Allison Perlman, Assistant Professor of History and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the 2013 S-USIH conference chair, has won the 2013 School of Humanities Teaching Award.  Congratulations to Allison for her remarkable efforts at UC-Irvine in her first year on the faculty. The text below is from the official announcement:

“Professor Perlman is a brilliant lecturer and caring mentor who has successfully contributed to multiple levels of the curriculum in both departments. Colleagues who have seen Professor Perlman in the classroom remark on her exceptional teaching effectiveness and intellectual sophistication. Her work as a public intellectual brings her scholarship on media coverage of the Civil Rights movement and the relation of popular culture to collective memory to the wider community.”

The American Association of University Women has awarded Lilian Calles Barger, doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Dallas, the prestigious American Dissertation Fellowship for 2013-2014. This year marks the 125th anniversary of AAUW’s fellowships and grants supporting women engaged in scholarship, research, and social projects. Barger’s dissertation “Human Liberation from Below: Transnational Origins of Liberation Theology, 1775-1975” provides a cultural history of ideas at the intersection of religion and politics in the American hemisphere.

Personal reflection:

It is satisfying to me to have a history of theological thought considered valuable for understanding how we think about the nature of the social order, the definition of freedom, and the exclusion of millions from the liberal project. The days of seeing theology as static and produced by theologians in an ecclesiastical ivory tower sequestered from the rest of culture have longed passed. In a 2008 essay, David A. Hollinger asserted that instead of being a “conversation-stopper,” as Richard Rorty assumed, religious ideas should be interrogated understanding them as “constituting a vital matrix of political culture.” [i] While Hollinger is concerned with political dialogue, and I am more concerned with the broader culture, the contested nature of theology running through American thought is inescapable.

I also see recognition for the field of intellectual history and the notion that the examination of ideas is valuable in providing powerful explanations of historical change on multiple levels – social, political, cultural. My subjects are 1960s theologians who drawing from a long history of modern thought contributed to change in the perceived relationship between religion and politics. Their theologies emerged from their attempt to reconcile Black Power, women’s liberation, and Latin American revolutions, in which they were involved, with their theistic worldview. I hope my work contributes to bringing positive attention to the work of intellectual historians.

Personally, I am thrilled to have value ascribed to my project so early in the process. With the support of my committee, the fellowship allows me the opportunity to apply sustained focus in sharpening my arguments and renews the hope of family and friends that I will finish!

I am presenting a portion of my research at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association in May, 2013 in Washington DC.

See the AAUW website

On April 25, 2013, Ray Haberski will give the Hundere Lecture in Religion at Oregon State University.  At the invitation of Courtney Campbell (Hundere Professor of Religion and Culture), he will give a talk entitled, “Lincoln’s Bequest: Losing and Finding Religion in a Time of War.”  Also instrumental to planning the event are Christopher McKnight Nichols (a member of the 2013 S-USIH Conference Committee) and Amy Koehlinger, a scholar of religion who is working on a book that will be paired with Haberski’s volume in series they are contributing to for the Academy of American Franciscan History.

On May 7, 2013, the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University will host a conference on American Military and Diplomatic History.  Christopher McKnight Nichols, a member of the 2013 S-USIH conference committee, is a co-editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History and a chief organizer of the conference that will showcase the publication of this volume.

Read more about it at the conference website.  For now, here is a snippet: This conference will bring together international and U.S.-based scholars to offer new perspectives on the historical and contemporary relationship between the United States and the world. The daylong event features scholars from three continents and draws on experts from OSU’s School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, as well as from political science and public policy. It will address a wide variety of scholarly accounts and innovative interpretations of American military and diplomatic history, 1776-present, and seeks to engage the OSU and Corvallis communities in discussions about the pressing international challenges that the U.S. and the world face today.

Andrew Hartman, an associate professor of history at Illinois State University, co-founder of S-USIH, and a regular blogger at s-usih.org, has been awarded the Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies for the 2013-2014 academic year. The University of Southern Denmark will be the home university for the Danish Fulbright Chair in American Studies from 2012-2015 and will be Hartman’s home for the next year.  He will work at the Center for American Studies at SDU; the Center is under the direction of Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, a historian of United State history and author of Right Face: Organizing the Conservative Movement, 1945-1965. The center was founded by David Nye, a leading scholar in the history of technology and American culture.  Hartman and his family will live in Odense, Denmark, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen.