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Professors and Department News 2011-2012

• Christopher Loss has been awarded a 2012-13 Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is to support his current book project, Front and Center: Academic Expertise and its Challengers in the Post-1945 U.S.
• Sarah Igo has been awarded a large New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to be used over the next three years. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowships provide support for "exceptional faculty members in the humanities" who are pursuing innovative research to "acquire systematic training outside their own special fields."  Professor Igo plans to use the fellowship to pursue training in sociolegal thought and jurisprudence at U.C. Berkeley's Law School and Center for the Study of Law and Society.
• Moses Ochonu has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies for 2012-13.
• Daniel Sharfstein's article, “Atrocity, Entitlement and Personhood: The Value of Violence in Property Law,” (forthcoming in the May 2012 Virginia Law Review) was honored with the Association of American Law Schools’ 2012 Scholarly Paper Prize, and Sharfstein presented his work at the organization’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on January 6.
• Samira Sheikh has been awarded the Ryskamp Fellowship, by the American Council of Learned Societies, for the 2012-13 academic year.
• Celso Castilho and Catherine Molineux are recipients of a 2012-2013 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Fellowship in conjunction with the Sawyer Seminar entitled “The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World.” (see the description of the project listed below).
• Our new colleague, Celia Applegate, has just been voted "Vice President elect" of the Central European History Society, and will assume her term as president in 2014. The Central European History Society is the central organization of historians of Germany and of the Habsburg Empire in North America.
• The Smithsonian has appointed Gary Gerstle as Goldman Sachs Visiting Scholar for 2012.  In this capacity, he will be working with curators to develop a major, permanent exhibit on immigration to be installed in the National Museum of American History in 2014-15.
• Celso Castilho, Vanderbilt University, and Camillia Cowling, the University of Nottingham, have won the 2011 Conference on Latin American History Prize for their article, “Funding Freedom, Popularizing Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil.”
• Jane Landers' book, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions has been awarded honorary mention for the 2011 Bolton Johnson Prize for the best English-language book on any aspect of Latin American History
• Richard Blackett has been named the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University for the 2013-14 academic year.
• Daniel J. Sharfstein, associate professor of law and affiliated faculty of history, has been awarded an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship by the Fletcher Foundation. Sharfstein will use the fellowship, which provides $50,000 to fund research that furthers the broad social goals of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, to chronicle a group of Southern lawyers who argued against integration in courts during the decade following Brown.
• Jane Landers has been awarded nearly 45,000 British pounds sterling (about $70,000) from the British Library Endangered Archives Programme.  She will direct the project entitled: "Creating a digital archive of a circum-Caribbean trading entrepot: notarial records from La Guarjira."
• Richard Blackett, Andrew Jackson Professor of History, Teresa Goddu, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies and Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History have been awarded a $146,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to convene a year-long Sawyer Seminar in the academic year 2012-13 entitled “The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World.” The seminar will place the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) within the broader Atlantic emancipation processes of  the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and draw on Vanderbilt faculty who study slavery and abolition, including members of the history department Catherine Molineux, Celso Castilho, James Epstein, and Lauren Clay, among others.
• Jane Landers has been elected President-Elect of the Conference on Latin American History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association and the largest and oldest professional organization dedicated to the study of Latin American history.
• Jane Landers' book, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, has won the Rembert Patrick Award for the best scholarly book on a Florida history topic.
• Leor Halevi's book Muhmamad's Grave has won the Medieval Academy of America's John Nicholas Brown Prize, given for an outstanding first book. All the more noteworthy in that the prize has gone to an Islamicist, given that the Academy is primarily devoted to Medieval European History.
• Both William Caferro and Jane G. Landers were named Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professors of History, as of March 18, 2011. 
• Katie Crawford, Professor of History, has accepted the position of the Director of Women's and Gender Studies (Fall 2011- Spring 2014). 
• Edward Wright-Rios has been awarded the Ryskamp Fellowship, by the American Council of Learned Societies, for the 2011-12 academic year.
• Julia Cohen has received a fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, of the University of Pennsylvania, for spring semester 2012.
• Gary Gerstle has been named the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University for the 2012-2013 academic year. 
  
• Julia Cohen has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant for The Sephardic Studies Reader, 1730-1950, a documentary history to be co-edited with Sarah Abrevaya Stein of UCLA.
  
• Sarah Igo has been awarded a Teagle Foundation Grant of $392,000 to co-direct a three year project, the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education (2009-2012).

2011 - 2012 Book Publications

• Gerald Figal, Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012)
• James Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
• Peter Lorge, Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
• Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Harvard University Press, 2012)
• Christopher Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2012)
• Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000, (Translated in to French, 2011; University of Chicago Press, 2003)
• Helmut Walser Smith, editor, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Peter Lorge, editor, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (The Chinese University Press, 2011)
• Peter Lake and Michael Questier have co-authored the book,The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martydom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethean England,published by Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011.
• Peter Lorge is editor of a series of books called “Asian States and Empires”. Four of these books have been published.  The second book in the series is War, Culture, and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740-1849 by Kaushik Roy.
• Daniel Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin Press, 2011)
• Frank Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Current Graduate Student Articles and Awards

• Caree Banton is the recipient of a 2012-2013 Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship in conjunction with the Sawyer Seminar entitled “The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World.”
• Courtney Campbell has received The 2011 Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. Prize for, “Inside Out: Intellectual Views on Northeastern Brazilian Regional Identity and Transnational Change, 1926-1952”.  The prize is awarded annually for the best graduate student paper on Latin American and Caribbean, Borderlands or Atlantic World history presented at the SHA meeting. She has also been awarded a Fulbright-Hays DDRA (funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered through IIE) for the 2012 year to do 12 months of dissertation research in Brazil
• Joanna Elrick has received a John Carter Brown Library Fellowship for summer 2012. Joanna has been awarded a 2012 Cuban Heritage Collection Research Fellowship in support of her research project, “Religion, Race and Culture in Colonial Cuba, Angola, and Brazil.” She will present a paper, "Magical Exchanges: the African contribution to popular religion in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, 1697-1752 " at the "Enslavement, Identity and Cross-Cultural Exchange" conference at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, UK, to take place January 2012. She was awarded a bursary by the Wilberforce Institute to attend this conference. She has also been awarded the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship to perform archival research in Portugal during the 2010-2011 academic year, and, a one-month Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at The Huntington Library.
• Angela Sutton will present a paper, “West African, Prussian and Dutch slave traders at Fort Gross Friedrichsburg: An investigation of enslavement as a Process of Cross-Cultural Exchange,” at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (University of Hull) in January of 2012. She was awarded a bursary by the Wilberforce Institute to attend this conference. Sutton has been awarded the Vanderbilt University Dissertation Enhancement Grant for research into the Swedish Slave trade in the Royal Archives in Stockholm. She was awarded a Max Kade Student Research Grant to go to Berlin summer 2011 to do research in the Brandenburg Africa Company Archives. She has also received a NAF-Netherlands Fulbright Scholarship Award for the 2010-2011 academic year, and a Binkley-Weaver travel grant for research in Ghana summer 2010.
• Erin Woodruff Stone has received a 2011-2012 Fulbright Research Grant to Spain to study indigenous/Spanish interactions in the Colonial Circum-Caribbean in the 16th century.that will be used to conduct archival research in Sevilla and Madrid, Spain.
• Nicolette Kostiw is a NSEP/IIE Boren Fellow for the 2010-2011 academic year and is currently conducting dissertation research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is also the recipient of a James and Sylvia Thayer Short-Term Research Fellowship and will conduct research at UCLA's Special Collections in January 2012. 
• Rachel Donaldson’s article, "Broadcasting Diversity: Alan Lomax and Multiculturalism," is forthcoming from The Journal of Popular Culture.

Alumni

• Nicholas M. Beasley (PhD, 2006) The Reverend Nicholas Beasley is Rector of the Church of the Resurrection Episcopal, in Greenwood, South Carolina. His book Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies 1650-1780 was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2009. More recently, he has published book reviews in Anglican and Episcopal History and Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief. Dr. Beasley taught history courses in the European Studies summer program at University of the South in 2008 and 2009.
• Paul H. Bergeron (PhD, 1965) is Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of Tennessee. His latest book, Andrew Johnson's Civil War and Reconstruction, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2011.
• Michael Boden (PhD, 2010) Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, and Professor of Military Science, Hofstra University.
• Tim Boyd (PhD, 2007) is a history teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Boyd's book, Georgia Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Shaping of the New South (Gainesville, 2012) is available from the University Press of Florida. An article based on a chapter from the book on the 1966 election of Lester Maddox appeared in the Journal of Southern History (May 2009).
• Christina Dickerson Cousin (PhD, 2011) is an Adjunct Professor in Humanities, Cumberland County Community College, Vineland, New Jersey.
• Michael Crane (PhD, 2009), is Assistant Professor of History, University of Arkansas - Fort Smith.
• Mike Davis (PhD, 1996) is Head of School, Colorado Academy, a 900 student preK through 12 school in Denver. www.coloradoacademy.org.
• Rachel Donaldson (PhD, 2011) is a Lecturer, Program in American Studies, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee.
• Pablo Gomez (PhD, 2010) is an Assistant Professor at Texas Christian University. His dissertation is titled, “Bodies of Encounter: Health, Illness and Death in the Early Modern African-Spanish Caribbean.” His work has been published in the edited volume “Differenz und Herrschaft in den Amerikas: Repräsentationen des Anderen in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” the Encyclopedia of Plagues, Pestilence, and Epidemics and in several medical journals. Pablo is the director of the British Library funded project "Creating a digital archive of Afro-Colombian history and culture: Black Ecclesiastical and Notarial records from the Choco, Colombia," he is also a member of the NEH funded project “Ecclesiastical Sources and Historical research on the African Diaspora in Brazil, Cuba and Colombia.” He has presented his work at various conferences across the world. Pablo Gomez has received the Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program Fellowship for 2011-2012 academic year.
• Mark Hampton (PhD 1998) Associate Professor of History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, since January 2007. Associate Professor (tenured) and Assistant Professor at Wesleyan College, Macon, GA, 1999-2006. His books include: Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 (University of Illinois Press, 2004), and, Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850-2000, (co-edited with Joel H. Wiener; Palgrave, 2007). His current book project is: "Britishness and Hong Kong, 1945-1997," (forthcoming 2012). He is co-editor of the journal Media History (since 2005). He is co-organizing a conference on "Articulations of British Culture in the Empire", 1707-1997, to be held in Hong Kong in May 2011; the confirmed plenary speakers include Chris Bayly, David Cannadine, Linda Colley, and Philippa Levine.
• Cheryl Hudson (PhD, 2011) Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies's book, "Ronald Reagan and the 1980s: Perceptions, Policies, Legacies," was published by New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.
• Robert Hutton (PhD, 2009) is a lecturer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN. Hutton's article, "Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War's Aftermath" will appear in the University Press of Kentucky's New Directions in Southern History series.
• Natalie Inman (PhD, 2010) is Assistant Professor, Cumberland University, Lebanon, Tennesse.
• David C. LaFevor (PhD, 2011) is Assistant Professor, Berry College, Georgia.
• R.A. Lawson (PhD, 2003) is Associate Professor of History, Dean College, Massachusetts. Professor Lawson’s book Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945 (LSU Press, 2010) has been awarded the Michael V.R. Thomason Book Award for best book of 2010-2011 by the Gulf South Historical Association.
• Werner D. Lippert (PhD, 2005) is Assistant Professor, Department of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania has published The Economic Diplomacy of Ostpolitik: Origins of Nato’s Energy Dilemma.
• Andrew McMichael (PhD, 2000) is Associate Professor and Assistant Dean, Potter College of Arts and Letters, Western Kentucky University. As Assistant Dean he is involved in technology and electronic "outreach," as well as curriculum development, and grants. The second edition of his first book, History On The Web: Using And Evaluating The Internet, is forthcoming. He is researching and writing a second monograph on the history of alcohol in the Ohio Valley from the colonial period through the early 19th century. In the spring of 2012, McMichael has a teaching sabbatical in England at Harlaxton College, where he'll teach Atlantic World and The History of Beer.
• Steven P. Miller (PhD, 2006) is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Goshen College (Spring 2010). A resident of St. Louis, Miller teaches history at Washington and Webster Universities. His first book, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), has received favorable reviews in such publications as The New York Times Book Review, Christian Century, and H-Net Reviews. His current project explores the place and meaning of evangelical Christianity in the United States between 1970 and 2008. Miller has published numerous scholarly articles and reviews, and is a regular contributor to the Religion in American History weblog. His website can be found at http://sites.google.com/site/stevenpmillersite/.
• LeeAnn Reynolds (PhD, 2007) is Assistant Professor, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.
• Larry O. Rivers (PhD, 2010) is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Augusta State University in Augusta, Georgia. Larry's article "'Leaning on the Everlasting Arms': Virgil Darnell Hawkins's Early Life and Entry into the Civil Rights Struggle" was published in The Florida Historical Quarterly (Winter 2008).
• Selena Sanderfer (PhD, 2010) is Assistant Professor, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her dissertation, titled, For Land and Liberty: Black Territorial Separatism in the South, 1776-1904 examines lower class black separatist movements from the South to Nova Scotia, Liberia, and the Midwest.
• Mary L. Sanderson (PhD, 2010) is an adjunct instructor in Dayton, OH, where she teaches at Wright State University and the University of Dayton.
• David Wheat (PhD, 2009) is Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University.  His latest article "The First Great Waves: African Provenance Zones for the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Cartagena de Indias" was published in The Journal of African History 52:1 (2011): 1-22.  Wheat was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2012-2013 in support of his book project, "Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640."