FALL 2009

Matthew Grow's book, “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer was published by Yale University Press in February 2009. His main current scholarly project is a co-authored biography of Parley P. Pratt, a nineteenth-century Mormon apostle, writer, and explorer, which will be published by Oxford University Press. Grow is also settling into his position as director of the Center for Communal Studies. He is contacting roughly 700 current intentional communities to expand USI’s archival collections and he recently announced the beginning of a travel grant program to help researchers visit and use those collections.

Robert L. Reid, Professor Emeritus, is serving on the Steamboat Bicentennial Committee, which is planning for the 2011 celebration of the first steamboat to successfully travel from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. The Committee is working under the auspices of the River Institute at Hanover College. Professor Reid also continues to speak to local groups on his current research on the 1937 Ohio and Mississippi river flood.

Matthew Rothwell’s chapter, “Transpacific Revolutionaries: The Creation of Latin American Maoism” has just been published in New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, ed. Scott Rutherford, et. al. (Ontario, Canada: Between the Lines, 2009). 

Ginette Aley has just published "'We are all Good Scavengers Now': The Crisis in Virginia Agriculture and Food Production during the Civil War," in William C. Davis, ed., Virginia at War: 1864 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 81-98.  This collection of essays is a History Book Club Selection. 

Wendy McNamara, adjunct instructor of History, has been named the Director of Early College High School by the EVSC in Evansville, and she has been selected to receive the prestigious Lawrence Senesh Award for School Administrators from the Indiana Council for Economic Education (ICEE).

New Faculty Join the History Department

The History Department is pleased to welcome new colleagues who have joined the History Department. For Fall 2009, we welcome:

Matthew Rothwell, who specializes in Latin American history, with a particular focus on the history of revolutionary movements in Latin America and their connections to like-minded movements both within the region and globally. Rothwell is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled “Transpacific Revolutionaries,” which documents the influence of the Chinese Revolution in Latin America. In this work, which builds on his dissertation research, Rothwell argues that Latin Americans who traveled to China during China’s Maoist period (1949-1976) played a key role in the domestication of Chinese ideas in Latin America, with different results in the three cases studies he uses: Peru, Bolivia and Mexico. The Peruvian case is particularly important, because the Maoist Shining Path’s insurrection played a major role in Peru’s crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the top leadership of the Shining Path spent considerable time in China during the 1960s and 1970s. While his research is rooted in the field of Latin American social history, Rothwell also engages historians working on modern China, the international communist movement and the global movement of people and ideas. Matthew is completing his PhD this summer at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He looks forward to offering a variety of courses at USI covering Latin American, global and Chinese history.

Anya King earned her PhD in 2007 from Indiana University, Bloomington, in Central Eurasian Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. She is a specialist in medieval Islamic history and culture and the Silk Road. Her research focuses on trade and relations between the ancient and medieval Near East and Asia. She is currently working on the book version of her dissertation “The Musk Trade and the Near East in the Early Medieval Period.” This work covers the history of musk and its various uses in medicine and perfumery, and examines its manifold roles in the early medieval Islamic Near East with an eye to explaining its singularly important role in Islamic symbolism. Other research projects in which she is engaged include studies of two early Arabic texts on aromatics and perfumery, and the 9^th and 10^th century Arabic geographical literature on Asia. Other interests include the Turkic peoples of Central Eurasia and the Indo-Iranian peoples and languages. In June 2009, she will present a paper “The Late Antique Flowering of Asian Trade: The Role of the Sasanians in the Introduction of New Products of Asia” at the annual meeting of the World History association in Salem, Massachusetts. Anya plans to offer a variety of courses on Islamic and Asian history at USI.