A Message from the Chair
The spring is always the busiest season in Harris Hall and given the events of the last two-plus years, it is especially satisfying to see our students re-occupying the building: catching up with classmates, waiting in line outside of Henry Binford’s office (some things never change), attending lectures. The return to in-person teaching has inevitably had its strains, especially amid covid surges; we are ever more aware of how much was lost in the remote world. Many of my colleagues have commented on the avidity of the students this year and their seriousness of purpose, their desire to figure out the relationship between then and now. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February, hundreds of people – students, colleagues, members of the public – crowded into the Leopold Room to hear Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Ben Frommer analyze the crisis.
The History faculty are, as usual, busy in their classrooms; in demand as experts on the radio, TV, documentaries, and Congressional committees; researching and writing articles, books, and op-eds. To take only a small sample of this news, a fuller list of which you’ll find on our website-- Kate Masur spearheaded a digital history project, entitled “Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice,” with a team of Northwestern graduate students and undergraduates, which the Chicago Tribune covered in a front-page story. Doug Kiel gave testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources.
Last year Ed Muir became the first Northwestern History Department faculty member to be elected president of the American Historical Association – a great honor both for him and for us. He’s our first but not last president, I wager. The esteem my colleagues have earned in their fields is evident in the fact that the current program committee chairs for four major professional organizations – the Organization of American Historians (Geraldo Cadava), the American Historical Association (Amy Stanley), the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (Caitlin Fitz) and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (Daniel Immerwahr) – all have their offices on the second floor of Harris Hall, which has to be some sort of record. David Shyovitz’s A Remembrance of His Wonders won the Medieval Academy’s 2021 John Nicholas Brown Prize. Dyan Elliott’s The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy was awarded the 2022 Otto Gründler Award by the Medieval Institute for outstanding contribution to the field of medieval studies. Michaela Kleber, who joined the Department last year, was awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. women’s and gender history. Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
For the fourth year in a row, the History Department has won the university’s highest teaching award. This spring, Amy Stanley was named to the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence. Lauren Stokes won the College Distinguished Teaching Award. Among the other accolades and accomplishments you’ll see in our faculty news are a shelf-full of new books and edited volumes by Daniel Greene, Henry Binford, Kevin Boyle, Paul Gillingham, Melissa Macauley, Kate Masur, Susan Pearson, David Schoenbrun, Scott Sowerby, Lauren Stokes, and Helen Tilley. Leslie Harris has been elected to the Society of American Historians in recognition of the "narrative power and scholarly distinction" of her historical work; she was also awarded the Newberry Library’s inaugural Wagner Distinguished Fellowship for Humanistic Inquiry. Both Dyan Elliott and Sean Hanretta won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sarah Maza will be at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars next year; Brett Gadsden won a fellowship at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study.
With nine retirements between 2020-2025, we have been hard at work on the crucial business of hiring. Next fall we’ll welcome Kathleen Belew, presently an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, and Jeff Eden, Assistant Professor at St. Mary’s College, Maryland, to Harris Hall. Belew’s first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), established her as the foremost historian of the modern white power movement and – more broadly – as a major figure in recent American history. Eden is a specialist in the history of Russia/Soviet history as well as Central Asia with extraordinary range, both geographically and temporally. He is the author of two ground-breaking monographs: Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2021). Our cherished colleague, Henry Binford, will be retiring this summer after nearly a half-century on the Northwestern faculty. We will miss him immensely and hope to persuade him to return to offer the occasional class. We have inaugurated the Binford Prize, awarded to the group of teaching assistants who best exemplify Henry’s commitment both to distinction and teamwork in teaching. We also salute our colleague, Richard Kieckhefer, the John Evans Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, who has been a valued member of the History Department.
This year, we’ve been especially grateful for the herculean work of the History Department’s Business Administrator, Annerys Cano, who because of staff departures, has at times been doing three jobs at once. We’re very glad to welcome Julie Hoather, the new Graduate Coordinator, and Gloria Hernandez, the new Undergraduate Program Assistant, to our midst, and thank Alison Witt-Janssen for her work on this newsletter and the departmental website. And, as ever, I send hearty thanks to our devoted friends and alumni supporters. We were thrilled by Dan Linzer’s gift in honor of his father, Aaron Hochstein, as well as by the generosity of Barbara Posadas and Roland Guyotte’s Endowment. Your contributions have made it possible for the Department to offer two additional teaching post-docs to our new Ph.D.s, which have provided opportunities for talented historians to enrich our undergraduate curriculum as they seek permanent employment. On that score, you’ll see more good news from the Graduate program, here. We raise our glass to new beginnings and with gratitude for our friends.