Bjornlie, Shane. "Jordanes and the End of the Roman Empire". Representing Rome's Emperors: Historical and Cultural Perspectives through Time, edited by Caillan Davenport and Shushma Malik. Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 173-194.
Abstract: This chapter explores the legacy of emperors and the end of Roman imperial rule in the works of the sixth-century author Jordanes. It argues that Jordanes’ two contributions to historical writing, the Getica and the Romana, operate in tandem with each other to produce a narrative of Roman and Gothic history that is reflective of a contemporary discourse for both the end of the western Roman empire and the potential for crisis in the eastern empire. According to Jordanes’ narrative, Roman emperors are primarily culpable for crisis in the imperial state as agents of tyranny and civil war. In the Romana, Jordanes attributes Roman imperial success to specific political virtues and institutions, especially the republican institution of the consulship, which become eclipsed by the rise of government by emperors. The Getica provides a narrative for translatio imperii by which the Goths acquire the same political virtues lost by Roman emperors, thereby positioning the Gothic Amal family of Italy as potential sponsors for the rejuvenation of the western Roman empire. This configuration of the Roman and Gothic past is sensitive to both the outcome of the Gothic War in Italy and discourses of political decline current in Justinian’s Constantinople.
Bjornlie, Shane. Review of The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea, by Edward J. Watts. Speculum, vol. 99, no. 4, 2024, pp. 1376-1377.
Cody, Lisa Forman. Review of Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body, by Rebecca Whiteley. Social History of Medicine, vol. 37, issue 4, November 2024.
Cody, Lisa Forman. Review of Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England, by Sarah Fox. The English Historical Review, vol. 139, issue 598-599, June/August 2024, pp. 928-930.
Ferguson, Heather. “Letter from the Editor.” Review of Middle East Studies, vol. 57, issue 1, June 2023, pp. 1-2.
Ferguson, Heather, and David Gutman. “Introduction.” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 2023.
Geismer, Lily. “A New Suburban Politics.” Dissent, Fall 2024.
Cebul, Brent, and Lily Geismer. “Why Bidenism Failed.” Jacobin, December 31, 2024.
Geismer, Lily. “The Democrats’ ‘Opportunity’ Pitch Is a Dead End.” Jacobin, December 11, 2024.
Geismer, Lily. “America Needs a New Approach on Affordable Housing. History Offers a Guide.” Time Magazine, March 25, 2024.
Geismer, Lily. “What About Rural America?” Boston Review, February 28, 2024.
Geismer, Lily. “Campaign Staffers Are Undermining American Democracy.” Jacobin, January 17, 2024.
Geismer, Lily. “Scholarship as Coping,” Reviews in American History, vol. 52, issue 4, December 2024, pp. 370-383.
Hamburg, Gary. Rossiia. Put’ k prosveshcheniiu. Yale University Press and Academic Studies Press, 2024, 2 volumes. Tom 1, 630 pp.; Tom 2, 592 pp.
Hamburg G. M. “Freedom and Unfreedom in the Russian Empire in the Debate between Chicherin and Rennenkampf at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History, 2024, vol. 69, issue 2, рp. 291-306.
Abstract: This article treats the polemic between the conservative-liberal Boris Chicherin and Nikolai Rennnenkampf on the Polish and Jewish questions. Some portions of the exchange appeared in legal, and others in clandestine editions. The initial critical encounter between them in the early 1880s was an abstract debate about the metaphysical grounding of rights. But already at that time, the two opponents raised the fundamental question as to whether Russia’s political future would focus on individual liberty or on the will of state officials and that of the majority in society. The polemic continued in the mid-1890s with Chicherin’s publication of Kurs gosudarstvennoi nauki, in which the conservative-liberal criticized the Church and the national policy of the Empire. The more conservative Rennnenkampf answered with two open letters,in which he castigated Poles for threatening the social equilibrium in the Western provinces of the Empire. Rennenkampf also viewed the Jewish question as “incomparably more complex” than the Polish question. Chicherin responded to Rennenkampf in a short book published abroad. He did not agree with Rennenkampf ’s assertion that the Jewish problem was “more complex” than the Polish question; indeed, Chicherin thought it “much simpler”. By the 1890s, Chicherin had changed his ideas about the Polish question but also about Russia’s readiness for constitutional government. Indeed, he had reached the conclusion that Russia itself was ready for a representative assembly. He was troubled by the Petersburg government’s promotion of Orthodoxy and of Russian language on the Empire’s western periphery. For Chicherin, the encounter with Rennenkampf had the highest possible stakes — the choice between freedom and unfreedom inside Russia itself. Rennenkampf called for unrelenting pressure on Russia’s “enemies”.
Hamburg, G.M. Review of Heretical Orthodoxy: Lev Tolstoi and the Russian Orthodox Church, by Pål Kolstø. The English Historical Review, vol. 139, issue 597, April 2024, pp. 557–558.
Itagaki, Lynn Mie and Jennifer M. Gülly. “Illiquidity: The Ocean as Matter and Method.” Oceanic Convergences, edited by Magali Compan and Valerie Magdelaine. Presses Universitaires Indianocéaniques, 2024, pp. 117-137.
Abstract: The Mediterranean Sea has played an essential role in establishing Europe as a global center of capitalist and colonial power. This body of water has been a tool of global domination that continues in the EU's deployment of its expanse and often stormy conditions as fatal border strategies. This essay examines the Mediterranean in terms of recent representations of MENA refugees that change and influence the cultural politics of the European Union. How do we negotiate the negative externalities of the representations of violence against refugees, the horror audiences and viewers might feel when confronted with breaking news as well as the shock strategies pro-refugee EU activists use? The images of blood, the testimonials of mortal fear and deep loss of fellow travelers and loved ones can reinscribe horror onto the very people and populations journalists and activists had hoped to help. How do we ethically read and represent the violence of dissolution and decomposition—the liquefaction—against men, women, and children who should not have died in the way they did? In the academic contexts of Critical Border Studies; Blue Humanities (New Ocean Studies); New Materialisms; Critical Refugee Studies, this study analyzes the overlapping and divergent frameworks of these related and yet distinct theoretical formations and critical foci in order to consider the ethics of representing drowned refugees. Through the history, provenance, and outcry over the display of a recovered fishing vessel, Barca Nostra (Our Boat)—the most controversial art exhibition at the 2019 Venice Biennale—we identify the difficulties of merging these frameworks and fields of inquiry, and propose the concept of the "illiquid" in order to address the continuing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and conceptualize the brutalities of both capitalist and physical liquidation that strips precarious peoples of their dignity and lives. In the controversy over Barca Nostra's work, the horror is that it exists at all.
Livesay, Daniel. Review of Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire, by Christine Walker. Clio. Women, Gender, History, vol. 1, no. 59, 2024, pp. 249-252.
Livesay, Daniel. Review of Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery, edited by Paul Polgar, Marc H. Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell. History: Reviews of New Books, September 2024, pp. 102-103.
External Grant: Livesay, Daniel. Bright Institute Fellow, Knox College, 2024.
Abstract: This was the third and final year of a three-year fellowship at the Bright Institute at Knox College. The fellowship brings together a cohort of early-American historians who teach at small liberal arts colleges for two weeks each summer to discuss their research and teaching pedagogies.
External Grant: Park, Albert. Small Scholarly Conferences on Japan Studies Grant, Association for Asian Studies, Fall 2024, $5000.
Abstract: This grant supports an EnviroLab-organized conference "Archiving of the Nonhuman" in March 2025.
External Grant: Park, Albert, Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator. "Sustainable Future – Overcoming Disparities," Japan Foundation, 2024, $100,000.
Abstract: A multi-disciplinary project on the relationship between Globalization, demographics, rural and elderly and elder care and technology in Japan, U.S.A., and Asia. Grant supports research, fieldwork, conferences and workshops and partnerships between universities, colleges and NGOS in the U.S.A, Japan, South Korea and China.
External Grant: Petropoulos, Jonathan. Support for Research, Croul Family Foundation, 2024.
Abstract: Members of the Croul family, including Jack, Kingsley, and Spencer, continue to support Prof. Petropoulos’ scholarly activities. He is grateful for their on-going support.
Venit-Shelton, Tamara. "White Plague, Yellow Peril: Tuberculosis and Environmental Health in San Francisco Chinatown." Nature Unfurled: Asian American Environmental Histories, edited by Connie Y. Chiang. University of Washington Press, 2024.
Blei, Daniela, and Tamara Venit-Shelton. “The Future of Food in Japan: Interviews with Organic Farmers.” Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 30, 2024.