Welcome! The Department of History at Michigan State University is a large, vibrant intellectual community. The faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, alumni and friends of the Department of History are actively engaged in an enormous range of activities involving research, publishing, teaching, learning, and public outreach. It is my honor to share these with you.
On April 16, the Football Scholars Forum met to discuss Soccernomics by Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper. Szymanski, Stephen J. Galetti Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan, joined us in East Lansing while Simon Kuper participated via Skype.
For Twitter timeline click here. Listen to the audio from the session here (mp3). For more information visit: http://footballscholars.org
Dr. Steinberg has an article published in the International Journal of Transitional Justice.
http://ijtj.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/22/ijtj.ijt007.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=rLhjvoPc0dNheXQ
Dr. Steinberg will spend the academic year 2013-14 as a resident fellow of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. The theme of the fellowship is “Trauma and Social Transformation.”
As part of the Speaker Series, our very own Helen Veit will be giving a talk on Friday, April 19, at 3:30 pm in the Old Horticulture Conference Room. Helen Veit specializes in American history. Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina, 2013) explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era. Her next book, Small Appetites: A History of Children’s Food, examines the history of children’s eating starting in the early nineteenth century. She is the editor of the American Food in History book series, forthcoming from Michigan State University Press.
“For Infants and Invalids: Medicalizing Children’s Food in the Nineteenth Century”
Helen Veit
Friday, April 19, 3:30 pm
Old Horticulture Conference Room
Beliefs about children’s food have changed enormously over time. Today, many Americans believe that children have naturally delicate tastes. But Americans in the nineteenth century more often claimed the opposite: children had naturally delicate bodies, they said, and dangerously omnivorous tastes. This paper explores changing ideas about children’s food, a seemingly biological subject that continues to be deeply influenced by beliefs about medicine, mortality, the duties of good parents, and the nature of childhood itself.
Professor Sayuri Shimizu has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship for a project titled “The Rise and Transformation of the North Pacific Ocean Resource Management Regimes, 1900–1975.” Taking a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to maritime environmental history, the study examines ideas, local practices, national regulatory policies, and intergovernmental institution-building regarding the commercial harvesting and scientific husbandry of fishery resources in the North Pacific in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century leading up to the United Nations Law of the Sea Conventions (UNCLOS I & II). Congratulations Professor Shimizu!
As part of the Speaker Series for the Department of History, Jerry Davila will be giving a talk on Thursday, April 11, 3:30pm in room 255 Old Horticulture. Davila is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Race Mixture in the Land of the Future”
The decolonization of West African nations reignited connections across the Atlantic world that had been severed under colonialism. In Brazil, the renewal of these connections was seen as an opportunity to define a sphere of political and economic influence that would drive its development as an industrializing future world power. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the Brazilian government and Brazilian intellectuals pursued opportunities across the Atlantic by promoting Brazil as a racially mixed and racially democratic nation. Dávila examines these crossings to understand dynamics of racial identity expressed in the experiences of Brazilians sojourning in West Africa.
Nearly 70 years after the United States bombed Japan in 1945, Michigan State University has acquired the world’s largest collection of interviews with bomb survivors living in North and South America.
After months of cataloging, 56 interviews of those who lived through bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima – ranging from 45 minutes to several hours – are now part of the Robert Vincent Voice Library of MSU Libraries. They are available worldwide through MSU Libraries’ online public access catalog.
http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2013/a-bomb-survivors-tell-stories-of-love-loss-migration/
This documentary film journeys through the experiences and memories of Antonia Castañeda from her migrant family’s cycles between Crystal City, south Texas, and the Yakima Valley in Washington state, to her coming of age as a Chicana activist, community organizer, feminist, teacher, mentor and scholar. Shifting away from documentarian conventions, the film proposes a non-linear set of narratives where past and present are intertwined by intense mementos dealing with patriarchy, subordination, sexuality, survival and self-discovery.
Saturday April 30 at 9:45 AM at the Kellog Center. Dia de La Mujer Conference.
Ashley Wiersma’s academic blog, Colonialism Through the Veil, was recently featured on Settler Colonial Studies, a website affiliated with the field’s peer-reviewed journal and edited by Lorenzo Veracini and Edward Cavanagh.
Leslie Page Moch will deliver the keynote address, “Repertoires and Regimes of Human Mobility: On the Move in 20th-Century Eurasia,” at an interdisciplinary conference in St. Louis on Friday, April 5. The Conference, On the Move: Migration and Mobility in East and Central Europe and Eurasia, is sponsored by the Migration, Identity, and State Research Collective and the Eurasian Studies Research Cluster in International and Area Studies of Washington University and by the Volkswagen Foundation.
Online courses offer students at MSU and elsewhere the opportunity to study important subjects and work toward graduation while off campus in the summer. Our internationally known faculty offer 22 online summer courses.
Click on Events to see what’s going on in the department.
Donations are crucial for our endowment, graduate program, undergraduate program, and the Center for History Teaching and Learning. Donations also support faculty, undergraduate and graduate awards and can endow chairs.
