News
Faculty Happenings
Martha Chaiklin
This summer Martha published a co-edited volume called “Asian Material Culture,” which addresses topics from the Lion Dance to Moon Cakes. It includes her article “Up in the Hair- Strands of Meaning in Women’s Ornamental Hair Accessories in Early Modern Japan.” On a research trip to the Netherlands, funded by the World History Center, she investigated factory requisitions for ivory by the Dutch East India trading company for a book in progress and presented a paper on ivory in India at the World Economic History Congress.
Seymour Drescher
This summer Seymour Drescher participated in several scholarly lecture series and conferences on themes of slavery and abolition. At Leiden University in the Netherlands he gave a Crayenborgh Lecture on free versus slave labor from Antiquity to the present. At the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona he gave the keynote address at a conference on “Slavery, Empire and Abolition: The Case of Spain Understood from a Comparative Perspective.” At the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris he presented a paper on nationalist dimensions of abolitionist discourse and, at the annual meeting of Academia Europaea, (the Academy of Europe),he participated in a Round Table discussion on Slavery and the Slave Trade. This Fall, following the departmental symposium on new book Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery, there will be three panels discussing his scholarship at the Midwest Conference on British Studies, to be held in Pittsburgh on October 9, 2009. His paper “Emperors of the World: British Abolitionism and Imperialism,” first delivered at Cambridge University, is to be published shortly by Ohio University Press. He is co-editing and participating in a collective volume on Slave Revolts and Abolitionism. A paper delivered at the Ghana bicentennial conference on Anglo-American slave trade abolition is appearing in a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. His 1977 book, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, is to be republished, with a new foreword and afterword, by the University of North Carolina Press.
Tony Novosel
Tony is currently working with a Peace and Reconciliation Project in Northern Ireland known as the Business Education Initiative. This summer he spent two months in Northern Ireland, as part of a larger project,interviewing members and former members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Red Hand Commando and Loyalist Politicians regarding their political development and political analysis between 1972-1982, for ending the conflict in Northern Ireland. Novosel also provided orientations to Amizade, Coe College, Duke University, and other organizations who came to Northern Ireland to study the conflict. He continues to Work on collaborative projects with Belfast Model School for Girls and University of Pittsburgh Students dealing with the Middle East and the Messines Common History Project that links University of Pittsburgh students with organizations in Northern Ireland around the key historical events in Irish History.
Marcus Rediker
During the summer Marcus Rediker conducted research on his new history of the Amistad Rebellion and wrote a response to a roundtable on his book, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking, 2007), to be published in the journal, Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives in 2010. In July he lectured at an NEH Institute at Johns Hopkins University and as a keynote speaker in Hamilton, Bermuda, as part of the Bermuda Race Relations Initiative, a national discussion of the legacy of slavery. In the coming academic year he will deliver the Lawrence A. Brewster Lecture at East Carolina University and the John Kemble Lecture at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He will also speak at Denison University, the Conner Prairie Museum in Indianapolis, the University of Miami, North Carolina State University, the Sandy Spring Museum (Olney, Maryland), and the University of Bologna.
Rebecca Shumway
Over the summer Rebecca Shumway participated in the five-week NEH seminar, “Roots: African Dimensions of the History and Cultures of the Americas (Through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade),” at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville , Virginia . She also spent a month in Ghana, where she participated in the Omohundro Institute’s workshop, “Africa, Europe and the Americas, 1500-1700,” held at the International Institute for Advanced Studies, Accra, and presented a paper entitled, “The ‘Castle Slaves’ of the Gold Coast in the Era of the Slave Trade,” at the biennial conference of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) in Accra. In Fall of 2010 (the year in which the World Cup will take place in Africa for the first time), she will teach a new undergraduate course: HIST 1721, History of Southern Africa.
Richard Smethurst
Richard Smethurst has recently published Japanese-language op-ed pieces in two major Tokyo newspapers. On March 15, the liberal Asahi shimbun (circulation 8.3 million) published Smethurst’s short essay, “Takahashi Korekiyo: A Man Ahead of His Times,” about a pre-World War II finance minister who opposed militarism, called for fiscal stimuli to grow poor citizens’ standards of living in times of recession, and advocated a graduated income tax to narrow the income gap between the rich and poor. On June 15, the Nihon keizai shimbun, Japan’s business newspaper, published “Takahashi’s Legacy Provides a Model for the Whole World to Follow,” an essay that emphasized Takahashi’s courage in publicly standing up to Japan’s militarists in the 1930s—and being assassinated in 1936 for his trouble. Both essays subsequently appeared in the newspapers’ English-language editions. Harvard has just published Smethurst’s 2007 book on Takahashi in a paperback edition; a Japanese translation will appear in Spring 2010.