Spring 2024 List of Accomplishments

Faculty Accomplishments

• Ralph Keen won the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Catholic Historical Association.
• Malgorzata Fidelis’s 2022 book, Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland (Oxford), won the Oskar Halecki Award in Polish and East-Central European History from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences.
• Adam Goodman won this year's UIC Rising Star Award for Humanities, Arts, Design, and Architecture.
• Hayley Negrin has been awarded the Leopold-Hidy Award for the best article published in Environmental History in 2023. The award-winning article is Hayley's "Return to the Yeokanta/River: Powhatan Women and Environmental Treaty Making in Early America," which examines a 1677 treaty signed by an Algonquian Weroansqua named Cockacoeske in the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion, arguing that the treaty was not in fact a sign of declining power but instead a story of Indigenous resilience and kinship with the environment, utilizing the concept of “environmental treaty making.”
• Young Richard Kim, Associate Professor of History and Classics and Head of Classics, and Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of History, have been selected as the Institute or the Humanities Faculty Fellows for 2024-2025.
• Assistant Professor Clare S. Kim was just named a UNESCO DMRCP Fellow. DMRCP stands for "Diversity of Mathematical Research Cultures and Practices," and the fellowship is managed by the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences within UNESCO (her notification came from the University of Hamburg).
• Young Richard Kim has assumed duties as the book review editor for the Journal of Early Christian Studies and has joined the advisory board of a new journal, Public Humanities, to be published by Cambridge University Press.
• Clinical Professor Julie Peters had her History 419 class hosted a Model UN event for Farragut Career Academy in Little Village.
• The Department of History hosted the 2024 Illinois Academic Decathlon State Championships. The events brought hundreds of high schoolers to UIC, where they got swag bags and tours from the amazing Student Ambassadors, and meals from the UIC Dining Hall.  More than 60 members of the UIC History community rallied to serve as judges, provide snacks and directions, and much, much more.
• Professor Barbara Ransby had her book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) selected by the Wall Street Journal as a “Five Best: Books on Women of the Civil Rights Movement.”
• Visiting Lecturer Ben Whisenhunt, UIC Ph.D. '97, was appointed Co-Series Editor of "Anthem Americans in Revolutionary Russia" with Dr. Lee Farrow of Auburn University Montgomery. He served as co-series editor of the series "Americans in Revolutionary Russia" with Dr. Norman Saul of the University of Kansas from 2016-2022 published by Slavica Publishers. The original sixteen volumes (Slavica) will be published by Anthem Press in 2024 and 2025 while he and Farow will edit another fifteen volumes over the next five years.
• Professor Lynn Hudson will be a fellow at the UIC Institute for the Humanities. While in residence at the Institute, Lynn will be working on a project called "Wade in the Water: Segregated Swimming in American Cities, 1914-1954," which follows nicely on her most recent book, West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California' Color Line.
• Professor Jon Connolly is the 2024 recipient of the Shirley A. Bill Award for Excellence in Teaching.
• Professor Marina Mogilner won the Arts and Humanities Division’s Graduate Mentoring Award.
• Professors Cynthia Blair, Jon Connolly, and Hayley Negrin have each won a UIC Award for Creative Activity.  Cynthia won support for a project entitled, "Seeing Black Labor in Early Twenty-First Century Chicago,” a photo-documentary, exhibit, and book project that focuses on making the modes and meanings of contemporary Black labor visible. Jon won for his proposal “Thinking with Colonial Photography," some of which we got to see at a Brownbag a few weeks ago in which he tries to reimagine the agency of taking photos, not only describing the positionality of the photographer but also the agency of those being photographed. Hayley won support for her book project, “Fugitive Lands: Sovereignty and Slavery in the Early American South," the funds for which will help pay for copyright and image reproduction.

Student & Faculty Publications/ Appearances

January 2024

• UIC Professor Jeff Schuhrke, a 2020 Ph.D., was quoted in the New York Times about labor unions and their role in the founding of Israel and their involvement in the current Israel-Hamas War.
• Professor Jonathan Daly presented "Intelligence, the Russian Security Police, and the Threat of Revolution," at the conference Police Intelligence, from Local to Global, 1750-Present, January 25–26, 2024, in Brussels, Belgium. And, he published “Frontier Agriculture and the Creation of Global Neo-Europes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, ed. Jeannie Whayne (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 552–69.

February 2024

• Prof. Laura Hostetler had an edited volume published with Brill! titled Reimagining the Globe and Cultural Exchange: The Asian Legacies of Matteo Ricci's World Map.The collection of essays wonders, "How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe?"  Laura also wrote the volume's marvelous introduction and a chapter on "China's Nine-Dash Line: Cartographic Science and the Adoption of New Map Languages in the Transition from Empire to Nation State.”
• Assistant Professor Clare S. Kim presented “The Modern Subject: Transpacific Exchanges and the Racial Politics of Mathematics in America” at the Institute for the Humanities at UIC on February 22, 2024.
• UIC Bridge-to-Faculty Post-doc Celso Mendoza presented at the “Radical Research from BIPOC Scholars at UIC” on his research on February 21, 2024.  His talk "critically re-examined the supposedly legendary Spanish victory in the conquest of Mexico, in which the conquistadors are said to have killed a great Aztec leader, seized his banner, and routed the entire Aztec army in the Battle of Otumba. Using some of the earliest sources available, especially Indigenous accounts of the conquest, Dr. Mendoza demonstrated that the popular Spanish accounts of the battle is a complete fabrication. According to Indigenous sources, it was the Spaniards who left the battlefield defeated."

March 2024

• Prof. Lilia Fernández  was quoted extensively in a recent WBEZ story about the layers of migrants who have come to Chicago, making the city what it is.
• MAT student Kenny Allen published a co-authored piece in Truthout, entitled "Chicago Ballot Amendment Would Tax Real Estate Moguls to Fight Homelessness." The article was co-written with UIC's Anna Guavarra and Gayatri Reddy for the Dis/Placements project, a digital public history project bringing together scholars, students, and community members to trace a People’s History of Uptown, the northside neighborhood of Chicago shaped by multiple forms of displacement and urban renewal, as well as active resistance to such processes.

April 2024

• Department Chair Kevin Schultz was interviewed for (and appeared in) an upcoming PBS American Masters documentary on William F. Buckley, Jr., one of the subjects of his 2015 book, Buckley & Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton & Co.). The documentary, “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley”, aired nationally on PBS and now streams on the PBS website.
• UIC Visiting Lecturer Jon Balzerak is having his Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017) translated into Polish.
• Assistant Professor Jon Connolly just published Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
• UIC Professor Emeritus John D’Emilio is busy at work on a second volume of memoir, one that will cover the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. He hopes to have a full draft completed before the end of the year.
• UIC Professor Emeritus Rick Fried reported that “one of the hotter speaking gigs for area historians is at the Wyndemere retirement community in Wheaton. On first Wednesdays of the month at 11 a.m. the History Group hears from historians on a broad variety of topics.  In 2023/4, we've heard from current UIC faculty Jeffrey Sklansky and Neal McCrillis and former UIC faculty member Dominic Candeloro.  To honor America's oldest ally, we even listened to Prof. Emeritus Peter Conroy of the French Department. Ph.D. graduates of UIC also gave talks:  Karen Johnson (Wheaton College), Dominic Pacyga (emer., Columbia College), David Veenstra (St. Francis Univ.), and Mark Friedberger (emer. Texas Tech).We're always looking for fresh talent.  Consider this Du Page County's answer to the Harmsworth Lectures.”
• Associate Professor Young Richard Kim presented papers at the Byzantine Studies Conference and Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity.
• Ph.D. student Elizabeth Maher just had a peer-reviewed article come out in Disability Studies Quarterly, the journal of record in the field of Disability Studies. Elizabeth's article, "Wolf Girls and Mechanical Boys: Whiteness and Assimilation in Bruno Bettelheim’s Narratives of Autism," revisits Bettelheim's defining work on autism, highlighting forgotten articles that help us problematize "contemporary and historical formations of autism as a white, middle-class, male 'disorder' by making explicit the role of race in the construction of early narratives of autism."  The article also forefronts the importance of Jewish masculinity in postwar America.
• UIC Ph.D. 2014 Cory Davis has just agreed to a contract with Johns Hopkins University Press to publish a book based on his dissertation with the tentative title of The Republic of Commerce: The National Board of Trade and the Creation of American Capitalism. The book will be published in cooperation with the Hagley Library in the Hagley Library Studies in Business, Technology, and Politics series.

Student Accomplishments

• Undergraduate students Roan Lester, Caleb Price, Katherine Dahl, June Chow, and Wiktor Kurazawa received the Richard S. Levy Pathway to History Award.
• Undergraduate student Bernadette Vianney Pitt-Payne won this year's Gordon Lee Goodman Award for Distinction in Undergraduate Studies from the Department of History at UIC.
• Undergraduate student Fiona Lashmet won this year's Lilian Edinger Scholarship.
• PhD student Frankee Lyons accepted a two-year Fulbright US Scholar Postdoctoral Fellowship to complete her project entitled, What Homeland?: Polish Jewry and the Second Repatriation, 1953-68, at the University of Haifa’s Interdisciplinary Unit for Polish Studies. She hopes to defend her dissertation sometime this year and will take the fellowship next year, moving to the relatively peaceful university town of Haifa, where she can focus on Polish migration to Israel after 1956.
• PhD student Aleksandr Turbin won the Deena Allen Memorial Fellowship.
• Ph.D. students Elizabeth Maher and Dylan Shearer won the Marion S. Miller Dissertation Fellowship.
• Undergraduate Hashoun Marks won the David Stahl and Karol Weigelt Prize.
• Undergraduate Bernadette Pitt-Payne won first place in this year's UIC In/Between Undergraduate Research Forum.
• Undergraduate Victor Leal-Painter gave the keynote address at this year's LAS Scholarship and Awards Luncheon in front of a packed house of donors, faculty, the Dean, and scholarship winners.
• Ph.D. student and History Graduate Society president Katie Brizek just won a 2024 Mother Theodore Guerin Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center at Notre Dame. 
• Ph.D. student Liliana Macias 1. led the development and implementation of public programs for the Pilsen Latina Legacies Chicago Monuments Project funded by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Mellon Foundation. A short documentary of the public programs will premiere in Paris for a conference on monuments in 2024. 2., She was invited to be in the Advisory Committee for the Cultural Heritage and Historic Markers Program which will build on the work of previous City initiatives (Chicago Monuments Project, Black Chicago Heritage Initiative, Chicago Tribute Markers) and is supported by generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And 3., Macias co-founded the organization Raices Chicago Story Coalition, a non-profit that collaborates with Latine/x organizations and communities of Chicago to cultivate the visibility and accessibility of these stories.
• Ph.D. student Paúl Ribera was just accepted as a fellow in the 2024 Summer Institute of Northwestern University's Holocaust Educational Foundation.  The institute is a two-week residential course designed to prepare PhD students and faculty to teach Holocaust Studies courses at institutions of higher learning. Part of Paúl's dissertation analyzes the migration of Jewish families to Bolivia in the wake of the Holocaust, so this institute will have a dual purpose for him as it will also help him better frame this part of his work.
• Beida Liang, Sohini Mukhopadhyay, Nico Soto, and Aleksandr Turbin won the Award for Graduate Research from the Graduate College.
• Briana Salas and Aleksandr Turbin won Provost Graduate Internship Award from the Graduate College.
• Ajpa Sharma won the Dean’s Scholar Fellowship from the Graduate College.
• Ph.D. student Aleksandr Turbin Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert Fellowship (Summer 2024).
• Ph.D. student Joanna Dobrowolska won The History of Poland and the Polish National Alliance.
• Ph.D. students Avash Bhandari and Sarah Barton won the Marion Miller Fellowship.
• Ph.D. student Elizabeth Maher has just won both the National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship AND was named a 2024-25 Research Fellow at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. The NAE/d Spencer Dissertation Fellowship provides a stipend for a full academic year of writing. It's a major award, and fewer than 10% of applicants receive it.  As a Research Fellow at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Elizabeth will receive travel funds to visit a number of archival collections in the consortium related to her research, including funding to the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and Yale University Library. Elizabeth's dissertation seeks to uncover a raced and gendered history of autism in the United States from 1943 to 1980.