News & Events
Recent News
Download our latest newsletter, History @ Illinois, Spring 2009
"Military Historian Concludes a Career of Teaching and Bagpiping at LAS" (Article at College of LAS News)
Jungwon Kim has been awarded an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship for "Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Korea: Translation and Analysis of Inquest Records" (in collaboration with Prof. Sun Joo Kim at Harvard). She has also won a Presidential Fellowship, Seoul National University for her book project: "Negotiating Virtue: The Politics of Chastity and Social Power in Late Choso˜n Korea."
Craig Koslofsky has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship via the Newberry Library to put the finishing touches on his book on the night in early modern Europe and to begin a new project on mercy and compassion in early modern culture.
Mike Rosenow (now at the University of Central Arkansas), who received his PhD here in 2008, has just been announced the winner of the second Herbert Gutman Dissertation Prize, given by the Labor and Working Class History Association to honor Gutman for his pioneering work, given for the best dissertation in labor history. His dissertation, "Injuries to All: The Rituals of Dying and the Politics of Death among United States Workers, 1877-1910," is honored with a cash award and publication by the University of Illinois Press in its major series, the Working Class in America. Mike's dissertation was directed by Jim Barrett, and he worked with many of us during his undergraduate and graduate student years here.
It is with great pride that the History Department celebrates the publication of Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2009) by Joseph Kip Kosek of George Washington University, who graduated with honors in History from the University of Illinois in 1997. Professor Kosek has many awards and achievements that show some of the directions an Illinois history degree can take you. He had already distinguished himself in our department by winning the Scher Prize for one of his undergraduate papers and writing an excellent honors thesis on the nineteenth century penny press. He went on to graduate work in American Studies at Yale University, where he wrote the dissertation that was the basis for his new book. The dissertation won the Allan Nevins Prize given annually by the Society of American Historians for the best-written dissertation in the field of American History. He is currently assistant professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the American Studies program at GWU, where he teaches courses in American religion, cultural history, US reform movements among other subjects. Professor Kosek’s book tells the stories of religious radicals who responded to the catastrophic bloodshed of the twentieth century by inventing new forms of militant nonviolence that gained remarkable power by blending Christian ideals, Ghandian non-violent protest, and novel uses of mass medial. Congratulations Kip!
Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy on the Columbia University Press website.
More information on Kip Kosek can be found under “Core Faculty” at GWU American Studies.
Sundiata Cha-Jua, and Clarence Lang have just won the 2009 EBSCOhost America: History and Life Award, a biennial award given to recognize and encourage sholarship in American history in the journal literature advancing new perspectives on accepted interpretations or previously unconsidered topics. They won this prestigious award with their coauthored article, "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" which was published in the Journal of African History Vol. 92, No. 2 (Spring 2007), 265-88
Ron Toby News
Ronald Toby was recently featured in the Jan. 23, 2009 evening edition of the Mainichi shinbun, one of Japan's major national dailies in a series entitled, "Where's this country headed?". The profile/interview summarizes his carrer, covers his 2008 book The Politics of "Seclusion" , but also looks more braodly at his approach to early modern Japan in its East Asian transnational contect, as well as connecting his historical writing to present-day questions of Japan's role in the world today.
John Randolph has just won the AAASS W. Bruce Lincoln book prize "for an author's first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia's past". The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Cornell, 2007) also received Honorable Mention in the Wayne S. Vucinich book prize competition.