Faculty News

March-April 2012

Elinor Accampo was officially thanked by the Panhellenic Community, through a nomination of Alpha Delta Chi, for her dedication to scholarship and teaching.  And the 58th annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, which she had been organizing for two years and presided over, was a huge success. The meeting took place 22-24 March at the downtown L.A. Omni, and had over 325 registered participants.

Marjorie Becker received a 2012 USC Mellon Mentoring Award for undergraduates.  In addition, Rethinking History has published her article, "Though it seemed to be a lie, the women (even the shy one) danced on the pulpit that night: What Mexicans made of the revolutionaries among them, 1934--1940," and the accompanying poem, "The Most Languid, Untold Pleasure."

Daniela Bleichmar was promoted to Associate Professor of Art History and History.

Richard Fox will deliver the Merle Curti Lecture at the University of Wisconsin on April 12.  The title of the lecture is "Memory-Making on the Ground:  Abraham Lincoln's Elevation to Civic Sainthood in the Spring of 1865."

Wolf Gruner published an article, ‘“Peregrinations into the Void?’ German Jews and their Knowledge about the Armenian Genocide during the Third Reich”, in Central European History 45 (2012), 1–26.  Gruner‘s recent research on the diverse reactions of individual Berliners towards the Nazi persecution of the Jews, ranging from looting and physical attacks to help and public protest--which was published as a chapter in an edited volume on Berlin during National socialism last September-- was prominently featured in a newspaper review, "'Missbrauchte' Hauptstadt. Propagandabühne oder Ort der Verfolgung – eine Studie befasst sich mit Berlins Rolle ab 1933" (The “abused” capital: Propaganda scene or locus of terror- a study on the Role of Berlin since 1933) in the German newspaper “Die Welt” on February, 4th 2012. He also gave a talk as the USC Shoah foundation Institute inaugural Senior Fellow on “Open Protest and Other Forms of Jewish Defiance: A Reassessment of Jewish Responses towards Persecution in Nazi Germany,” on January 18th, 2012.

Sarah Gualtieri has been appointed an Associate Editor of The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, which is published by Brill. The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures covers the full span of topics for which there is research on women and Islamic cultures all over the world. She will be soliciting and editing entries for the online version.  She also will be presenting a paper at the conference, "al-Mahjar/al-Mashreq: Levantine Migrations 1800-2000," to be held at NC State University, April 20-22.

Peter Mancall delivered the inaugural Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in late March.  The three lectures related to his overall theme, Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic World.  The first lecture was entitled "Frejus: The Boundaries of Nature."  The second was "Vallard: The New Ecology of the Atlantic Basin."  And the third was "Secota: The Landscape at the End of History."  The University of Pennsylvania Press will publish a revised version of the lectures.  

María Elena Martínez was awarded a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship for 2012-2013. She was also elected to the Board of Editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review. And she was an invited presenter at the Symposium, “Transnationalism: A Useful Category of Analysis?” at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies in March 2012. 

Steve Ross gave the Plesur Lecture at the University of Buffalo as well as talks at Drexel University's Cinema School and Law School.  He also published an op-ed piece, “Five Reasons Hollywood Is Not a Bastion of Liberalism,” in the Washington Post.

Vanessa Schwartz was featured in the March issue of  l'Histoire magazine (the popular history magazine in France) in an article called "Une Ambassadrice en Amérique"   She was also selected as a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute and will be on leave there during the Fall of 2012.

February 2012

Daniela Bleichmar gave a Smart Lecture at the University of Chicago about her forthcoming book, Visible Empire, and a talk entitled "New Worlds of Knowledge: America in Prints, Prints in America" at Northwestern University as part of a symposium on early modern prints and the production of knowledge.  Her essay on the recent Contested Visions exhibit of colonial Latin American art at LACMA appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Vanessa Schwartz gave at talk at MOCA on February 12, "Learning from the Paparazzi." She is the keynote speaker at the Cultural History Conference in Padua Italy.  She also will be running a graduate seminar and a public program at the Cinémathèque de Grenoble and will keynote the Narrative Studies Association Annual Conference in March.

January 2012

For the fall 2011, Wolf Gruner was appointed the first USC Shoah Foundation Institute Senior fellow 2011. During his sabbatical leave, he conducted research on Jewish defiance and protest against Nazi persecution. In November, Gruner organized the first bilateral Workshop for PhD Candidates from the United States of America and Israel, “Researching the Holocaust” at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem (co-hosted by USC and Yad Vashem). The participants came from Berkeley, Yale, Chapel Hill and several other US and Israeli universities. In October, Gruner was invited to give a paper on “What did the German Jews know during the Holocaust about the Armenian genocide” in Vienna at the Conference “Der Holocaust und die Geschichte der Völkermorde im 20. Jahrhundert. Zur Bedeutung und Reichweite des Vergleichs”, which was organized by the Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt and the University Vienna.  He published the articles: “The Germans Should Expel the Foreigner Hitler”. Open Protest and Other Forms of Jewish Defiance in Nazi Germany, in: Yad Vashem Studies Vol. 39 (2011), no. 2 and “Die Berliner und die NS-Judenverfolgung. Eine mikrohistorische Studie individueller Handlungen und sozialer Beziehungen“ (The Berliners and the anti-Jewish persecution. A microhistorical analysis of individual actions and social relationships), in: Rüdiger Hachtmann/Thomas Schaarschmidt/Winfried Süß (eds),Berlin im Nationalsozialismus. Politik und Gesellschaft 1933 1945 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Vol. 27), Göttingen 2011, pp. 57-87, plus the entry “Holocaust”, in: Encyclopedia of Global Religion, ed. by Mark Juergensmeyer and Wade Clark Roof, Sage 2011, pp. 532-533.

The Korean translation of Kyung Moon Hwang's book, A History of Korea--An Episodic Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), was published by 21st Century Books in November 2011.

Steve Ross's “The Five Best Books on Political Hollywood,” appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 10, 2011.  The Huffington Post published his piece, “Hollywood’s Surprising Political History,” on December 1, 2011.  C-SPAN's BOOKTV featured two of Ross's appearances: a forum on Hollywood and Activism at LA Public Library's ALOUD series that included Mike Farrell and Roger Simon, and a talk he gave at the California Historical Society.

NOVEMBER 2011

Lois Banner gave a lecture at Jeffrey Lyons's film series at the Director's Guild in New York on the new movie, My Week With Marilyn.

Marjorie Becker was named a finalist in the Second Annual Beyond Baroque Poetry Contest for her poems "Listening" (dedicated to the memory of Salvador Allende,) "Suddenly the Future," and "A Broken Untold World of Dance," (from her forthcoming manuscript, Archive of Dreams.)  Her "Open and Early Buttered Biscuits," was accepted by and is forthcoming in Spillway.  And she has been invited to read from her collection Piano Glass/Glass Piano and from Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club at Macon College in Macon, Georgia.

Judith Bennett recently gave a paper at the Institute of Historical Research (London) on “Early, Erotic, and Alien: Crossdressing Women in Late Medieval London,” and she was also briefly an Invited Professor in the Erasmus Mundus M.A. Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Granada.

Daniela Bleichmar has published “Seeing Peruvian Nature, Up Close and from Afar,” Res 59/60 (spring/autumn 2011), 82–95 and “The Enlightenment and Its Visual Manifestations in Spanish America,” in Ben Vinson (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Latin American Studies (New York: Oxford University Press). Her article "Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France” was accepted for publication in Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Bill Deverell has been appointed to the board of the California Council for the Humanities and has been given a lifetime service to Los Angeles award by the Los Angeles Historical Society.

Sarah Gualtieri was invited to Smith College in Northampton on November 4  to give a talk entitled, "Bringing Arab American Studies into Conversation with other Ethnic Studies Fields."

Maria Elena Martinez was invited to present (and accepted) on the Spanish and Portuguese empires at a conference at Stanford University on Nov. 11-12, 2011.  She also was interviewed and appeared in the BBC International documentary "How the World got Mixed Up," which premiered in October.

Steve Ross published an Op-Ed piece, “Obama, Take a Page From Reagan,” in the Los Angeles Times, Oct. 14, 2011.www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ross-storytelling-20111014,0,284101.story

OCTOBER 2011

Lois Banner’s MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe has now been translated into French, in addition to German and Italian.

Bill Deverell reports that the Institute on California and the West has been invited to apply for a grant through the Rose Hills Foundation to support three K-12 outreach projects in western American history and literature.  The Institute-sponsored book on the history of the Banning family of Southern California, Grand Ventures, has been awarded the annual design prize of Bookbuilders West.  This is the second design prize the book has won. 

Deb Harkness gave the Brown University Department of History's 31st Annual Church Lecture in September.

Steve Ross’s article “Hollywood, Right-Wing Powerhouse," appeared on Salon.com on Aug. 31, 2011, www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/2011/08/31/hollywood_left_and_right.  Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Vanessa Schwartz has been invited to give two talks in Amsterdam in October: "Fluid Motion and the Visualization of Airport Design during the Jet Age" at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and "At Full Speed: Mobility and the News Picture" at the Spectacle and Society Conference at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies.  She will also travel to Paris where the American Ambassador to the OECD will host a book party in honor of the publication of her book, Modern France: A Very Short Introduction.

SEPTEMBER 2011

Ayse Rorlich gave a lecture on June 15^th, entitled “'The Visual Turn': Muslim Culture in Late Imperial Russia,” at the University of Vienna, Social Anthropology Seminar. On September 9th, she also presented "Pictorial Debates: Tatar Satirical journals and Muslim Modernity Discourses, 1906-1917" at the USC Symposium on "Poison Pens".

Steve Ross will deliver the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholars Lecture at the Linwood Dunn Theater on Monday, Sept. 19, 7:30pm.  Tickets are free but need to be ordered online at www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2011/09/scholars.html. Steve will also be speaking later this month in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Portland about his new book, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (Oxford University Press).  In addition, Steve will discuss his book on the Patt Morrison Show, KPPC, on Oct. 4, either at 2:20pm or 2:40pm.

AUGUST 2011

Lois Banner’s MM-Personal, has been nominated for a best book award from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. Also, MM-Personal was just translated into Italian.  A German edition came out earlier this year.

Marjorie Becker is deeply grateful that her article "Though It Seemed To Be a Lie, the Women, (even the Shy One,) Danced on the Pulpit that Night: What Mexicans Made of the Revolutionaries among Them, 1934--1940," and the companion piece, "The Most Languid, Untold Pleasure," have been accepted for publication by Rethinking History and are forthcoming in 2011.  She is also very grateful that seven of her poems from her collection Body Bach have been re-published in Kevin Cantwell, ed., Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club (2011) and that in his introduction to her work, Cantwell writes that "the poems are reminiscent of Olga Broumas and the New York-cum-northern California Beat writer Diane de Prima."

Bill Deverell reports that The Institute on California and the West received a five-year commitment from a private foundation to inaugurate the Los Angeles Service Academy, a program for high school students from across the LA Basin; the Academy will teach the students, who will be enrolled for two years each, about the history and daily operations of Los Angeles infrastructure.  The Academy is designed for students with an interest in local civic and public service.

In August, the University of Toronto Press published The Middle Ages in Texts and Texture, a collection of twenty-six essays written in honor of Professor Robert Brentano (UC Berkeley) and edited by Jason Glenn.

Wolf Gruner gave a paper on “What did Jews and Germans in the Third Reich know about the Armenian Genocide?”, at the IXth Biennial Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars “Genocide: Truth, Memory, Justice and Recovery”, July 19th-22nd, 2011, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which will be published in Spanish. He published an article about “Resisting the Path to Genocides”: An interdisciplinary research initiative at USC, in: Past Forward, Spring 2011, pp. 28-29; as well as a book chapter with a reevaluation of the role of city governments in the Third Reich by applying network theories: Die Kommunen im Nationalsozialismus. Innenpolitische Akteure und ihre wirkungsmächtige Vernetzung, in: Wolfgang Seibel/Sven Reichardt (eds.), Der prekäre Staat. Herrschen und Verwalten im Nationalsozialismus, Campus Verlag: Frankfurt am Main 2011, pp. 167-212.

Sarah Gualtieri was invited to Princeton University in March 2011 to give a paper based on her research on the history of the Lebanese in Los Angeles (this project is funded by USC's Advancing Scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities Fellowship).

Steve Ross’ Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics has just been published by Oxford University Press.  He will be giving a talk for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on September 19th at the Linwood Dunn Theaters (1313 Vine, Hollywood) at 7:30pm.  If you are interested, you can book seats (no charge) beginning Sept. 1st.  Go to www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2011/09/scholars.html

Vanessa Schwartz's Modern France: A Very Short Introduction has been published by Oxford University Press. This Spring she will be the Carl and Marilyn Thoma Visiting Professor in the Arts and the Humanities in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

MARCH 2011

Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall's co-edited volume, Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World has just appeared from the University of Pennsylvania Press.  The book is the first in The Early Modern Americas book series, which is affiliated with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute (and for which Peter serves as the general editor).

Wolf Gruner obtained a contract from Berghahn Books in New York for an English translation of the recent book he coedited in German with 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.  His German book, Judenverfolgung in Berlin 1933-1945: Eine Chronologie der Behördenmaßnahmen in der Reichshauptstadt (The Persecution of the Berlin Jews: A Chronology), second entirely revised and strongly expanded edition, Berlin 2009, 191 pages, will also be translated into English and published in 2012 with the German Foundation “Topography of Terror”.  Gruner recently published the chapter on “Greater Germany” in Peter Hayes/John Roth (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, New York: Oxford University Press 2010, pp. 293-309, and the chapter on “Forced labor in Nazi anti-Jewish policy, 1938-1945” in Jonathan Friedman (ed.), The Routledge History of the Holocaust, London: Routledge 2010, pp. 168-180.  On 13 February 2011, Gruner gave a talk in Berlin, Germany, about “Individual Public Protest against the Nazi Persecution of the Jews 1933-45”, at the international symposium, “Öffentlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus” in commemoration of David Bankier, Topographie des Terrors. The German newspaper Tagesspiegel cited from his talk and the German public radio station “Deutschlandradio Kultur” featured exclusively the topic of his talk in an interview with the author in its program “fazit” on 13 February 2011.

Vanessa Schwartz was quoted in the New York Times (March 9, 2011) in an article entitled “The Americanization of the Rue St.-Honoré”.

FEBRUARY 2011

Elinor Accampo was interviewed on the KPCC Patt Morrison Show on December 27. The topic was the rising preference in France for civil unions over traditional marriage. Accampo has also become President of the Society for French Historical Studies. She will host the 58th annual meeting of the Society, which will take place March 22-24, 2012 at the Omni Hotel and on the USC campus.

Lois Banner and Mark Anderson (photographer) have published MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe (Abrams, 2011). This book is taken from the contents of Marilyn's file cabinets, which were in her house the night she died and in private hands for fifty years.  It was previewed in the Vanity Fair cover story in October, 2008.  The text contains a new interpretation of Marilyn.  MM-Personal has been previewed in the Wall Street Journal and will be in the New York Times, the Ladies Home Journal, the Sunday supplement of the London Daily Telegraph and more. 

Judith Bennett's "Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge" has just been published in The Lesbian Premodern, ed. Noreen Giffney, et al. (Routledge: 2011), pp. 131-145.

Charlotte Furth and Angela Ki Che Leung (editors) published Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2010)

Deb Harkness’ A Discovery of Witches: A Novel has been published by Viking Adult (2011). The book is doing very well, and Harkness is currently on tour.

Paul Lerner received an ACLS Fellowship and also a Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.  In Fall semester 2011 he will be a visiting scholar at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at University of Leipzig.

Peter Mancall and Howard Gillman have received a major grant from the Mellon Foundation to support ten two-year postdoctoral fellows in the humanities and humanistic social sciences in the College.  Peter also received a grant for EMSI from the Borchard Foundation to host a workshop at the Chateau de la Bretesche in Missillac, Brittany, on "Maritime Communities in the Early Modern Atlantic World" in June. 

Jack Wills (editor) published China and Maritime Europe, 1500 – 1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

JANUARY 2011

Marjorie Becker has been invited to read from her most recent book, Piano Glass/Glass Piano at the LA Book Festival this spring.

Judith Bennett has published "Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England," Past and Present, 209 (2010), 7-51.

Wolf Gruner published the chapter on "Greater Germany", in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. by Peter Hayes/John Roth, New York: Oxford University Press 2010, pp. 293-309; as well as a chapter on the “Berlin Municipality and the persecution of the Jews 1933-1945,” in Berlin 1933-1945. Zwischen Propaganda und Terror. Ein Begleitkatalog zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung, hg. v. Stiftung Topographie des Terrors, vertreten durch Andreas Nachama, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors: Berlin 2010, pp. 216-222. The text appeared in an English edition as well: Berlin 1933-1945. Between Terror and Propaganda, catalogue of an exhibition, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors: Berlin 2010.

NOVEMBER 2010

Lisa Bitel is now a guest blogger for Religion Dispatches (religiondispatches.org), which has just published her essay, "'Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?': Rock and Religion, Irish-Style."

Paul Lerner's article, "Consuming Encounters: The 'Jewish Department Store' in German Politics and Culture," is about to appear in Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick-Segev (eds)., The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life (Berghahn Books: December 2010), pp. 135-154.  His co-edited manuscript, Jewish Masculinities:  German Jews, Gender and History was just accepted for publication by Indiana University Press.

Steve Ross is a series advisor and featured interviewee on Tuner Classic Movies seven-part series, “Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood.”  The series airs on Monday nights beginning Nov. 1, 2010.

OCTOBER 2010

Marjorie Becker’s collection of poems Piano Glass/Glass Piano has been published.  According to USC English professor David St. John, “Marjorie Becker’s second collection of poems, Piano Glass/Glass Piano is a truly remarkable achievement.  Novelistic in its narrative conception and operatic in its dramatic sweep, this sequence of poems charts the oscillations of identity and sexuality, following the story of its speaker/narrator Marnie, who is first seamstress then shopkeeper, and whore then Madam.  Unspoken racial anxiety, the construction of Southern Jewish identity, the potential transformation of the self by use of the body—all of these are at stake and under discussion in Marnie’s brilliantly interwoven stories. . . . Marnie is an extraordinary character, one of the most provocative and compelling female speakers in recent fiction or poetry.”

Bill Deverell has been invited to give the Robert Athearn Lecture at the University of Colorado in December.

Phil Ethington has begun a three-year term on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.

On October 7th, Robin D.G. Kelley delivered the Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture at York University, Toronto on “The Jazz Atlantic: Modern Music in the Age of African Liberation”. Also, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original garnered two more awards: the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Association and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

Peter Mancall has been elected to the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and to the editorial board of the William and Mary Quarterly. In addition, Basic Books has just released Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson—A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic in paperback.

Ayse Rorlich published an essay entitled “Empire and Self: Sadri Maksudi’s Encounter with England,” in K. Durukan, R. Zens, A. Zorlu-Durukan, eds. Hoca, ‘Allame, Puits de Science (Istanbul: Isis, 2010.)

Steve Ross was interviewed for a “Marketplace” feature story, “What’s Next for Arnold Schwarzenegger,” on September 27, 2010 for American Public Radio.

Brett Sheehan published “Boycotts and Bombs: The Failure of Economic Sanctions in the Sino-Japanese Conflict, Tianjin China, 1928-1932,” Management & Organizational History, Vol 5, No.2 (May 2010), 197-220.

SEPTEMBER 2010

Elinor Accampo delivered a plenary address at the annual meeting of British Society for the Study of French History in Newcastle, U.K. on June 27, 2010, entitled, "Overlooked Victims of 1918: War, Pregnancy, and La Grippe ‘Espagnol’"

Wolf Gruner coedited with Jörg Osterloh: Das Großdeutsche Reich und die Juden. Nationalsozialistische Verfolgungspolitik in den angegliederten Gebieten (The Greater German Reich and the Jews. Anti-Jewish persecution in the annexed territories) which was just published with Campus Verlag Frankfurt/Main (438 pages, 2010). He co-authored the introduction and delivered a chapter on Bohemia Moravia (7-48, 139-174).  He also published: “The History of the Holocaust: Multiple Actors, Diverse Motives, Contradictory Developments and Disparate (Re)actions”, in: Betts, Paul/Wiese, Christian: Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies. London: Continuum Press 2010, pp. 323-342. In July Wolf gave a talk on “Defiance and Protest – Forgotten individual reactions towards anti-Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany”, at the International Institute for Holocaust Research 3rd Annual Summer Workshop for Holocaust Scholars with the Participation of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Research Fellows: “The Persecution and Murder of Jews: Grassroots Perspectives”, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, July 5, 2010.

Kyung Moon Hwang's book, A History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), has just been published.

Robin D. G. Kelley's book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009) won the following awards: Winner, Best Book About Jazz, Jazz Journalists Association; Winner, Ambassador Award for Book of Special Distinction, English Speaking Union; Winner 2010 PEN Open Book Award, PEN American Center (NY); Finalist, 2010 PEN USA Literary Award; Nominee, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.  Another of Kelley’s books, Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora, co-edited with Franklin Rosemont, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), won an American Book Award, 2010, from The Before Columbus Foundation.

Peter Mancall has published “Pigs for Historians: Changes in the Land and Beyond,” in William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser. LXVII (April 2010), 347-375.

María Elena Martínez was the main academic advisor for the upcoming PBS documentary "When Worlds Collide," which explores issues of power, culture, and identity in the sixteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world.  She also wrote an essay for the documentary's website and vetted the rest of its webcontent, which is mainly intended to help high school students and teachers learn more about some of the figures, themes, and problems mentioned (and not) in the documentary.  It premiers on Monday, September 27 at 9:00 pm (KCET). María Elena was also invited to give a talk on indigenous intellectuals at Cambridge University (UK) this September.  And she was invited to discuss her book at a seminar in Lisbon that is organized by the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales Paris, Casa de Velazquez Madrid, and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Vanessa Schwartz published "Who Killed Brigitte Bardot?" in a special forum in The Fall 2010 issue most  of  Cinema Journal, the official journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She will be delivering a lecture at Yale on September 25, "Obsolescence, Technology and the aesthetic of Expendability: Considering the Material Culture of the Jet Age.".  She has been nominated for election as a member of the AHA Council in the Research Division.  She will be the Distinguished Professor of Art History at the Sorbonne, Paris I, the Institut National de l'histoire de l'Art during March, 2011.

MAY 2010

Wolf Gruner's interdisciplinary research cluster "Resisting Genocides" was one of the first three selected for funding under the Dean's College 2020 initiative.  In addition to support for research via post-doctoral, pre-doctoral and undergraduate fellowships and annual international conferences as well as interdisciplinary seminars on the cluster's topic, funding will lead to the creation of new general education courses, an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate.

APRIL 2010

Peter Mancall has been elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians.

Ayse Rorlich traveled to Russia in March to present a paper at a conference organized by the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences.  She took part in a conference on “Turkic States and the Statecraft from the 16^th to the 19^th Century” and a colloquium on “Tatar Visual Culture in Late 19^th and Early 20^th Century.”

MARCH 2010

Lisa Bitel has received an ACLS fellowship for 2010-11 to work on her new book, Lady of the Rock: Vision, Faith, and Cult in the Modern Desert, which is under contract with Cornell University Press.

Steve Ross served as an historical consultant for the March 2010 PBS series, “The Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.”   He will also serve as Guest Host for a discussion on the current state of labor unions on KCRW’s “The Politics of Culture” to be aired Tuesday, March 9, 2010.

FEBRUARY 2010

Elinor Accampo has been asked to be President of the Society for French Historical Studies for the academic year 2011-2012. This honor also entails the rather daunting responsibility of hosting the Society's 58th annual meeting at USC in late March/early April 2012.  This conference attracts between 250-300 registered participants.

An interview with Judith Bennett has just been published in the Icelandic history journal, "Sagnfræðin, femínisminn og feðraveldið," Saga 47:2 (2009), 39-54; her textbook on Medieval Europe: A Short History came out in a new edition last week; she spoke at the University of Western Ontario in November; and in March she will be giving the Edmondson lectures at Baylor University and the Casper lecture at Marquette University.

Peter Mancall has won the Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award, which will be awarded at USC's Academic Honors Convocation on April 26.  He has also accepted an invitation to edit a book series, to be called "The Early Modern Americas," for the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ayse Rorlich was invited by the Open Society Institute to join the scholars who interviewed the finalists for US and Canada Graduate Programs.  The interviews were conducted in Chisinau, the Republic of Moldova.