Faculty News

APRIL 2013

Marjorie Becker has been invited to participate, with Prof. David St. John, in "Peruvian Portals: A Cross-Cultural Hymn."  This assessment of Quechua poetry and Andean history will take place at the Fisher next fall.  She also participated in a conference assessing the legacy of Muriel Rukeyer's complex and remarkable role as independent progressive, internationalist, (and translator of the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz,) feminist and foremother of many writers and artists.  In addition, Marjorie just learned that her monograph, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution, is in its sixth printing.

Sarah Gualtieri has been invited to present a paper at the International Immigration History Conference, " A Century of Transnationalism", at UCLA on April 26, 2013.  Organized by Roger Waldinger (Director, Program on International Migration and Professor of Sociology, UCLA) and Nancy Green (History, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), this two-day conference will bring together an international group of historians and social scientists who focus on the history of international migration.

Wolf Gruner’s article “Peregrinations into the Void? German Jews and their Knowledge about the Armenian Genocide during the Third Reich” (Central European History 2012) was translated into Armenian and published in three chapters in the journal:  Nor Or Weekly, 28 February
2013, VOLUME 91, NO. 9, pp 2 and 14; 7 March 2013, volume 91, No. 10, p.11; 14 March, VOLUME 91, NO. 11, pp. 3 and 14.  Wolf Gruner’s chapter on the persecution of the Jews and the reaction of the Berliners in a recent book on Berlin between 1933-1945 was highlighted in an article “Feigheit und Mut: Berlin zur NS-Zeit”, in a big German newspaper: Süddeutsche Zeitung on 12 March 2013.  His presentation “Individual Defiance and Protest. A micro historical Reevaluation of Jewish Responses towards Nazi Persecution” was highlighted in the internet blog of the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam, Netherlands, with the article “Microgeschiedenis en Holocaust” (micro history of the Holocaust) by Froukje Demant, 12 Dec 2012.

María Elena Martínez was awarded a 2012-2013 Mellon Mentoring Award in the Faculty to Graduate Students category.  She was also invited by the University of Nantes to give a talk this summer on her book Genealogical Fictions and assess the work of their graduate students in her field (declined).

Joan Piggott has published the first in a series of articles and translations of the eighth-century Japanese law code, known as the Yoro Code, in "Gender in the Japanese Administrative Code, Part 1: Laws on Residence Units." The article appears in the Teikyo Journal of History 28 (February 2013), pp. 317 to 418.  In addition, a workshop and lectures pertinent to the next phase of the project will be held at USC during the week of April 22-25, with two visiting professors from Japan joining Professor Piggott. They are Prof. Akiko Yoshie and Prof. Yoko Ijuin. Besides their working meetings and presentations to both undergrads and grad students, Professors Piggott, Yoshie, and Ijuin will participate in a roundtable discussion concerning the recently published work on April 23, 3:30 to 6:30, in the Polymathic Study Room (Rm 241) of Doheny Library.

MARCH 2013

Marjorie Becker presented some of her creative work stimulated by her research on Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda, at a recent conference.  Five of her most recent poems, all set in Jewish and black Macon Georgia, have been accepted for publication.  Two of her other poems, again set in a post-structural and post-modern understanding of the Deep South, were published in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V. Georgia.  Her poems are entitled, "Capturing Sighs and Gemstones in Bundles, in Baskets," and "Sea-green Ease."

Judith Bennett gave a talk on feminist canons at the University of Oslo in January and talks on women and poverty at the University of Glasgow in February and the University of Antwerp in March.

Wolf Gruner published the book in German "Gedenkort. Rosenstraße 2-4: Internierung und Protest im NS-Staat" (Memorial. Rosenstrasse 2-4. Internment and protest in Nazi Germany), hrsg. von der Topographie des Terrors, Hentrich Verlag Berlin 2013. He gave a lecture at the memorial "Topography of Terror" in Berlin on February, 26th 2013, where the book was presented and the 70th anniversary of the so called factory raid and the public protest against the deportations of Jews in the Rosenstrasse was remembered. On the topic he gave an interview to a German radio station “Deutschlandradio Kultur” for their program “Fazit”, which highlighted the 70th anniversary of the events in a broadcast on February 26th. The Berlin newspaper “Tagesspiegel” covered the lecture and the evening in a page long article by Thomas Lackmann under the title “Für Widerstand zählt nicht der Erfolg” (success is not relevant to call it resistance) on February 28th, 2013. Wolf Gruner also gave an interview for the “Evangelische Pressedienst” (Christan press service) on the 70th Anniversary of the factory raid and the protest in the Rosenstrasse, Berlin 1943, on February 21, 2013.  In addition, he published the book chapter “Die Verfolgung der Juden und die Reaktionen der Berliner” (The persecution of the Jews and the
reactions of the Berliners”, in Michael Wildt/Christoph Kreutzmüller, Berlin 1933-1945, Munich: Siedler 2013, pp. 311-323, 422-425.

Vanessa Schwartz has just published an essay, “Film and History” in the electronic journal of Sciences Po called Histoire@Politique. http://www.histoire-politique.fr/. Her article, “LAX: Designing for the Jet Age” is now published in DeWit and Alexander, LA Overdrive (Getty, 2013) and her work will be integrated into the exhibition of the same name, opening in April.  She gave the keynote at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference in Fresno.  She served on the final selection panel for the ACLS/Mellon dissertation fellowships, a program that awards two million dollars in grants. 

FEBRUARY 2013

Daniela Bleichmar is pleased to note that her book was awarded the PROSE award for best book in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in 2012 from the Association of American Publishers.  She is also the recent recipient of a year-long residential research grant from the Getty Research Institute for the academic year 2013–2014; she will serve as the Consortium Professor, which involves teaching a graduate seminar in the spring semester on the year's scholarly theme, "Connecting Seas: Cultural and Artistic Exchange," which will be open to students from any institution in the region.

Peter Mancall's "The Raw and the Cold: Five English Sailors in Sixteenth-Century Nunavut," is the lead article in the January 2013 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly.  As it happens, the same issue includes a piece by Vera Keller, a former Mellon post-doc with EMSI who taught in history, entitled "The 'Framing of a New World': Sir Balthazar Gerbier's 'Project for Establishing a New State in America,' ca. 1649." 

Jacob Soll authored the review, "I Would Prefer Not To—What Paperwork Means to Modern Life," The New Republic, January, 10, 2013

JANUARY 2013

In December 2012, Wolf Gruner finished a small book in German: Gedenkort Rosenstraße 2-4, Internierung und Protest im NS Staat (Memorial Rosenstrasse. Internment and Protest in the Nazi State). The book is due to be published by the memorial Topography of Terror in
Berlin, Germany, at the 70th anniversary of the protest in late February 2013 and presented at a public event, for which he is invited to give a keynote.  He also gave a talk on the use of video testimonies in research and classroom at the 2013 Winter seminar “Testimonies: Preservation,
Access, and Education for the 21st Century” of the Association of Holocaust Organizations at USC, January 7-9, 2013.

Sarah Gualtieri presented at the thematic conversation, The Arab Uprisings: Media Representations of Women & Youth," at the Middle East Association Conference in Denver, CO, in November.

Steve Ross' Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped America Politics was just named by Choice as one of  its “Outstanding Academic Titles” for 2012

Vanessa Schwartz participated in a Presidential Plenary at the AHA in conversation with Bill Cronon, Peter Galison and film director John Sayles. She will be keynoting the conference: Politics in Art Forms in February at USC with a talk, "Beyond Atrocity: Looking at Photojournalism."  Her former student, Brian Jacobson, (tt at St. Andrews) won the dissertation award given by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. 

December 2012

Daniela Bleichmar's article “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France” has appeared in the latest issue of the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies.

A conference organized by Clinton Godart, titled "Buddhist Futures: Conceptions of Modernity and Temporality in Modern Japanese Buddhism," was held successfully at USC on November 9, 2012.  Seven participants from the United States, Japan, and Europe discussed problems surrounding the relations between modernity and Buddhism in Japan in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. Also, Clinton Godart presented a paper titled "“Ishiwara Kanji, the East-Asia League, and Buddhist Utopianism in Twentieth Century Japan.” The conference was sponsored by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, the East Asian Studies Center, and the Department of History at USC.

Wolf Gruner presented the papers “Open Protest and Other Forms of Jewish defiance. A Reassessment of Jewish Responses towards Anti Jewish policies in Nazi Germany” at the "Twelfth Biennial Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust: The Holocaust Today: New Directions in Research and Teaching", at Northwestern University, November 1-4, 2012, and “Individual Defiance and Protest. A micro historical Reevaluation of Jewish Responses towards Nazi Persecution” at the international conference “EXPLORING THE MICRO HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST”, Paris, Mémorial de la Shoah, 6 December2012.

Maria Elena Martínez’s new edited book has just been published: Race and Blood in the Iberian World, ed. Max Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg (Berlin, Münster, Vienna, Zurich and London: Lit Verlag 2012). For the spring she has been invited to give a keynote speech at a conference at Northwestern University on race, to present at an interdisciplinary workshop in Mexico City on empires and globalization in the early modern world, and to participate in a "state of the field" symposium on colonial Latin America in Venice, Italy.

Ayse Rorlich received an invitation from the Al Farabi Kazakh National University to give a series of guest lectures over a period of five weeks in the Spring of 2013, as well as become the co-chair of the Ph.D. Dissertation Committee of one of their doctoral candidates.  The conflict in the schedules of our universities, and her teaching obligations at  USC  prevented her from accepting this  invitation .

Steve Ross has just signed on with Bloomsbury Press to publish his current manuscript-in-progress, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews and Their Spies Foiled the Nazi Plot Against America.  Steve has been appointed as Visiting Professor at University of Paris 8 for June 2013.

NOVEMBER 2012

Elinor Accampo is pleased to announce the seventh edition of the textbook she co-authors, Western Civilization: Beyond Boundaries (Wadsworth Cengage).

 Judith Bennett gave a plenary lecture on "The ‘Girl Effect’ and English Exceptionalism" at the North American Conference on British Studies in Montreal, November 9-11.

Daniela Bleichmar recently gave a lecture about her new book, Visible Empire, at the Berkeley Art History Department. She was a keynote speaker at a symposium held at The Graduate Center, CUNY, to celebrate the twentieth-anniversary of the Colonial Latin American Review, where she talked about “Other Archives: Knowing the Spanish Americas Through Images and Objects.”

The book co-edited by Wolf Gruner und Jörg Osterloh: Das “Großdeutsche Reich” und die Juden. Nationalsozialistische Verfolgungspolitik in den “angegliederten”  Gebieten (The Greater German Reich and the Jews), Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag 2010, 440 pages, was awarded one of the prizes for most outstanding German studies in humanities and social science in 2012 by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the VG WORT and the German Foreign Office, dedicated to fund a translation into English.  In addition, Wolf Gruner and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum co-organized the panel at USC on October 29^th 2012: “Beyond Numbers. Creating A Personal History Of The Holocaust”.  Panelists discussed the recently published Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Volume II: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe (Martin Dean, ed.) and The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (Wendy Lower, author), both projects of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The panelist also addressed the role of the testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute in historical research.

Steve Ross will be the featured speaker at the Provost's Writer's Series event this Wednesday (11/14) at 7pm in the University Club.  He will speak about his new book, Hollywood left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics.

OCTOBER 2012

Marjorie Becker participated in a conference celebrating the world-changing  assessments of motherhood, essays, and poetry of the late Adrienne Rich.  Her presentation focused on the illicit Mexican women's dance she discovered as part of the grass roots resistance movement that transformed modern Mexican history.

Bill Deverell is pleased to announce news of a $45,000 grant awarded to the Institute on California and the West for public programming marking the centennial of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Wolf Gruner announces the successful completion of the second International Workshop hosted by the interdisciplinary USC Dornsife research cluster “Resisting the Path to Genocide”, this time with a special focus on Groups and Networks. During the conference, which took place on 6-8 September 2012, nine scholars from Nigeria, Germany, and the United States discussed the workshop theme with the members of the cluster. Among those who presented their latest research were political scientists, sociologists, law historians, history, public administration and practitioners. The intensive discussion on mass violence and group resistance during the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, against Circassians in 19th century Caucasus, in Rwanda and contemporary Nigeria draw a good crowd of USC faculty, grad students and students as well as people from several other Universities and the public. The second day panel took place at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades. The workshop concluded with a reading of a Tunesian novelist, who held this year`s writer in exile fellowship at the Villa. In addition, Wolf Gruner published the book chapter: “Armenier-Greuel” Was wussten jüdische und nichtjüdische Deutsche im NS-Staat über den Völkermord von 1915/16?, in Holocaust und Völkermorde. Die Reichweite des Vergleichs, ed. by Sybille Steinbacher, Fritz-Bauer-Institut, Frankfurt/Main-New York 2012, pp. 31-54.

Maria Elena Martinez was invited by the US Ambassador to the Dominican Republic to give several lectures on 1492 to students, journalists, and other civil society groups in that country during the month of October.

Steve Ross gave a talk on "Hollywood Left and Right" at the National History Center in Washington, D.C. 

Vanessa Schwartz published an article called "Paris 1900" in French in a catalogue that accompanies a major exhibit at the Hôtel De Ville in Paris called "Paris Vu Par Hollywood" largely based on her research in "It's So French!"  Her article "Wide Angle at the Beach" was recently translated into Portuguese and is being published in a book on the history of communication in Brazil. She is a member of the Cundill Prize Committee which gives the largest monetary prize for a book published in any field of history. 

Jake Soll presented a paper at the Wharton School/University of Pennsylvania Economic History Forum on Friday, Oct 5, "A French Revolution in Accounting?  Printed Balance Sheets and the Origins of the Language of Political Accountability".  Also, his article, "Don't Count on it" will appear in the next issue of the New Republic's online section, The Book.  His review of Jane Gleeson-White's Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance has been published by The New Republic; it is available here.

Emerita Professor Charlotte Furth receieved the 2012 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies.  This is the highest honor bestowed by the AAS, the most important scholarly association in the field of Asian Studies.

SEPTEMBER 2012

Bill Deverell has been named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Western Historical Association.

Clinton Godart’s article, titled "Tezuka Osamu’s Circle of Life: Vitalism, Evolution, and Buddhism" has been accepted for publication in Mechademia, an annual, peer-reviewed forum for critical work on Japanese manga, anime, and related arts.  Clinton has also been invited to participate in a session on "Global Spencerism" at the International Congress of the History of Science to take place at Manchester from July 22-28, 2013.  In addition, he is organizing a conference at USC titled "Buddhist Futures: Conceptions of Modernity and Temporality in Modern Japanese Buddhism," sponsored by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, the East Asia Studies Center, and the Department of History (Doheny Library, November 9, 2012, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM).

Paul Lerner published “Nazis on the Couch” in the September 5 issue of the TLS.

Joan Piggott announces the successful completion of our three-day international conference, Reassessing the Shôen System: Society and Economy in Medieval Japan, which took place in early June, with 20 researchers invited from Japan, the U.S. and England. Presenters gave papers from which an edited volume will be produced, the first in English on the subject. Happily the conference made it possible for four of our own History graduate students (Kamei, Kawai, Damian, Sherer) to present their own research to this global group. A good report of the conference has already been published in the fall issue of a major journal, Rekishi hyôron (749, 2012.9).  Also, in late summer we also held the eighth in our ongoing series of month-long summer workshops to teach participants how to read premodern sources written in Sino-Japanese (kambun). This year's Heian Kambun Workshop met daily from July 17 to August 10, with participants reading, interpreting and translating a variety of materials from the ninth through the eleventh centuries.  Led by Joan Piggott with two visiting professors from Japan, the ten participants included our own graduate students plus others from east coast universities. Our visiting professors used their stay in Los Angeles to network with colleagues across southern California by giving three public lectures. Prof. Hideo Yamaguchi presented "On the Run in the Nara Period (710-84): How Did the World Look to an Escaped Corvee Laborer?"  while Prof. Tomoyasu Kato spoke on "Historical Sources—the Limits of Printed Documents" and "Courtier Journals as Sources of Heian Aristocratic Society."

Joan is also delighted to announce reception of a third major grant to the History Department's Project for Premodern Japan Studies from the Cressant Foundation. It will enable us to continue conducting our visitors' series, research projects, and next summer's Kambun Workshop, while also providing travel fellowships to graduate students in Japan.