History News
NCPH/OAH 2012
Loyola's graduate students and faculty were well represented at the 2012 annual meetings of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in Milwaukee, April 18-22, 2012. Three current and past graduate students - Samanatha Chmelik, Katie Macica (right), and Rebecca Redinger - presented their work in the Saturday afternoon poster session. Graduate students Devin Hunter, William Ippen, and Greg Ruth and faculty member Kyle Roberts participated in various working groups on Sustainability and Public History, the Civil War Sesquicentennial, and Doing Public History Online.
Congratulations to faculty member Michelle Nickerson who launched her new book, Mothers of Conservatism (Princeton, 2012), at the conference.
Public History Graduate Students Launch New Blog
The Lakefront Historian is a group blog written by graduate students and scholars associated with the department's Public History Program. Content includes reviews of historical sites and institutions, commentary on the public consumption of history, thoughts on public history theory and practice, and news and updates about public history careers. Be sure to also check out the Facebook page of the Public History Program.
New HGSA Officers Elected
Congratulations to the newly elected officers of the History Department Graduate Students Association (HGSA): Amelia Serafine, President; Greg Ruth; Vice President; Laura Johns, Treasurer; Grace Pekar, Secretary; Rachel Boyle, Media Coordinator. For the latest updates on the HGSA, follow their Twitter feed @LUC_HGSA or check out their Facebook page.
OLDER NEWS:
One of our recent History Ph.D.'s students has now become a college president!
Providence Christian College's Board of Directors has unanimously approved the appointment of Dr. J. Derek Halvorson as the College's 2nd president, effective July 1. Halvorson, currently serving as Regional Director of Development for Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, will succeed Jim Den Ouden, who is retiring after serving as president of Providence since June 2004. (More...)
One of our recent History Ph.D.'s students has now become a college president!
Providence Christian College's Board of Directors has unanimously approved the appointment of Dr. J. Derek Halvorson as the College's 2nd president, effective July 1. Halvorson, currently serving as Regional Director of Development for Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, will succeed Jim Den Ouden, who is retiring after serving as president of Providence since June 2004.
History Department ranked sixth in the nation for scholarly productivity!
In January, 2007, the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index announced that the history department of Loyola University ranked sixth in the nation in scholarly productivity. The Index is financed by the State University of New York at Stony Brook and produced by the for-profit company Academic Analytics. The index rates the scholarly output of nearly 7,300 doctoral programs in the United States. The current rankings are based on publications in 2005. Loyola's history department was tied for sixth with New York University. The top 10 (in order of rank) were Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Maryland, Yale, Loyola and NYU, Ohio State, Rice and Northwestern. (More...)
Dr. Gilfoyle receives award for best Urban History book in 2006!
KENNETH JACKSON AWARD FOR BEST BOOK (NORTH AMERICAN) PUBLISHED IN 2006 awarded to Timothy Gilfoyle for his book, A Pickpocket's Tale: the Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (W.W. Norton, 2006).
Selected from more than thirty outstanding nominations, A Pickpocket's Tale combines evocative prose with meticulous research to tell the riveting story of a petty criminal named George Appo, and through his story, to convey a revealing history of the underside of the nation's largest city. Well known in his time, Appo was lost to history until Gilfoyle resurrected him. Gilfoyle's genius, however, lies in his decision to build the narrative around Appo's journey. Following Appo through his triumphs and travails allows Gilfoyle to introduce the readers to the Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods where the pickpocket grew up with other lost boys, learning the code of conmen and petty thieves who relied on guile and intelligence to craft their crimes. Gilfoyle takes us inside prisoner ships, penitentiaries, and asylums to unmask the brutality of the nineteenth-century penal system. In discussing, the violence that Appo encountered and survived, including shootings and stabbings, Gilfoyle demonstrates how a rapidly growing New York City became an increasingly more diverse, more chaotic, and less egalitarian place.
A masterful work of urban scholarship, A Pickpocket's Tale reminds us that good history explains the past, but great history gives the past meaning and illuminates the human condition.
Dr. Ghazzal awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study
Professor Zouhair Ghazzal has been awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for 10 months between September 2008 and June 2009. He will be a fellow in their Social Sciences Program and work to complete his book entitled The Ideal of Punishment: The Syrian Judiciary and its Procedures. Every year the Institute has a theme, and for the coming year it will be on Norms and the Importance of Normative Values in Society.
Curriculum changes
Over the past year we have enhanced the research component the history major: 1) by developing a senior capstone course, 2) by instituting a portfolio requirement, and 3) by offering more focused instruction in information literacy. These initiatives share the common theme of encouraging our majors to engage in the active construction of history rather the passive reception of knowledge.
- The senior capstone course will be taught for the first time in the Spring, 2008. This course guides history seniors in writing a substantial research paper based on original primary sources. They are encouraged to work with faculty mentors in these projects and build on their intellectual focus as history majors. This course has our students “doing history” in the most real way.
- Our new history portfolio, which was approved at the December 2007 Academic Council meeting, is similarly focused on getting students to engage in historical research and analysis. They are now required to turn in a portfolio before graduation, which includes a historical research paper, their “best” bibliography, a book review, and primary source analysis. Our faculty will be evaluating a sample of these portfolios starting in December, 2008.
- Recognizing that many of the most important historical sources are now available in electronic form--whether in online databases, web pages, archives, or journals--we have developed a new unit on information literacy to become part of our Junior Colloquium (HIST 291), which all history majors take.
Through these initiatives, the history major will be more research intensive and will encourage students to engage with all the major source venues, from the web to archives. Some of the award winning student papers which have already come out of our efforts are: “Reading between the lines: What quack advertisements reveal about Eighteenth-century Medicine,” and “From Lakefront Mansions to a Concrete Jungle: Examining the Evolution of Housing in Edgewater.”
New Joswiak Fellowship
Dr. John R. Jozwiak, a former professor in the business school, has left a generous bequest to the History Department. Part of the money will be used for an annual $3000 tuition scholarship for an outstanding senior history major. The scholarship will be awarded for the 2010-2011 academic year if funds are available. The department will also continue to sponsor the History Essay Contest, with cash prizes for first, second, and third prizes.
Making it easier for university Honors students to do a history major
Due to significant overlap in the course content, we have made students in the University Honors Program exempt from the 100 level requirements for the history major in the following manner: HONRS 101 = HIST 101, HONRS 102 = HIST 102, HONRS 203 (The American Experience) = HIST 112 (this is a historical knowledge core course), and one of the non-western "Encountering" courses (Encountering Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East) = HIST 104. In effect this means that honors students can do a history major in eight instead of twelve courses.
Global awareness
We have continued to expand the geographical breadth of our faculty and course offerings. In Fall, 2007, we added another three new history courses in Chinese history at the Beijing Campus and, this October, the Beijing campus will host a major historical conference on foreigners in the Qing Court: “Interaction and Exchange at Court: Westerners and the Qing (1644-1911)>. Professor Kim Searcy co-taught the undergraduate seminar at the Newberry Library in spring 2008 on “Islam and the West: European and American Views of the Muslim World, 1450-1900.” In the Spring 2008, we conducted a job search to hire a permanent faculty member in Eastern Europe and New assistant professor Edin Hajdarpasic will be joining us as our Modern Eastern Europeanist as of January 1, 2009. In 2007, Dr. John Pincince, FT NTT, was hired to teach the history of South Asia, thus complementing the expertise and offerings of Sr. Ann Harrington (Japan) and Dr. Mark Allee (China). Dr. John Donoghue, FT TT, was hired to teach Colonial U.S.; his cross-Atlantic expertise enhances our department’s contribution to global awareness especially in the area of Atlantic Studies. Because of these new course offerings and new faculty, the history department has been a vital participant in the establishment of several new area studies programs-- including Islamic World Studies and the Polish Studies Minor programs --as well as the existing interdisciplinary programs of International Studies, Latin American Studies, Black World Studies, and Medieval Studies.
Undergraduate activities
Our historymajors still manage to have fun despite their demanding courses. The History Club has sponsored a film series over the past year with such movies as Gladiator and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. They also held a festival in the Spring, 2008, which included a trivia bowl, putting items into a Loyola Time Capsule, and hearing an alumni panel discuss what they have done with their history majors.