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Transcending the Limits of Language

Laurent Dubois takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the history of a musical instrument as a Mellon New Directions Fellow. The studies that he was able to pursue with musicology and instrument-making have shaped a collaborative digital project on the banjo, as well as his forthcoming book on banjo music/culture. https://interdisciplinary.duke.edu/transcending-limits-of-language-laure... read more »

Zachary Fuchs Wins 2015 Lowell Aptman Prize

Zachary Fuchs, who took his History 157s (Empires in Historical Perspective) last Fall—has been awarded the 2015 Lowell Aptman Prize (in the First-Second Year category).  His final paper, “The Great White Symbol: U.S. Naval Power as an Expression of Empire, 1890-1909,” combined extensive primary-source research (using the Perkins-Bostock library and the archives of the Naval Yard in Washington, DC), with wide reading in the secondary sources.  Zach is the sixth prize winner in the eight years Professor Kaiwar has… read more »

Jacob Remes Commemorates Katrina Ten Years Later

This week marks ten years that I've been thinking and writing about disaster—and more importantly, ten years since Katrina. To commemorate both those things (the former obliquely), I have a piece in The Atlantic today about how the solidarity needed and practiced after Katrina can be an antidote to neoliberalism. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/hurricane-katrinas-lesson-in-civics/402961/ read more »

Tom Cinq-Mars Awarded Weyerhaeuser Fellowship

Tom Cinq-Mars was awarded the Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser Forest History Fellowship from the Forest History Society (FHS). A non-profit depository dedicated to forest and conservation history located here in Durham, the FHS offers the Weyerhaeuser Fellowship annually to a Duke graduate student pursuing an historical research project treating land use, forestry, or the environment, broadly construed. Students enrolled in any Duke graduate program are eligible to apply. Tom will use the Fellowship stipend, consisting of $10,000… read more »

Andrew Ruoss - 2015 Winner of North American Conference on British Studies Dissertation Fellowship

 The British Studies Dissertation Fellowship is awarded annually to support dissertation research in the British Isles on any topic of British (including Scottish, Irish and Imperial) history or British Studies. Andrews's thesis is entitled "Competitive Collaboration: Forging Global Corporate Political Economy, 1650-1730" -- and is a major contribution to our understanding of politics and economics in the early modern period.   read more »

AHA Today Announces Winner of First Blog Contest

The American Historical Association (AHA) is pleased to announce the winners of its first AHA Today Blog Contest. Over the course of the summer, each of these historians will be writing for AHA Today about their scholarship and the experience of doing their research. One of the three winners is:  Eladio Bobadilla, doctoral student at Duke University and an alumni of Weber State University. He will be blogging about his research on how Chicanos have embraced the cause of… read more »

Christina Mobley joins the University of Virginia History Department as an Assistant Professor

Christina Mobley accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Virginia. She earned her PhD in History from Duke in the spring of 2015. She specializes in the cultural history of slavery in Africa and the African diaspora. She is particularly interested in West Central African cultural practices in the Atlantic world in the early modern period. Her dissertation, "The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti," investigates the politics of interior… read more »

Tom Cinq-Mars Awarded AHA Bernadotte Schmitt Grant

This past spring, Tom Cinq-Mars received a Bernadette Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African, or Asian History from the AHA. Scholars can apply for these modest grants of $1000 each annually to continue research in progress and may use the funds to offset a variety of costs, including travel to archives and libraries, copying source materials, as well as childcare. Fifteen grants were awarded nationally this year. Tom will use the funds to travel to Harvard University’s Lamont Library, where he will examine… read more »

Remember Reconstruction by Preserving Mitchelville

Unfortunately the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment and the formal beginning of Reconstruction probably will not have the power or grandeur of the 150th anniversary commemorations of the Civil War. There likely will be fewer academic symposia and state-commissioned programs. This is not as it should be. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/05/26/how-should-americans-rem... read more »

Mandy Hughett on what she gained from her internship experience

When I started graduate school, I knew I wanted to remain active in my community and perhaps even pursue a job beyond the academy after graduation. So, I set out in search of an internship after I became A.B.D and in fall 2013, I served as a policy intern for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) in Durham, North Carolina. As I had hoped, my internship taught me practical new skills, and it enabled me to network with non-profit professionals in the Triangle Area. But, surprisingly, it also strengthened my… read more »

Will Goldsmith on “Lessons from the Transferable PhD Conference”

Almost 50 percent of those who earn Ph.D.s in history do something else besides teach as tenure-track faculty at universities or four-year colleges. As a history Ph.D. student, I’ve been confronted with that basic fact since starting graduate school four years ago. And yet, that “something else” has often felt elusive. What else do history Ph.D.s do? How do they make that transition from graduate school to other employment? How do they take the skills and experiences of Ph.D. training and apply it elsewhere? Goldsmith's… read more »

Humphreys wins George Rosen Prize

Humphreys book Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War  (Hopkins, 2013) has been awarded the George Rosen Prize from the American Association of the History of Medicine.http://www.histmed.org/about/awards/george-rosen-prizeThis is the book's second accolade. Last year, Marrow was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize!   read more »

Ashley Rose Young joins the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book, Manuscript & Special Collections team

Ashley Rose Young was offered a position as the reference intern at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library for the 2015-2016 academic year. Ashley is a passionate bibliophile and has cultivated a vibrant collection of historic cookbooks that sheds light on American cultural development and community formation in the nineteenth century. In 2013, she was awarded first prize in the Andrew T. Nadell Book Collectors Competition for her historic Creole cookbook collection. She then went on to win second prize… read more »

Tricia Ross received a Duke-UNC Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Tricia Ross received a Duke-UNC Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her dissertation, "Care of Bodies, Cure of Souls: Religion and Medicine in Early Modern Germany." Combining histories of late medieval and early modern psychology, medicine, and religion, her project reveals how concepts about body and soul in each of these fields overlapped and influenced each other, such that diseases of the body were understood to be related to the health of the soul; and… read more »

Elizabeth Fenn Wins Pulitzer Prize for History

Elizabeth A. Fenn's "Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People" has won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Fenn was cited Monday for her chronicle of the Mandans, which the judge's called "an engrossing, original narrative showing the Mandans, a Native American tribe in the Dakotas, as a people with a history." The finalists in the category were Sven Beckert's "Empire of Cotton: A Global History" and Nick Bunker's "An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America." read more »

Rochelle Rojas has been awarded the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Fellowship for Religion and Ethics

Rochelle Rojas has been awarded the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Fellowship for Religion and Ethics, administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The Newcombe Fellowship is designed to encourage original and significant study of ethical or religious values in all fields of the humanities and social sciences, and is provided to Ph.D. candidates at American institutions who will complete their dissertations during the 2015-16 academic year. In the current Newcombe… read more »