Osofsky Lecture and Spring 2022 Accomplishments

Student Accomplishments

• Graduate student Sekordri Ojo was selected as one of 25-30 students to participate in a week-long international doctoral summer school for graduate students in the history of education, to be held this summer in Madrid.  This competitive program is run by the European Educational Research Association, and it’s an excellent opportunity for Sekordri to discuss her dissertation project and learn from leading scholars from the US and other countries.
• Graduate student Meg Gravelle was selected to participate in the Newberry Library seminar on “Trans Historical: The Many Genders of the Past.”
• Graduate student Jeff Nichols had an interview on the Japanese TV program, “The World to Compare.”
• Recent PhD grad, Huiying Chen, accepted a tenure-track job as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University!  Huiying’s 2021 dissertation, supervised by Laura Hostetler, was entitled, “On the Road in Eighteenth-Century China.”
• Graduate Student Alison Orton and PhD grad Julie Daly (neé Fountain), have both been active in using their skills to support the people of Ukraine. Alison has worked in archives in Ukraine and recently conducted a 30-minute interview with a brewer in Lviv, Ukraine, who became famous for switching his beer production to Molotov cocktails.  It’s an interesting interview, have a listen. And Julie, who now works as a Placement Officer for the Volunteer Centre in Dublin, Ireland, is working hard to help refugees throughout Europe.  He helps run a centre and organizes the work, as demonstrated by the blog she maintains.
• Michael Porter, Russell Fillmore-Brady, Jesse Connor, and Tyler Giacalone graduated with Master of Arts in the Teaching of History (MAT) degrees.

Faculty Accomplishments

• Prof. Joaquín Chavez made an excellent appearance on the television channel for the Catholic journal “America,” where he discussed the beatification of Salvadoran Jesuit Rutilio Grande, who in 1977 was assassinated in the buildup to the El Salvador civil war.  Grande was among the first priests killed by Salvadoran death squads and was a close friend of Saint Oscar Romero, who himself was assassinated in 1980 while serving as Archbishop of El Salvador.
• Prof. Barbara Ransby was named a recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award.  This is a testament to Barbara’s excellent body of work, which the awards committee cited specifically, bestowing the award “because of the historical and political importance of her writings, her tireless work as an institution-builder and activist, and the integrity she brings to every project in which she is involved.”  She shares this year’s award with Angela Davis and Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
• Prof. Michael Jin was part of a professional development workshop for grade 6-12 teachers on Japanese incarceration and the teaching of Asian American history, sponsored by Facing History & Ourselves.
• Postdoctoral Fellow Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez was featured in a Bridge-to-Faculty event where she spoke on “Latinx Youth Migration and the Rights of Childhood in Twentieth-Century America.”
• Prof. Kirk Hoppe won a Fulbright. As part of the Fulbright Scholars program, Kirk will spend next fall at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik.  Alongside his duties doing cross-cultural work, he will also be doing research for his current project of African migration to Europe.
• Prof. Adam Goodman was invited to spend a year as a research fellow at Stanford University’s prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  Along with the normal duties of a research fellow, Adam will work on a project exploring how US immigration policies since 1965 have increasingly left people in a precarious, often prolonged, state of limbo—from undocumented immigrants living under threat of expulsion and people stuck in detention, to asylum seekers waiting as their cases wind their way through labyrinthine bureaucracies and individuals with provisional protections such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that can be stripped away at a moment’s notice.
• Prof. Emeritus Leon Fink discussed his new book, Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progessive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II, over zoom with the Wilson Center and the National History Center.
• Postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, won the 2022 Bancroft Dissertation Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University!  The award is given annually to an outstanding Columbia dissertation in American history, diplomacy, or international affairs.
• Prof. Young Richard Kim, helped orchestrate this semester’s “Homer-athon,” featuring a full reading of Homer’s “Odyssey” to celebrate the re-opening of the National Hellenic Museum. His triumph is featured on WGN-TV News.

Student and Faculty Publications

January 2022

• Prof. Emeritus Leon Fink published a new book entitled, Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II

February 2022

• Prof. Michael Jin published a new article entitled, “Voices of the Unredressed: Korean and Nisei A-Bomb Survivors, Structural Legacies of Violence, and Compensatory Justice in the Cold War Pacific,” published in the Amerasia Journal

March 2022

• Postdoctoral Fellow, Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, has a chapter coming out in a now-available-for-preorder collection entitled The North American West in the Twenty-First Century.  Ivón’s chapter is entitled, “‘A Violation of the Most Elementary Human Rights of Children’: The Rise of Migrant Youth Detention and Family Separation in the American West.”
• Associate Dean and Professor at the UIC School of Law and one of our own affiliated faculty, Teri McMurtry-Chubb, published an article in The University of Memphis Law Review entitled, “The Rhetoric of Race, Redemption, and Will Contests: Inheritance as Reparations in John Grisham’s Sycamore Row.”
• Jochen S. Arndt, a 2015 PhD of ours and currently Assistant Professor of History at the Virginia Military Institute, published Divided by the Word: Colonial Encounters and the Remaking of Zulu and Xhosa Identities (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2022).

April 2022

• Graduate Student Polina Popova published a fascinating post about children’s literature from 1930s Ukraine on the Princeton University Library’s blog.

May 2022

• Prof. Malgorzata (Gosia) Fidelis’ new book titled, Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland, is set to release.
• Prof. Kevin Schultz contributed to an article in the Chicago Tribune about Eboo Patel’s efforts to bring people of different faiths together. Kevin provides a historical perspective on interfaith leaders collaborating to broaden the country’s religious understanding and cooperation.