richard Barton, director of undergraduate studies Dr. Jeff Jones, a presentation from honors and social studies licensure liaison Dr. Lisa Tolbert, and many photos of our newly graduated historians. We are proud of all of you! For lists of award winners, click here for undergraduate and here for graduate.

Parsons Writes about Greensboro Polio Epidemic

Associate Professor and Director of Public History Dr. Anne Parsons wrote a timely editorial in the News and Record: This city has united before to confront a deadly virus.

Azariah Journey Wins Scholarship

Congratulations to History major Azariah Journey for winning the Sally & Alan Cone scholarship from the UNCG Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program! Azariah is also an officer in the UNCG History Club.

Mize Wins Teaching Award

Congratulations to Dr. Jamie Mize (UNCG Department of History PhD, 2017) for receiving the Outstanding Teaching Award for the 2019-2020 academic year at UNC-Pembroke, where she is an assistant professor of History!

"The End of WWII and the Controversy Surrounding the A-Bomb"
Phil Koch
UNCG History Club
Monday, Feb. 10, 2020, 1-2 p.m.
SOEB 219

A presentation and discussion led by UNCG's oldest graduate and history major, Phil Koch. Refreshments will be provided at the event. Interested? RSVP: uncghistoricalsociety@gmail.com.

"Russian Politics in the Late Putin Era: Challenges & the Prospects for Change"
Dr. Timothy Colton
Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, 7:30 p.m.
Weatherspoon Museum Auditorium

The Center for Legislative Studies begins its 2020 Spring Lecture Series with the following event: Dr. Timothy Colton, Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies at Harvard University will be presenting "Russian Politics in the Late Putin Era: Challenges & the Prospects for Change" on Thursday, February 6th at 7:30 p.m in the Weatherspoon Auditorium.

Sponsored by International Global Studies; the Lloyd International Honors College; and the Departments of Political Science; Geography, Environment, and Sustainability; History; Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; and Sociology. For disability accommodations, please contact Forrest White at fewhite@uncg.edu.

Film Screening: "The Innocents"

The spring Human Rights Research Network film series begins with a showing of The Innocents on Thursday, January 30, at 6:30pm in Room 120 of the School of Education Building. Dr. Jeff Jones will be moderating the film and discussion that evening. There will be a reception following the film.

The Innocents is a 2016 French Sundance Film Festive Award winning production that depicts the aftermath of the brutal rape of several nuns in a Polish convent by Russian soldiers in 1945. These rapes result in pregnancies for several of the sisters. The plot follows the efforts of a French doctor to assist the women in the convent. The film raises serious questions about the violation of human rights, not only among perpetrators of such crimes, but also among humans in good societies and in tragic circumstances such as those depicted in this much-awarded film.

Community Scanning Day

2019 Edition of The Historian Now Online

Check out what our faculty, students, and alumni have been doing during the past year in our annual newsletter: http://his.uncg.edu/documents/newsletter/Newsletter-2019.pdf

Lisa Tetrault: "When Women Won the Right To Vote - An American Fiction"
Monday, October 21st
5:30-6:30 PM, Faculty Center
Dr. Lisa Tetrault, Associate Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon

That women won the right to vote in 1920 is American scripture, but that story misleads us in countless ways. It also leaves us ill equipped to fight the modern ongoing history of disenfranchisement. One hundred years later, it's time for a new story, one that more accurately captures this complex history, confronts the legacies of racism, and enables us to pick up the still unfinished project of securing voting rights for all.

Dr. Lisa Tetrault, Carnegie Mellon University, is the author of The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (2014) which won the OAH Mary Jurich Nickliss Book Prize.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, HNAC, and the Program in Women's and Gender Studies.

A reception with food will be at 5:00 PM

Invited Scholar Lecture: "The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba: Architecture, Memory, and the Future"
Thursday, October 24th, 6-7 PM, Faculty Center
Dr. Michele Lamprakos, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Univ. of Maryland

Most scholars know the Great Mosque of Cordoba as one of the great monuments of Islamic civilization. But for almost eight centuries, it has been the city's cathedral. Unlike other mosques on the Iberian peninsula, which were demolished and replaced by cathedrals and churches at some point after the Christian conquest, the Great Mosque of Cordoba survived. It was progressively adapted for Catholic worship with relatively minor changes. Then, in the 16th century, a strange thing happened: a massive choir and presbytery began to rise from the middle of the building. Over the course of the next two centuries, the surrounding fabric was progressively "christianized" — only to be "re-islamicized" in the 19th-20th centuries, in the era of Romanticism, Liberalism, and colonialism. Paradoxically, re-islamicization reached its highpoint under Franco's ultra-Catholic dictatorship (1939-1975). It might be expected that, with transition to democracy and freedom of religion, there would be greater openness to the Islamic past in Cordoba. But in fact, the opposite occurred: the last two decades have seen a new wave of christianization, as Church authorities have sought to downplay, discredit, and even deny the Islamic past. The long struggle over the building's fabric and meaning attests to the continuing power of the Islamic architectural legacy. But it is also a barometer of changing attitudes toward the Islamic past - and the meaning of that past for Spanish culture and society.

Michele Lamprakos is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, University of Maryland-College Park. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, she specializes in the early modern/modern Arab-Islamic world and critical heritage studies. Her research focuses on two main themes: the lives and layers of buildings and sites; and contacts between faith-cultures in the Mediterranean. She is author of Building a World Heritage City: Sanaa Yemen, the first book on urban heritage to be recognized by the Society of Architectural Historians' Spiro Kostof Award (Honorable Mention, 2018). She lectures widely and has organized international symposia, including "Heritage and the Arab Spring" (Freer Gallery of Art, 2014, with Nancy Um) which explored the role of cultural heritage in a new and shifting Middle East. She has served as Technical Reviewer for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and as Desk Reviewer for UNESCO. Dr. Lamprakos' lecture draws on her second book project, Memento Mauri: the Afterlife of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, which she is advancing as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2019-2020).

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Honors College, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Civilizations, the Islamic Studies Research Network, and HNAC.

Empires Across Space and Time
Monday, Oct. 28, 5:00
SOEB 118

The North Carolina Humanities Corridor presents "Empires Across Space and Time." Join faculty and students from UNCG and NCCU for an interdisciplinary discussion on varied examples of imperial power, from the prehistoric Wari Empire to the Roman Empire to the British Empire.

What is an empire? Who built and maintained the empires of the past? How and why did they do so? What are the differences between migrants, settlers, colonizers, and imperialists?

Associate Professor of History Jill Bender will be one of the discussants.

Ayla Amon: "'Unintelligible Babel': How Enslaved Muslims Used Arabic to Pursue Freedom in Early America'"
Tuesday, Sept. 10, 5:30-6:30
EUC Auditorium, UNCG

Of the more than 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported to the New World during the transatlantic slave trade, estimates suggest that at least 25% were Muslim. They brought with them their culture, their faith, and most importantly their language. Arabic, a language minimally studied, spoken, or understood in America, provided an outlet and resource for these men and women. They used Arabic to reaffirm their faith; to plead to be returned to Africa; to condemn slavery and their slave owners; to generate rebellion; and in a few cases, to gain their freedom. This lecture will examine some of the Arabic documents they wrote in order to shed light on the lives of these remarkable people and the role that Islam played in shaping the antebellum American landscape.

Ayla Amon is a Curatorial Assistant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture who studies enslaved African Muslims in North America. She holds degrees in Islamic Art and Architecture, Middle Eastern Studies, and Museum Studies from the University of Chicago and George Washington University, and has worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walters Art Museum, and the Tangier American Legation Museum in Morocco.

Co-sponsored by Lloyd International Honors College, the African American and African Diaspora Studies Program, the Department of History, and the Muslim Student Association.

Eger Publishes New Archaeology Book

The University Press of Colorado recently published The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers, edited by Dr. Asa Eger. "The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers demonstrates that different areas of the Islamic polity previously understood as "minor frontiers" were, in fact, of substantial importance to state formation. Contributors explore different conceptualizations of "border," the importance of which previously went unrecognized, examining frontiers in regions including the Magreb, the Mediterranean, Egypt, Nubia, and the Caucasus through a combination of archaeological and documentary evidence."

Kriger Gives Keynote Address

Dr. Colleen Kriger gave the keynote address at the "Clothing the Enslaved in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World Conference" at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff this summer. Her talk was titled "European Woolens and African Consumption in the Early Modern Atlantic: Status, Style, and Creole Culture."

Suttell Appears in Documentary

Dr. Brian Suttell (Ph.D. in History from UNCG, 2017) contributed to "Hope's City," a documentary by Dancing Ape Films and directed by Ricardo Fleshman that had its premiere on June 22, 2019. The film addresses the history and current revitalization efforts in Pamplin City, Virginia. In the documentary, Brian discusses issues such as the impact of the railroad, the Civil War, and race relations on the history of Pamplin City. The film is available on Amazon for a small fee and is free for Amazon Prime subscribers.

Fariñas Borrego Joins Department as Visiting Assistant Professor

Please join us in welcoming our new Visiting Assistant Professor in Latin American History for the 2019/20 academic year, Dr. Maikel Fariñas Borrego! Fariñas Borrego earned his Ph.D. degree in history from UNC Chapel Hill in May 2019. He earned his M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and his B.A. in History at the University of Havana. Fariñas Borrego has taught courses on Modern Latin American History and the History of Latinos in the United States. He is the author of the book Sociabilidad y cultura del ocio (2009) and several book chapters and journal articles on voluntary associations in republican Cuba. Fariñas Borrego's research focuses on the organization of business leaders in civic associations, such as Rotary Clubs, and their transformation into regional power groups across Cuba. He will be teaching three courses in the fall: HIS 209, HIS 240, and HIS 391.

Mandy Cooper Joins Department as Instructor of Women's History

Join the history department in welcoming our newest full-time instructor Dr. Mandy Cooper! Dr. Cooper holds the Ph.D. in history from Duke University and she is joining us to teach courses in U.S. history and women/gender history. Her courses this fall include HIS 329 U.S. Women's History Since 1865 and HIS 451/551 Gender and History: "Women and Politics in U.S. History." For more information about these courses check out the course descriptions page.

UNCG Museum Studies Program Wins National Leadership in History Award

The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) has recognized our program with an Award for Excellence/Leadership in History Award (the only North Carolina winner!) for the exhibit "Etched in Stone?: Governor Charles Aycock and the Power of Commemoration" in place on the top floor of the lobby of UNCG Auditorium. In addition, this project earned the HIP (History in Progress) Award given at the discretion of the awards committee to 5% or less of the total winners of the Award of Excellence. Read more here.

Polio Hospital Highway Marker Dedication
Sat., June 15, 2019, 3:00 p.m.
710 Huffine Mill Road, Greensboro
RSVP: go.uncg.edu/marker

The North Carolina Highway Historical Marker program has approved a marker commemorating the Central Carolina Convalescent Hospital, which served as a hospital for people with polio and later as a detention center for civil rights protesters in 1963. The marker will go up nearby Wendover Avenue, but we will hold the dedication ceremony at the hospital site itself. Read the News and Record article.

Montana Joyce Wins 2019 Undergraduate Research Award

Dean of University Libraries and Professor Martin Halbert and Associate Dean for Public Services and Associate Professor Kathryn Crowe presented the 2019 University Libraries Undergraduate Research Award to Montana Joyce, a double major in history and biology, on May 2 at UNC Greensboro's Student Honors Convocation. Read the article here.

Bender Named National Humanities Center Fellow

Associate Professor of History Jill Bender has been appointed a Fellow at the National Humanities Center for the academic year 2019-2020 for her research project "Assisted Emigrants: Irish Female Migration Projects and the British Empire." For more information, see the NHC website.

Gatson Hired as Assistant Professor in Public History

The UNCG Department of History is pleased to announce that Dr. Torren Gatson has been hired as Assistant Professor in Public History at the start of the fall term. Gatson's research focuses on historic preservation, material culture, 18th-20th century United States history, African American history, and southern history. Dr. Gatson defended his dissertation "The Combative Tactics of the NAACP Against Unfair Housing Laws and Practices: A Comparative Study of the Dynamic Changes in Urban and Rural Landscapes 1920-1960" in March 2018 at Middle Tennessee State University. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the department.

Speakeasy Night at Greensboro History Museum
Fri, April 26, 2019
7:00-10:00 p.m.
Tickets: $20; Age 21+ event, bring ID.

MA in History/Museum Studies student Erin Blackledge's capstone project: "An evening of Prohibition-era jazz, games, cocktails & more for the Smart Set. Tix on sale March 20. Includes admission and two beverage tickets. Additional beverage tickets will be available for purchase at the event. For a full authentic speakeasy experience, we encourage our fellas and flappers to dress in their best Gatsby (or cocktail) attire. For more details and fun, check out @GHMSpeakeasy on Instagram But ssshhh... don't tell. (Email greensborohistory.org or call 336-373-2610 for information)"