NOVEMBER 2021
moments in history
University of Maryland Department of History Newsletter
Photos by John T. Consoli/University of Maryland and Sabrina Alcorn Baron unless otherwise noted. Copyright University of Maryland Department of History, 2021.
Moments in history NOVEMBER 2021 contents History has its eyes on you Achieving MEDIA MOMENTS Publishing & Presenting Practicing History Training Historians Learning History Random moments FUTURE MOMENTS
Department of History | Newsletter | Report Name
Jessica Marie Johnson. Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) J
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Department of History | Newsletter
Department of History
Jessica Marie Johnson's (PhD, 2012, Advisor: Ira Berlin) book Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) has been awarded the 2021 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association. Johnson's book also won the Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize for Outstanding Original Scholarship on Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora; 2021 Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history (American Historical Association); the Lora Romero First Book Prize (American Studies Association); and the 2020 Kemper Leila Williams Prize for Louisiana History (The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association). The book was a Finalist for the Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History (African American Intellectual History Society). It also received Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award (Organization of American Historians); the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize (French Colonial Historical Society); and the Barbara Christian Literary Prize (Caribbean Studies Association). Johnson's book is also a finalist for the 2021 Frederick Douglass Book Prize awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; and the MacMillan Center at Yale University. The winner will be announced in February 2022. Johnson is Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.
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History has its eyes on you
Rick Bell's paper presented at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression held November 11-13, has won the Award for Best Paper Presented. The paper is titled: "Making Tracks: Naming and Framing the Underground Railroad." Sarah Cameron has been selected to represent the University of Maryland as the senior scholar nominee for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program. Kevin Aguilar, post-dctoral fellow, is the recipient of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive’s 2021 George Watt graduate essay award for his dissertation chapter, “Ambassadors of the Revolution: Anarchist Diplomacy during the Spanish Civil War.” The chapter explores the efforts of Spanish anarchists to build formal and informal ties with the Mexican Left and the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas during the Spanish Civil War. Along with a $1,000 award, Kevin's work will be featured in the upcoming issue of ALBA's quarterly magazine, The Volunteer. The full essay is also featured on ALBA’s website. Piotr Kosicki has been appointed Associate Editor of the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers./Revue canadienne des slavistes (CSP/RCS), founded in 1956, a quarterly, interdisciplinary journal of the Canadian Association of Slavists published in English and French.
ACHIEVING
Stefano Villani has joined the EURONEWS digital project on the birth of news in early modern Europe as Senior Research Fellow. This project, funded by the Irish Research Council, is led by Brendan Dooley, Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College Cork. As an appendix to Villani's 1999 Ph.D. thesis on the seventeenth-century Italian perception of the English civil wars and the Interregnum, hr transcribed all the newsletters and other correspondence sent to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and his secretary’s office by the Tuscan residents in London, Amerigo Salvetti and Giovanni Salvetti Antelminelli, between 1649 and 1660. The overall number of letters and avisi totals 1773 documents (and the transcript amounts to more than 777,000 words). EURONEWS has now aunched the Salvetti Project that will publish Villani's transcriptions of the handwritten newsletters along with digital images on the digital platform of the Medici Archive Project. A team of several junior fellows, coordinated by Dooley and Dr. Davide Boerio, has already begun this massive work by taking the pictures of the manuscript letters, uploading the images to the platform, and proofreading the transcriptions. All the texts will be encoded in XML, allowing not only their better presentation but also their more in-depth analysis and interpretation
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Rob Chiles is one of the featured experts in the latest installment of American Experience, PBS's flagship U.S. History documentary series. He appears in the film "Citizen Hearst," on the life and times of William Randolph Hearst. Chiles appears in both episodes, discussing Hearst's place in New York history. The film premiered September 27 and 28. Piotr Kosicki joined the New Books Network as co-host of the podcast New Books in Eastern European Studies. Sonya Michel has recently published two letters-to-the-editor:, one in the September 24, 2021 Washington Post on the role of chil care in the economy and one in the October 9, 2021 New York Times on the topic of gender-neutral pronouns. The Washington Post letter is here. The New York Times letter is here.
MEDIA MOMENTS
PUBLISHING
Rick Bell's essay "Border State, Border War: Fighting for Freedom and Slavery in Antebellum Maryland" is published in a new book from Louisiana State University Press entitled The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered. Robert Friedel is co-author of an essay "Novel markers to early detect degradation on cellulose nitrate-based heritage at the submicrometer level using synchrotron UV–VIS multispectral luminescence" published in Science Reports 11, 20208 (2021).Hi co-autors are Artur Neves, Ana Maria Ramos, Maria Elvira Callapez, Matthieu Réfrégiers, Mathieu Thoury and Maria João Melo. Read the full essay here. Jeffrey Herf, in the Fall 2021 issue of The Journal of Cold War Studies published "The U.S. State Department's Opposition to Zionist Aspirations: George F. Kennan and George C. Marshall in 1947-1948. The complete essay is here, subscription required. He also published "Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Vergangenheit in Deutschland seit 1945: Anfaenge, Hauptmotive und Kritik an der Erinnerungspolitik von seiten der SED-Regimes und der radikalen Linken in Westdeutschland," in Magnus Brechtken, ed., Aufarbeitung des Nationalismus: Ein Kompendium (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2021), pp. 38-60. Lnk to the volume is here. Herf's new book, Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949 is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in January 2022. Piotr Kosicki has a new book out, which he co-edited with Wolfram Kaiser (University of Portsmouth) entitled Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century: Catholic Christian Democrats in Europe and the Americas from Cornell University Press. David Sicilia has published a new book, Strands of Modernization: The Circulation of Technology and Business Practices in East Asia, 1850-1920 with the University of Toronto Press, a leading academic publisher of books on East Asian history. The book is co-edited with David G. Wittner. In addition to co-editing the book, Sicilia is co-author of the Introduction and author of a chapter on the role of multinational corporations in technology transfer.
On October 27, 2021 in the ARHU Dean's Colloquium on Race, Equity, and Justice, Christopher Bonner discussed his award-winning book Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) in a talk entitled "Willis Hodges's Shield: The Meanings of Black Voters." Bonner's work shows how Black Americans suffered under, but also exploited, uncertainties in the American definitions of citizenship and used this ambiguity to claim legal rights and forge the very meaning of citizenship in the young United States. His work was recently recognized with the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Sarah Cameron co-organized and spoke as part of a virtual symposium, "Marking Loss, Making Memorials," held on November 10. The symposium was presented by the Kibel Gallery at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and co-sponsored by the History Department and the Miller Center for Historical Studies. The inspiration for the symposium is an exhibit at the Architecture School. “Making the Holodomor: Context and Questions,” that explores the making of a memorial to the victims of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s in Washington, DC with commentary from Larysa Kurylas (BArch 1980), the design architect and sculptor of the memorial. The symposium used this exhibit as an occasion to launch a broader, interdisciplinary conversation about the politics, stakes and design challenges behind the making of public memorials to commemorate mass atrocity. One panel, “The Politics of Memory and Place,” examined issues of mass violence and historical memory and featured Cameron, Piotr Kosicki, and Erin Mosely. A second, “Presence: Past and Futures,” examined the specific design challenges behind the making of public memorials to mass atrocity. It featured an architect, an art historian, and a community designer and educator, and was caired by Leslie Rowland. Shay Hazkani on October 6, 2021 discussed his new book,, Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (Stanford University Press, 2021) in the UMD Libraries' Speaking of Books series. The book recasts the 1948 war in Palestine through a socio-cultural history of the conflict’s ordinary actors and its transnational reverberations. Piotr Kosicki on October 20, 2021 gave a talk (via Zoom) for the joint London School of Economics/Sciences Po Seminar in Contemporary International History, entitled "A New Kind of Progressive: European Christian Democrats, the CIA, and Venezuela." Marlene Mayo spoke as part of a Japan panel at an in person conference at Villanova University In October 2021. Fellow panelists include Malia McAndrews, one of UMD History PhD (tenured at John Carroll University), and Alisa Freeman (University of Oregon), who received a 20th Century Japan Research Award to use the Gordon W. Prange Collection. Julie Taddeo delivered multiple public history lectures on such topics as British Royal Family history since the Georgian era and Victorian crime and scandal for One Day University, Context Conversations, Smithsonian Associates, and area public libraries. Taddeo also organized a successful Alumni Career Networking Panel and an Internship Panel.
PRESENTING
"This is a pull quote to help the reader stay interested and focused."
Robert Chase (Ph.D., 2009, Advisor: Gary Gerstle) has been named co-director of Historians Against Slavery, a national organization that fellow History alumni Matt Mason once headed. He also published two books, the first an anthology Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (UNC, 2019) and a monograph (which grew out of his dissertation at UMD), We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America (UNC, 2020). We Are Not Slaves has won three awards this year: The Hank Lacayo Best Labor Themed Book (International Latino Book Award;) The Best Book in Critical Criminology and Social Justice (American Society of Criminology); and Honorable Mention for the Betty and McClung Lee Book Award (Humanist Sociology Association. Brooks Flippen (PhD 1994, Advisor: Keith Olson) looks forward to retire from Southeatern Okalahoma State University in May 2022 and has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from his university. Recently, he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at South China Normal University in Guangzhou, and published his fourth book, Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics (University of Texas Press, 2018). His most recent publication is “Dwelling in the Shelter of the Most High: Ronald Reagan and the Religious Right,” in Andrew Moore, ed., Evangelicals and Presidential Politics (Louisiana State University Press, 2021): 106-21.
PRACTICING HISTORY
Gregory O. Gagnon (PhD 1970, Advisor: Donald Gordon) retired from the University of North Dakota in 2011, but he has continued scholarly work and consulting. His most recent book is The Story of the Chippewa Indians (ABC-CLIO, 2019). He reviews for Choice as he has done since the 1980s and is a regular contributor to Mazina'igan A Chronicle of the Great Lakes Chippewa with an article on the status of American Indian Law coming out in November, 2021. Gagnon teaches Introduction to Indian Law at Loyola University of New Orleans each Spring semester. Richard P. Hallion (BA 1970; PhD 1975 Advisor: Keith Olson) has been appointed Vice Chair of the Okaloosa County Aviation Board, following serving for eight years as a founding trustee of Florida Polytechnic University, Florida's most recently established state university, and, likewise, eight years as a senior advisor to the Science and Technology Policy Institute of the Institute for Defense Analyses. He is concurrently the Vice Chair of the Air Force Air Armament Museum Foundation, and Flight Captain of Flight 61, Order of Daedalians. He consults for the Air Force Studies Board/National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, most recently on a study of adapting to shorter time cycles, and in a workshop on digital transformation. A Distinguished Lecturer of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he continues to write, speak, and publish widely in the fields of aerospace and national security. His most recent essay, coauthored with Mark J. Lewis, Executive Director of the National Defense Industrial Association, is "No Time to Go Wobbly on Hypersonics," Breaking Defense (28 Oct. 2021). Read the essay here.
Beatriz Hardy (PhD 1993, Advisor: Ronald Hoffman) is the current chair of the Council of Library Directors of the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions library consortium Her husband, Stephen Hardy (PhD 1999) passed away on August 24, 2020. He was director of advancement services at Salisbury University at the time of his death. David Hostetter (PhD 2004, Advisor: James Gilbert) is president of the Peace History Society and is a co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Peace History. Priti Joshi (BA, History and English, 1988) spoke to the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies on October 8. She is Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound. Her new book is Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India (SUNY Press, June 2021). Theresa L. Kraus (PhD 1986, Advisor: Ben Warren) recently finished a book, Civil Aviation Policy in Alaska, 1913-2018 (US Dept. of Transportation. She is the Federal Aviation Administration’s historian. The book can be found online here. Malia McAndrews (PhD, Advisor: Marlene Mayo) now tenured at John Carroll University, was part of a Japan panel with Mayo at a Villanove University conference in October 2021 Nicole Mahoney (PhD 2020 Advisor: Rick Bell) has a new role at the New-York Historical Society as Manager of Scholarly Initiatives. She manages projects for the Center for Women's History, the newly-founded
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Mahoney cont. Diamonstein Spielvogel Institute for New York City History, Politics, and Community Activism, and the partnership with the American LGBTQ+ Museum. As part of the Center for Women's History, she leads the Early Career Workshop, a monthly meeting of scholars working in women's and gender history. Mahoney also teaches two graduate courses per semester in the jointly administered N-YHS/CUNY Master's program in Museum Studies. Joseph Mannard (PhD 1989 Advisor: David Grimsted) published an article “’Our Prospects Are Mighty Dark. . . Still, I Confide in God’: The Ordeal of the Sisters of the Visitation in Antebellum Wheeling,” in American Catholic Studies 131.1 (Spring 2020) which also received the award for Best Article in a Scholarly Journal 2021 from the Catholic Press Association of the US and Canada. He has a forthcoming article “’Wilhelmina Jones, Come Out!’: Public Reaction to the Reception of Sr. Stanislaus Jones into Georgetown Visitation Monastery, 1825-1826” in U.S. Catholic Historian 30.3 (Fall 2021). He also has a book contract with Georgetown University Press for his current research project whose working title is: “Georgetown Nun to Washington Socialite: The Two Lives of Ann Gertrude Wightt, 1799-1867.” Matthew Mason (PhD 2002, Advisor: Ira Berlin) Professor of History at Brigham Young University has a new book project: a long-term study of the Anglo-American politics of slavery. A spinoff of that research was published as “North American Calm, West Indian Storm: The Politics of the Somerset Decision in the British Atlantic,” Slavery and Abolition 41.4 (2020): 723-47. His most rewarding recent teaching activities center around two projects: a course in the University of Utah Prison Education Project, and team-teaching a course as part of the BYU Slavery Project which studies BYU’s early links to slavery and racism, and exploring and responding to the legacies of those links.
Sam Miner (PhD 2021 Advisor: Jeffrey Herf) is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Dayton. In August, he published a piece called "The Reconstruction of Justice in Post-Nazi Western Germany" for the National WWII Museum. Read the article here. In September, he presented a paper called “I Wasn’t There, Otherwise I wouldn’t be Writing This Now”: Victim Testimony and the Riga Ghetto Case" at the conference Everyday Life of Jews in the USSR during the Holocaust and its Early Aftermath hosted by Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Scott Moore's (PhD 2015 Advisor: Marsha Rozenblit) book Teaching the Empire: Education and State Loyalty in Late Habsburg Austria was published by Purdue University Press in 2020 and he was promoted to Associate Professor and tenured this past May. Christy Regenhardt (PhD, 2006 Advisor: Robyn Muncy ) appeared on Episode 10 of the Remedial Herstory Podcast. Listen to the podcast here. Regenhardt is an editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. Enrique S. Rivera (MA, 2013 Advisor: Daryle Williams) has published a new book, The Untold History of Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation and the Anti-Slavery Revolution (International Publishers, 2021). The book is a micro-history of global capitalism, and it uses the 1795 anti-slavery and anti-colonial rebellion in Coro, Venezuela as the lens through which to probe this history.
Nate Reul (MA, 2013, Advisor: Jeffrey Herf) presented papers on German nationalism and Austrofascism at the annual Austrian Studies Association conference in July, and another paper on the Third Reich's foreign policy towards German minorities at the annual German Studies Association conference in October. IHe has also agreed to contribute an adaptation of the Austrian Studies Association conference paper to a related Tagungsband for publication in early 2022. Samuel Walker (PhD 1974 Advisor: Wayne Cole) is the author of The Day That Shook America: A Concise History of 9/11 (University Press of Kansas, September 2021. Jonathan W. White (PhD, 2008 Advisor: Herman Belz) is the editor of a new book, "To Address You as My Friend": African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln published by the University of North Carolina Press. White was a research assistant for Distinguished University Professor and Professor of History Ira Berlin, the late brilliant historian of the African American experience. This new book is dedicated to White's teachers in the Department of History. He was also motivated by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, a collaboration between the UMD Department of History and the National Archives, which publishes documents illuminating the Civil War from its beginning through Reconstruction. See the article in Maryland Today.
Training historians
Andrea Gutmann Fuentes (HiLS student) was awarded a 2021 Spectrum Scholarship from the American Library Association. Ala Crecuin Graff, (PhD Candidate Advisor: Mikhail Dolbilov) on November 5, 2021 gave a talk titled “Printing Politics, Pressing Power: The Rise of Private Opinion Press in Imperial Russia, 1850s-1860s” to the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, hosted by the Rare Books Division of the Library of Congress and convened by Sabrina Alcorn Baron and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Westchester University). Graff and another Russian historian are forming a new group for the study of Russian print culture. Derek Litvak and Lauren Michalak (PhD students, Advisor: Holly Brewer) will present a co-authored paper as part of The Americas Online: Thinking Digitally About Early America. The title of the paper is "Tracing Debates over Justice and Democracy: The Slavery, Law, and Power Project," part of the panel "Law, Slavery, and the Digital Humanities."
History Major Alicia Perkovich (BA, 2023) has been awarded a 2021 Dean’s Senior Scholar Award. Congratulations Alicia on this considerable achievement recognizing her academic achievement and scholarship! Alicia is the second consecutive History Major to win this award. Thomas Voracek graduated from the University of Maryland in 2016 with degrees in History, Women’s Studies, and Central European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES). After graduating, Thomas went to law school at the University of Miami, graduating in 2019 and working for a state court trial judge. He is now an Assistant Capital Collateral Regional Counsel in Tallahasssee, FL, representing individuals sentenced to death in federal and state courts in their post-conviction cases
LEARNING HISTORY
The History Undergraduate Association (HUA) has had a busy semester of events. They have sponsored monthly social hours, most recently featuring apple cider, for which many participants braved the cold front steps of Francis Scott Key Hall. HUA participated in the UMD First Look Fair. They also sponsored two movie nights, one where the history of disability in film was discussed and the second where the independent documenatry film Ask For Jane was discussed.
Viviana Tagliaferri, recently a European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the UMD Department of History has produced a documentary about her MedRoute Projet, which for the first two years was based at the University of Maryland.
RANDOM MOMENTS
James Gao, (1948-2021) Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Maryland died on October 26, 2021, at the age of 73. The cause was cancer. He was born and raised in Hangzhou the capital of Zhejiang Province in Southeast China. In 1983, he earned a master’s degree in Political Science from Peking University and taught there as an Assistant Professor from 1983 to 1986. He did his graduate training at Yale University, where he received his PhD in 1994. He was an Associate Professor of History at Christopher Newport University from 1992 to 1998. He joined the faculty of the UMD Depaertment of History as an Associate Professor in 1998. Since 1999, he was a regular summer Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary Chinese Studies at Peking University. Gao was a founding member and, in 1987-8, the first President of Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS), which served to bring together historians who came of age and had done their undergraduate work in China and then decided to do graduate training and work in American universities. His scholarship was part of a creative and bold result of this challenging cross-fertilization of cultures begun in an era of relative openness in China. His published works include Meeting Technology’s Advance: Social Change in China and Zimbabwe in the Railway Age (Greenwood, 1997), and The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou: The Transformation of City and Cadre, 1949-54 (University of Hawaii Press, 2004). He wrote the 700 entries in the Historical Dictionary of Modern China, 1800-1849 (Scarecrow, 2009). His Shanghai Market: Rice Consumers, Merchants and the State, 1955-1964 was completed and in a publishers’ review process at the time of his death. In addition, his fifteen articles in scholarly journals examined multiple issues including food rationing, photography of Chinese disasters, famine in the 1950s, consumerism, the history of rice in Shanghai, war and nationalism during the Korean War years, and rural revolutionaries in the cities. In The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, Gao wrote a remarkable history of his hometown. The work drew on three years of research in the city archives, those of the Communist Party, press accounts as well as oral interviews. The result was one of the first archivally based accounts of the Communist seizure of power in a Chinese city in those years. Gao depicted a cultural clash between peasant based Communist revolutionaries, and an urban professional and intellectual middle class. Messages from Mao Zedong encouraged both a “cautious realism of the early 1950s” as well as calls for radicalism and transformation. Gao saw in the latter some roots of the Communists’ “utopian fanaticism in the later years.” The cultural politics and psychological attacks on “class enemies” in those early years foreshadowed the much harsher confrontations of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Gao’s focus on the contrast between the radical countryside and the comparatively conservative cities underscored a distinctive feature of the Chinese revolution, one that became part of the international reputation of Maoism in subsequent decades. The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, as well as his published articles, displayed a welcome integration of social with cultural, political, and intellectual history. It remains a work of enduring importance for historians not only of China, but of revolutions in general. Though his work will endure, his death is a great loss for the Department of History at the University of Maryland and for the historical profession in general. His scholarship displayed a creativity, boldness, and importance that, as was the case with previous intellectual migrations to the United States, greatly enriched the American historical profession. James Gao was also a colleague of great integrity and courage. His life and work will hopefully inspire successor generations of historians of modern China. He is survived by his wife, Laura Liu, and his son, Weijing Gao. Jeffrey Herf, November 7, 2021 A version of this obituary will be published in the January 2022 edition of AHA Perspectives. See The Diamondback obituary here.
IN MEMORIUM
JJames Gao and Jeffrey Herf Photo courtesy of Jeffey Herf.
George Patrick Majeska died at age 85 of complications from vocal cord cancer in Pompano Beach, FL on October 29, 2021. His quick wit, warm heart, and intellectual curiosity will be missed tremendously. Majeska was born in Brooklyn, NY, on April 28, 1936, to John “Jack” and Marguerite Fagan Majeska, a first generation American from Lithuania and fourth generation Brooklynite. He grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood but was selected to attend Regis High School in Manhattan, where he studied Latin, Greek, and French, developing an early respect for the classics. Majeaska then studied Russian Orthodox Theology at St. Tikhon’s and at St. Sergius in Paris before returning to earn a Bachelor’s degree in Russian literature from Brooklyn College. Having earned Woodrow Wilson and Ford Foundation fellowships, Majeska received his PhD in History from Indiana University. While in Bloomington, he met and married the love of his life, fellow graduate student Marilyn Lundell Majeska, with whom he celebrated 53 happy years of marriage. Majeska enjoyed several fellowships at the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Research Center in Washington, DC, where he developed lifelong friendships, colleagues and research interests. His first teaching job was at the SUNY, Buffalo. In 1972, he joined the Department of History at the University of Maryland, where he was a Professor of Russian and Byzantine History for 28 years, mentored many undergraduate and graduate students, and published a highly acclaimed book and many articles in his field. He was president of the US National Committee for Byzantine Studies and an officer of the Early Slavic Studies Association. Majeska was also a Fulbright Scholar and was delighted to take his young family to Munich, Germany for a year. Throughout his entire life, he was curious and eager for knowledge, loved to travel, and could be counted on to know a little something about almost any topic, particularly in the humanities or world history. He was passionate about classical music, closely followed national politics, and loved hiking. Majeska spoke fluent French and Russian, some German, Greek, and Italian, and was teaching himself Spanish until just a few weeks before his death. He was extremely proud of his two children and four grandchildren. He is survived by his daughters, Tanya Springer of Pompano Beach, FL and Kristin Majeska of Portland, ME: by his grandchildren, Alex Millones, Thomas Springer, Nicolas Millones and Amanda Springer; and by his son-in-law, Luis Millones. He is predeceased by his wife Marilyn, his brother, Bruce Majeska, and his son-in-law, John Springer. A Celebration of Life was held at Sea Watch on Ocean, , Fort Lauderdale, FL, on Sunday, November 14, 2021.
FUTURE MOMENTS
New Internships for History Majors Two new internships will be offered in Spring 2022 with the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, part of the Enslaved.org digital database project. The internships are editorial internships just for UMD History majors, supervised by Kristina Poznan, who recently joined the Department of History. Internships will alos be available for the Fall 2022 semester and beyond. Contact Department of History Internship Co-ordinator Julie Taddeo for further information. The Department of History also announces another exciting new internship opportunity just for UMD History majors:. The internship is working with “Empire State Engagements,” an interview program on New York State history hosted and produced by Rob Chiles in conjunction with the New York State Museum. The position has been filled for Spring 2022. For more information on the program, see the website for "Empire State Engagements" or the YouTube channel for the program, "Empire State Engagements with Dr. Robert Chiles." Contact Julie Taddeo for more internship information.
Miller Center Event Thursday, December 9, 2021 12:00 pm-2:00 pm Online Zoom Register here Join UMD Department of History Alum Dr. Allison S. Finkelstein as she discusses her new book, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials: How American Women Commemorated the Great War 1917-1945 (University of Alabama Press, 2021).
Winter 2021 Campuswide Commencement Ceremony Monday, December 20, 2021 4:00 pm-6:00 pm XFINITY Center Gates open one hour prior to the start of each ceremony. All current COVID-19 health and safety guidelines required. Students are required to wear regalia including masks in order to participate in the commencement ceremony. Available via live stream on the university’s YouTube channel.
ARHU Winter 2021 Commencement Ceremonies Wednesday, December 22, 2021 9:00 am-4:00 pm The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Schools and departments within the College of Arts and Humanities will hold individual commencement ceremonies. Please find the full schedule here.
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