Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Washington State University
History | Faculty News

Marina Tolmacheva attends summer conferences

As we settle into this new academic year we want to take a moment to look back and appreciate some achievements that were not previously recognized over the last few months as we transitioned through staff changes!

Marina Tolmacheva traveled to two international meetings this summer. In August, she attended the 25th International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Tolmacheva presented a paper in the symposium on the “History of Isla…mic Science: Global and Local,” and also gave the academic year’s Inaugural Lecture in the Geography Program at the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (Foz do Iguaçu, Parana). In July, she attended the regional conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic. The conference was hosted by the American University of Central Asia. In addition to presenting a paper, Tolmacheva was invited to speak at two other local universities: the International Relations Faculty at Balasagyn National University and in the Department of Foreign Languages at the International University of Kyrgyzstan.

Review the conferences and their content at the links below!

http://www.escas.org/conferences/

http://www.ichst2017.sbhc.org.br/site/capa

Professor Sue Peabody has a new book out!

Professor Sue Peabody has published a new book: Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies.

Madeleine’s Children is rare narrative in world history of an enslaved person challenging his status in court and winning his freedom. It is the first full length biography tracing slavery in the Indian Ocean world and contains a detailed family saga of love, betrayal, hope, and struggle set against the broader context of plantation slavery, Parisian society, and colonization.

Madeleine’s Children

Sue Peabody has published a new article!

Sue Peabody, Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at WSU Vancouver, has published an article, “S’affranchir ou s’enraciner? Le droit français sur la migration des colonies à la metropole à l’époque de l’esclavage.” In Archéologie des migrations, edited by Dominique Garcia Hervé Le Bras, (Paris: La Découverte, 2017).

Find more information on her work and review a list of her publications by visiting the Department of History’s faculty directory.

 

Provost Teaching Fellowships Awarded to Three RCI Faculty!!!

Jesse SpohnholzJesse Spohnholz (RCI Director), Clif Stratton (RCI Asst. Director) and Katy Fry (RCI Curriculum Coordinator) received Provost Office Teaching Fellowships for the coming academic year. A joint application was submitted as part of the Provost’s Office efforts to promote education innovation at WSU.

 

 

Katy FryFry will start the work this Fall by redesigning RCI lesson templates, with revised versions that maximize the opportunities offered in Pullman by the new learning spaces and digital tools offered by the Digital Classroom Building. Stratton and Fry will pilot draft lessons in Spring 2018. Fry will then offer training to all ROOTS (RCI) faculty.

 

 

Clif StrattonStratton will conduct an assessment of learning outcomes to identify areas where new technologies are or are not having measurable effects on student learning. As Director, Spohnholz will be supervising the project. He plans to take talented WSU students around the state in a series of organized events aimed a wider public that will use WSU students to make the case for how critical creative and innovative history learning is for the future of our state, nation, and world.

 

“Legacies of the Manhattan Project at 75 Years” call for papers

The Hanford History Project and Washington State University Press are soliciting papers for a collection of essays on the March 2017 conference theme, “Legacies of the Manhattan Project at 75 Years.”  The collection is NOT a “conference proceedings” but rather an effort to gather recent, cutting-edge research that reflects current scholarship on any aspect of the Manhattan Project/Cold War inheritance. We would be delighted to consider for inclusion any work you are presently engaged in pertaining to that theme. See the flyer here for submission information and deadline.

Well over 100 people registered and participated in the March conference. There were outstanding panel discussions, informative updates regarding the evolution of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, and a round-table discussion that concluded the formal program.  The Park’s Hanford unit was visited as well as its crown jewel, B Reactor.

The conference in March also underscored the need to continue to expand the scope of historical inquiry and interpretation, to encompass those stories that have yet to garner the attention they deserve: the stories of often-overlooked groups (African-American and domestic laborers, for instance) without whose efforts the Manhattan Project would have remained a thing of whimsy, a pipe-dream; the stories of the Native American tribes-people and the pre-1943 farming families who were peremptorily uprooted, abruptly divorced from their traditions and ways of life, in order to make way for the government’s massive undertaking; the stories of the tragic human and environmental impacts that were the unintended consequences of an arms race conducted with a war-time sense of urgency; and, more positively, the stories of scientific and technological innovation and advancement developed to remedy those consequences.

The Hanford History Project will be hosting another conference at a date yet to be determined (spring or fall 2019).  A series of events is also planned for Fall 2017…more information forthcoming.

New RCI Teaching Postdoc, George Njung, to join faculty in Fall 2017

George Njung will begin serving as an RCI Teaching Postdoc in Fall 2017. Dr. Njung earned his PhD in History in 2016 from the University of Michigan, with a dissertation titled “Soldiers of their Own: Honor, Violence, Resistance, and Conscription in Colonial Cameroon during the First World War.” He has experience teaching college courses on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the History of Africa to 1850, and The Holocaust.

 

Dr. Matthew Unangst’s article to be published in CEH Journal

Matthew Unangst’s article, tentatively titled “Men of Science and of Action: The Celebrity of Explorers and German National Identity, 1870-1890,” has been accepted for publication in Central European History.

Central European History is a peer-reviewed academic journal on history published quarterly by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association.  It covers all aspects of central European history from the Middle Ages to present day.  It was established in 1968 and is edited by Andrew I. Port and Julia Torrie.

 

Dr. Robert McCoy receives CDSC 2017 Summer Fellowship

Robert McCoyThe Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (CDSC) announced the 2017 Summer Fellows. Dr. Robert McCoy is one of two fellowship recipients.  He will begin a new public history project on the Spokane River system as a site of contested cultural narratives about the Columbia Plateau region.

The CDSC facilitates and sustains digital scholarship, research and teaching at WSU.  Their mission is to promote socially engaged and ethically minded uses of technology as part of long-term partnerships across disciplines and communities.

 

Robert McCoy and Steven Fountain publish “History of American Indians”

“History of American Indians: Exploring Diverse Roots” has recently been published by ABC-CLIO Corporate / Greenwood Publishing.  Dr. Robert McCoy and Dr. Steven M. Fountain coauthored the book.

Robert McCoy

Robert R. McCoy is an associate professor of history at WSU, Pullman, Washington. He is the author of Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf, and the Creation of Nez Perce History in the Pacific Northwest (Routledge Press) and coauthor of “Forgotten Voices: Death Records of the Yakama 1888-1964.”

 

Steve Fountain

 

Steven M. Fountain is a clinical assistant professor of history and coordinator of Native American Program at WSU Vancouver.  His first book “Horses of Their Own Making: An Equestrian History of Native America” is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press.