Department Highlights

Faculty Highlights

Tufts History professors had a banner day at the School of Arts and Sciences faculty awards! Dr. Alisha Rankin was awarded the Lillian and Joseph Leibner Award for Excellence in Teaching and Advising. Prof. Kris Manjapra received the Gerald R. Gill Distinguished Service Award, and the Distinguished Scholar Award went to Dr. Liz Foster. Congratulations, to all!!!

Wonderful news to take into the weekend: Tufts historians Elizabeth Foster and Kris Manjapra have been promoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor, to take effect over the summer. Congratulations, Professors!

Ina Baghdiantz McCabe has been invited to join the College of Expert Reviewers at the European Science Foundation based in Strasbourg ESF's Community of Experts is a network of international recognized experts that covers the full spectrum of the scientific landscape (Humanities, Economics and Social Sciences, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Engineering Sciences, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Life and Biomedical Sciences). Its role is to sustain scientific collaboration, support excellence in research grant peer-review and proposal evaluation across all scientific disciplines. Congratulations Professor Baghdiantz-McCabe!

Professor Elizabeth Foster's book African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church has been selected as the 2020 recipient of ACHA's John Gilmary Shea prize. This award recognizes the most original and distinguished contribution to the history of the Catholic Church. The selection committee agreed whole-heartedly that the book is a wonderful contribution to the complex history of Catholicism in post-colonial Africa, a real exemplar of the field.

Congratulations to Dr. Chris Conz! His 2020 "Environment and History" article "Sheep, Scab Mites, and Society: The Process and Politics of Veterinary Knowledge in Lesotho, South Africa, c. 1990-1933" has been awarded the American Society for Environmental History's Alice Hamilton Prize for the year's best article published in a publication other than ASEH's own journal.

Congratulations to Professor Alisha Rankin on the publication on her new book, The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science. Read the excerpt in Lapham's Quarterly and book review in Nature.

Professor Reed Ueda was on the steering committee of editors for the Atlas of Boston History (U. of Chicago Press) which received the Historic New England Book Prize (2020).

Professor Manjapra's article in The Guardian How the long fight for slavery reparations is slowly being won. In a suburb of Chicago, the world's first government-funded slavery reparations programme is beginning. Robin Rue Simmons helped make it happen - but her victory has been more than 200 years in the making.

Congratulations to Professor Rachel Applebaum! Her recent book, "Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Cornell University Press, 2019)" has been awarded 2020 Radomi­r Luza Prize for Best Manuscript in Austrian/Czechoslovak Studies in the World War II Era. The prize committee's citation: "Rachel Applebaum displays a deep knowledge of the Czechoslovak space and the "soul of the nation". She finds the right elements and highlights the most important moments which marked the changes in the attitude of Czechs towards the Soviets. Applebaum arrives at original and intriguing new interpretations; she adds a new function to the process of "normalization" and describes it as a transnational policy designed to restore the Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship after the 1968 events. She also illustrates the routinization of the obligatory Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship through interesting examples, such as the mandatory Russian learning in schools. The book draws on thorough work with archival documents from multiple countries and languages, as well as on substantial materials of press and literature to shed new light on the Czechoslovak-Soviet relationship."

Prof. Leila Fawaz, who has appointments in both the Tufts History Department and the Fletcher School, has been awarded the prestigious Harvard Medal by the Harvard Alumni Association.

The African American Trail Project, directed by Professors Kendra Field and Kerri Greenidge, was featured in this Boston Globe story: Heritage and history found along the journey with the African American Trail Project.

Congratulations to Professor Elizabeth Foster for her book, African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church (Harvard University Press 2019). Foster received an honorable mention for the ISA (International Studies Association) book award on Religion and International relations. Her book has been featured in an article in a recent print edition of The Economist. The article is behind a pay-wall online, but widely available at local libraries. Professor Foster talks about African Catholic in an interview with The Washington Post.

Sonia Sotomayor and the Power of Asking Why - Tufts History Professor Peter Winn, former thesis advisor to Chief Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Kris Manjapra, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, has been awarded the Merck-Tagore Award in recognition of his contributions towards intercultural exchange between India and Germany. He is the author of Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014). The award is granted every two years on or around the birthday of the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Student Highlights

Congratulations to History and American Studies major Issay Matsumoto, one of only ten graduating seniors to be recognized with a Presidential Award for Civic Life!

History Doctoral candidate Satgin Hamrah has just published a timely article, "The Iran-Iraq War: Dark Moments In Our History And The Importance Of Remembrance," in "The Iranian."

Ph.D. Student, Satgin Hamrah, organized a panel for the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). She is both an organizer and a paper presenter presenting. She will be presenting in the session titled "From the Cold War to the War on Terror: The Paradoxes of U.S. Involvement in the Middle East & South Asia since the Second World War." Her paper title is "The Mobilization of militant Islamists in the Cold War & its Long-term Impact on the Greater Middle East and South Asia."

The Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Shimla) has published an essay on early stages of our graduate student, Tathagata Dutta's, research.

Read a travel log written by our own Ph.D. student Tathagata Dutta, published by The Quint.

Congratulations to sophomore Desmond Fonseca for receiving the Humanity in Action fellowship and the Laidlaw Scholarship.

The History Department is pleased to congratulate the following history majors on their recent awards.
Congratulations to Hong Jie Lim, LA '16, for being the recipient of the 1st place in the Tisch Library Undergraduate Research Award for courses 001-099 for his paper, "Exploited Workers, Laboring Mothers: Plantation Women in the Formal and Informal Economy of Colonial Malaya, 1900-1940". The paper was written for the fall 2014 Foundation Seminar, History 95: Plantation Histories.

Congratulations to Katherine Eisenberg, LA'16, for being the recipient of 2nd place in the Tisch Library Undergraduate Research Award for courses 001-099 for her paper "A'isha: The Evolution of Her Interpretation." The paper was written for the fall 2014 Foundation Seminar, History 97: Men, Women and Patriarchy in the Middle East.

Congratulations to Jeramey Evans, LA'16, Grigory Khakimov, LA'16, Sam Pearl-Schwartz, LA'17, and Andrew Wofford, LA'17, who are all recipients of 2015 Tufts Summer Scholar grants!

Congratulations to Aniket De, LA'16, and Natalie Girshman, LA'16, for being elected as juniors to the Tufts chapter, Delta of Massachusetts, of Phi Beta Kappa and to Hannah Arnow, LA'15, for her election as a senior to the Tufts chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Tufts Doctoral Candidate in History selected for National History Center Summer Seminar
Lata Parwani, a Ph.D. candidate in South Asian history, has been selected to participate in the National History Center's sixth international seminar on decolonization, to be held summer of 2011 in Washington DC. The Seminar is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the John W. Kluge Center for the Library of Congress, and supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Ms. Parwani will participate based on her thesis topic, "From Homeland to Motherland: Reflections on the Sindhi Hindu Exodus, 1947-1949."

Lata Parwani has received a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellowship at Williams College for 2011-2013. During the two-year residency, fellows devote the bulk of the first year to the completion of their doctoral dissertation, and teach one course as a faculty member in one of the College's academic departments or programs. During the second year the fellows again teach one course, and spend their remaining time on academic career development.