* Indicates student co-author
Cody, Lisa Forman. “‘Marriage is No Protection for Crime': Coverture, Sex, and Marital Rape in Eighteenth-Century England.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 61, no. 4, 2022, pp. 809-834.
Abstract: If coverture justified patriarchal control and legally erased many aspects of wives’ separate existence, did this mean that husbands in eighteenth-century England also enjoyed absolute authority over their wives’ sexual bodies? This article examines how contemporaries described the sexual boundaries between spouses and what wives could do when they had been violated by their husbands. Wives had few legal protections and limited social and economic resources to escape unwanted marital sex, but the small number who could afford the high costs turned to the ecclesiastical courts to legally separate from their husbands. The five case studies from the ecclesiastical courts explored here are exceptional, first, because sexual problems were at their core, and second, because unusual collateral evidence survives describing attorneys’ and judges’ opinions about spouses’ bodily rights within marriage. Whether they were seeking relief from reproductive toil, venereal infection, threat of sexual violence, or trauma from marital rape, these wives wanted to escape their husbands—but they faced hurdles. Because English ecclesiastical law did not explicitly identify sexual discord as justifying marital separation, the women's attorneys had to demonstrate that unwanted sexual relations were acts of cruelty. By invoking bodily safety, decorum and propriety, and sensibility and sympathy, advocates argued against husbands’ absolute conjugal authority. The author considers how broader transformations in beliefs about gender and sexuality may have resulted in giving wives slightly more room for protection by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly when they faced the threat of marital rape or venereal infection.
Ferguson, Heather. “Letter from the Editor.” Review of Middle East Studies, vol. 55, issue 2, 2022, pp. 199-201.
Ferguson, Heather. “Time and Its Others.” Chronologics: Periodisation in a Global Context, edited by Barbara Mittler, Thomas Maissen, and Pierre Monnet. Heidelberg University Publishing, 2022, pp. 173-189.
Guy Burak, E. Natalie Rothman, and Heather Ferguson. “Toward Early Modern Archivality: The Perils of History in the Age of Neo-Eurocentrism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 64, issue 3, 2022, pp. 541-575.
Abstract: This essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct “European” and “Islamic” archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct “Islamic archivality,” when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of “Islam” (and, indeed “Europe”) as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing “Islam” as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of “European,” and “non-European,” “centralized” and “decentralized” archives, and “original” and “copy,” as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation.
Geismer, Lily. “How the ‘Chill’ Ivy Decided to Give Its Students Absolute Freedom,” Slate, September 2, 2022
Geismer, Lily. “How the Third Way Made Neoliberal Politics Seem Inevitable.” The Nation, December 26, 2022.
Geismer, Lily. Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. Hachette Book Group, 2022.
Abstract: For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent. The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political history: a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it. Historian Lily Geismer recounts how the Clinton-era Democratic Party sought to curb poverty through economic growth and individual responsibility rather than asking the rich to make any sacrifices. Fueled by an ethos of “doing well by doing good,” microfinance, charter schools, and privately funded housing developments grew trendy. Though politically expedient and sometimes profitable in the short term, these programs fundamentally weakened the safety net for the poor. This piercingly intelligent book shows how bygone policy decisions have left us with skyrocketing income inequality and poverty in America and widened fractures within the Democratic Party that persist to this day.
Geismer, Lily. Review of Public Citizens, by Paul Sabin. Journal of American History, vol. 109, no. 3, 2022, pp. 704–705.
Hamburg, Gary. “Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin: Christian Modernist.” Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia, edited by Paul Valliere and Randall Poole. Routledge Press, 2022, pp. 132 – 150.
Hamburg, Gary M. and Semion Lyandres, editors-in-chief. Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography. Brill, 2022.
Hamburg, G.M. “Politics.” Tolstoy in Context, edited by Anna Berman. Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 75-84.
Abstract: This chapter analyzes the history of imperial politics from 1800 to 1914, with special emphasis on three key elements: the autocracy, the army, and peasant life before and after serfdom’s abolition in 1861. It argues that Tolstoy’s worldview took shape in the context of bureaucratic and military systems in which serf-owners occupied privileged positions, which complicated the abolition of serfdom, and which made impossible the building of an egalitarian social order in Russia.
Livesay, Daniel. Review of Between Fitness and Death, by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy. Journal of African American History, vol. 107, no. 2, 2022, pp. 302-303.
Livesay, Daniel. Review of The Mark of Slavery, by Jenifer L. Barclay. Journal of Southern History, vol. 88, no. 3, 2022, pp. 553-554.
Livesay, Daniel. Review of Reckoning with Slavery, by Jennifer L. Morgan. Journal of Family History, vol. 47, issue 4, 2022, pp. 491-493.
Livesay, Daniel. Review of Scandal and Survival in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, by Frances B. Singh. 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 27, 2022, pp. 308-310.
Livesay, Daniel. Review of The Smell of Slavery, by Andrew Kettler. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 52, no. 3, 2022, pp. 425-426.
External Grant: Livesay, Daniel. Faculty Fellow, Bright Institute at Knox College, 2022.
Abstract: This is a three-year summer fellowship at the Bright Institute at Knox College. It brings together twelve early-American historians working in small liberal-arts colleges in the United States for two weeks each summer for three years. Each summer, they work on research and pedagogical innovations that they can institute in their classrooms, and in their scholarship, to advance the field of early-American history.
Lower, Wendy. “Introduction to the Testimony of Eric Hauser.” Critical Edition Series. Yale University Fortunoff Archive For Holocaust Testimonies, 2022, pp. 1-21.
Panda, Ahona. “Decoding the Pegasus Puzzle.” Review of Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares, by Wendy Doniger. The Telegraph, February 4, 2022.
Panda, Ahona. Review of I Am the People, by Partha Chatterjee. South Asian History and Culture, vol. 13, no. 2, 2022, pp. 248-251.
External Grant: Panda, Ahona. 2020 Sardar Patel Award for Best Dissertation on Modern India in the Humanities, Education, Fine Arts, or Social Sciences. UCLA Center for India and South Asia, 2022.
Abstract: CISA is delighted to announce Ahona Panda as the winner of the 2020 Sardar Patel Dissertation Award for a dissertation entitled ‘Philology and the Politics of Language: The Case of Bengali, 1893-1955’, completed at the University of Chicago in August 2019. This prestigious prize is awarded in an in-person celebratory event with the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association who are the benefactors of this dissertation prize.
Park, Albert L. “A Recycling of the Past or the Pathway to the New? Framing the South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 81, no. 1, 2022, pp. 101-105.
Abstract: This essay supplies brief historical context on the Candlelight Protest movement in South Korea (2016–17) and provides the thematic and theoretical framing for the forum “The South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement and Its Discontents.” It lays the groundwork for approaching the study of the protests and assessing their historical and contemporary value for the push for political change, challenging economic norms and social renewal in Korea. In particular, this essay helps frame the forum as a platform for interrogating the connections between revolution, democracy, and capitalism and the limits of and potential for political change within the political economy of Korea and elsewhere.
Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Introduction to the Testimony of Sidney Bruskin.” Critical Edition Series. Yale University Fortunoff Archive For Holocaust Testimonies, 2022, pp. 1-41.
Abstract: Sidney Bruskin was a Jewish American from New Haven who attended Yale University in the 1930s and went on to track and arrest Nazis for the Counter Intelligence Corps. I annotated his testimony from the 1990s for the Critical Editions series of the Fortunoff Holocaust Video Archive.