E i s E n b E r g i n s t i t u t E f o r H i s t o r i c a l s t u d i e s

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This past year has been an exciting one for the Eisenberg Institute. It began with our move into the Institute’s new home in September, and with each month the Institute felt more like home as its offices filled with fellows and visiting scholars. The bookshelves arrived and soon featured an impressive library on our theme, and the conference room, with its stunning view of the Diag, became an increasingly popular site for doctoral exams and dissertation defenses. Our new suite of offices has given the Institute a new identity, one that makes clear that our lectures and workshops are only a small part of what the Institute has to offer the History Department and the wider university community. With this new home, the Institute has acquired a new visibility on campus and become an intellectual hub for faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars. We were so pleased to offer desks, computers and a sense of community – for the first time – to our Residency Research Fellows and visiting scholars and also to serve as an important stop for History Department candidates during their campus visits.

This fall we welcome a new and exciting line-up of speakers and Friday workshops on our theme, “Topographies of Violence,” which continues another year (see calendar inside). We will continue to pursue our initiative in global/world history, most likely in the form of a May Seminar for faculty and graduate students, but also including a series of workshops for K-12 teachers. At the same time, the Eisenberg Institute will also be soliciting faculty and graduate student input on possible themes for 2009-2010.

Also this fall we bid farewell and express our thanks to Peter Lawless, the Institute’s first Graduate Research Fellow, whose contributions to the EIHS have been extraordinary. Many of you know him for his expert design skills, but his intellectual input was also invaluable. We extend a warm welcome to PhD candidate, Lenny Urena, who joins us in September as Graduate Research Fellow for 2008-2009. This late summer we also welcome Shannon Rolston back from maternity leave: we have missed her! We thank Melanie Panyard, Karen Higgs, and Diane Wyatt for assisting and supporting us in her absence. We also thank outgoing Steering Committee member John Carson for his engagement and insightful guidance during the past two years. John has left a real mark on our program and activities! Returning members Valerie Kivelson and Damon Salesa join me in welcoming Christian de Pee to the SC for 2008-2010.

Please join us for the EIHS opening event on September 11th with Isabel Hull, alumnus of our department (BA) and distinguished professor of modern German history at Cornell, whose recent works examine law, ideology and the conduct of war. Also, feel free to drop in at the EIHS or email us with your ideas, suggestions and questions!

Kathleen CanningDirector

University of Michigan Department of History 1029 Tisch Hall Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eihs Tel: (734) 647-5407 Fax: (734) 647-4811 eisenberginstitute@umich.edu

Friday WorkshopsTisch Hall 1014, Noon to 2pm - unless otherwise indicated

September 12“Violence and Ideology”

Isabel Hull, Scott Spector, Lenny Urena

September 26 “Imagined Communities: Twenty-Five Years Later”

Benedict Anderson, Deirdre de la Cruz, Emanuela Grama

October 10 “Violence and the Public Sphere”

Pablo Piccato, Guillermo Bustos, Geoff Eley

November 7“U.S. Empire as State of Exception”

Nikhil Pal Singh, Brendan Goff, Monica Kim

November 21“Religious Violence as Redemption”

Mark Pegg, Daniel de Selm, Susan Juster, Rachel Neis

December 5 “Violence and the Politics of Oil”

A Conversation with Timothy Mitchell, Juan Cole and Gabrielle Hecht

Thursday SpeakersTisch Hall 1014, 4-6pm - unless otherwise indicated

September 11Isabel Hull, Cornell University

“Imperial Germany and International Law in the Great War, 1914-1918”

September 25Benedict Anderson, Cornell University

“Premonitions and Utopias”(Founders Room, Alumni Association, 200 Fletcher Street)

October 9Pablo Piccato, Columbia University

“All Murder is Political: Homicide in the Public Sphere in Mexico”

October 23Susan Juster, University of Michigan

“What’s ‘Sacred’ About Violence in Early America?”

November 6Nikhil Pal Singh, University of Washington

“Genealogies of Rollback: Race and War in US Globalism”

November 20Mark Pegg, Washington University, St. Louis

“Holy War and Sacred Violence in Latin Christiandom”

December 4 Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University

“Carbon Democracy”

EIH

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This is a monument for those who have died attempting to cross the US-Mexican border. Each coffin represents a year and the number of dead. It is a protest against the effects of Operation Guardian. Taken at the Tijuana-San Diego border. Photo: Tomas Castelazo

E I S E N B E R G I N S T I T u T e

Isabel V. Hullis John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. An undergraduate at the University of Michigan, she went on to receive her PhD at Yale. Her first work concerned the court of the last German Kaiser (The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cambridge 1982). She later engaged with the early modern period in Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Cornell, 1996), which won the 1996 Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association and the 1996 Berkshire Prize. She then returned to the modern period with the recently published Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell, 2005), which received both Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson prize and the 2005 DAAD Book Prize.

Benedict Anderson was born in Kunming, China on August 26, 1936, studied at Cambridge University and received his PhD in Political Science at Cornell, where he began teaching in 1967 and served as Director of its Southeast Asia Program (1983-88). He published his revised thesis, entitled Java in a Time of Revolution (Cornell, 1972), and at the same time he was expelled from Indonesia (for 27 years). In 1983 he published the original version of Imagined Communities (Verso), followed by In the Mirror: Politics and Literature in Siam in the American Era the following year. He is also the author of Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Cornell, 1991) and The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (Verso, 1998).

Pablo Piccato is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Columbia University. He works on the social and political history of modern Mexico, with a particular interest in crime, honor and the development of the public sphere. He received his BA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1989 and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997. His published work includes City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (Duke University Press, 2001); Congreso y Revolución: El parlamentarismo en la XXVI Legislatura (Cámara de Diputados, 1991) and, Actores, espacios y debates en la historia de la esfera pública en la ciudad de México (with Cristina Sacristán) (Instituto Mora, 2005).

Susan Juster joined the Department of History at the University of Michigan in 1992, where she is now Professor of History and Associate Dean, Social Sciences, College of LS&A. She received her PhD in history from Michigan in 1990, then taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara as an Assistant Professor from 1990 to 1992. She is the author of: Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Cornell University Press, 1994); A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism, with Lisa MacFarlane (Cornell University Press, 1996); and Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

Nikhil Pal Singh is Visiting Associate Professor and Director of American Studies at New York University. He is also the Walker Family Endowed Professor, Associate Professor of History and Adjunct Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. A historian of race, empire, and culture in the 20th-century United States, Singh is the author of Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2004), winner of the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best book of 2004 on U.S. civil rights history and the 2005 Washington State Book Award.

Mark Gregory Peggis Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St Louis. He researches and writes about heresy, inquisition, and holy wars in the Middle Ages. He is the author of The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246 (Princeton 2001), which examined one of the earliest medieval inquisitions into heretical depravity, and of A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford 2007), a history of the first crusade in which Christians were promised salvation for slaughtering other Christians. He was awarded a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2005-2008) for the study of Arabic and religious violence in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Timothy Mitchell is a historian and political theorist whose research focus is the modern history and political economy of the Arab world. He is the author of Colonising Egypt (University of California Press, 1991) and Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (University of California Press, 2002). and the editor of Questions of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge and at Princeton University, he taught for many years in the Department of Politics at New York University, where he was also director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. In 2008 he joined the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.

Topographies of ViolenceThursday Speaker Series - Fall 2008

Gabrielle Hechtis Associate Professor of History. Her first book, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity (MIT 1998), won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and a prize awarded by the Society for the History of Technology. The French translation appeared with La Dé-couverte in 2004, and MIT will publish a second English-language edition in 2009. Her current project, entitled, “Uranium from Africa and the Power of Nuclear Things,” draws on archival and field work con-ducted in Africa, Europe, and North America.

2008-2009 EIHS INTERNAL FELLOWS

Nancy Rose Huntteaches African history with a focus on modern central Africa and the history of medicine. Her A Colo-nial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Duke, 1999) won the Herskovits Prize in 2000. She has recently published articles in Past and Present, Cultural Anthropology, and Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines. She is presently completing a book on the aftermath of imperial violence in King Leopold’s Congo, tentatively entitled, “A Nervous Colony: Post-Terror Biopolitics and Belgian Policing of Religious Movements in Congo’s Equateur.”

Farina Mirhas been Assistant Professor of History since 2003. She received her PhD in South Asian History from Columbia University. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab,” which focuses on the shared literary and cul-tural practices of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in late colonial north India. As an EIHS fellow she will be teaching an Honors First-Year Seminar entitled “Writing Violence,” which examines mass civil violence and its historical representation.

Douglas Northropis Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies, as well as director of the Center for Rus-sian and East European Studies. His work focuses on modern Central Asian history, with an empha-sis on cultural, social, and environmental issues. His first book, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2004), won both the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize (AAASS) and the Heldt Prize (AWSS). He is currently writing a history of natural disasters — specifically earth-quakes — in urban centers along the Russian / Soviet imperial frontier, and is also finishing a world history reader on modern imperialism.

Leslie Pincusis Associate Professor of History with a focus on the intellectual, cultural, social history of modern Japan. She is the author of Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan (California, 1996) and editor of a special issue of positions: east asian cultures critique entitled Open to the Public: Studies in Japan’s Recent Past (April 2001). During her term as an EIHS Fellow, she will focus on her book project entitled “Sites of Transformation: Movements on the Margins of Japans Recent Past,” which traces a genealogy of twentieth-century alternative and oppositional social initiatives that have challenged the intrusion of state-sanctioned power into everyday life in Japan.

Hannah Rosenis Assistant Professor in the Program in American Culture and the Women’s Studies Department, re-ceived her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the nexus of race and gender in 19th century U.S. social and cultural history with an emphasis on the South. She is interested in histories of violence; slavery and emancipation in the Americas; and discourses of citizenship. Her first book, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in the fall of 2008.

Anshu Malhotrais a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of History, Faculty of Social Science, University of Delhi. She completed her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1998). Her current research interest is the history of gender and religious sensibilities from early to mid-nineteenth century Punjab. She is the author of Gender, Caste, and Religious Identities: Restruc-turing Class in Colonial Punjab (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2002). Her articles have appeared in Studies in History, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, and Social Scientist.

John S. Ellisis Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Flint. After his undergraduate studies at Eastern Michigan University, Dr. Ellis earned an MA in Welsh history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth as a Fulbright scholar and completed his PhD in British and Irish history at Boston College. He is the author of essays on the subject of war and national identity in the British Isles, with particu-lar emphasis on modern Ireland and Wales. His forthcoming book, Investiture: Royal Ceremony and National Identity in Wales, 1911-1969, examines the construction and at times violent contestation of Welsh national identity through the creation and public response to royal ceremonial.

Peter Linebaughis Professor of History at the University of Toledo, Ohio and taught previously at NYU, Rochester, and Harvard. He received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of Warwick, U.K. He is a contributing editor to Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975) and the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century (1993, 2nd ed., 2003). He is co-author with Marcus Redik-er of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolution-ary Atlantic (2000), which has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean. His most recent book is: The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (2008).

Kidada Williamsearned her PhD in history from the University of Michigan in 2005. She is Assistant Professor of His-tory at Wayne State University. Williams specializes in African American history, violence and victimiza-tion, and social movements. She is the author of “Resolving the Paradox of our Lynching Fixation” in Lynching Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Mob Violence (American Nineteenth Century History 6/3 (2005). She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “In the Time and Space of Violence: African Americans and the Dynamics of Southern White Supremacy after Slavery.”

Brendan Goffcompleted his PhD in modern U.S. history at the University of Michigan in spring 2008. His disserta-tion, entitled “The Heartland Abroad: The Rotary Club’s Mission of Civic Internationalism,” focuses on the international expansion of Rotary clubs during the first half of the twentieth century as a means of capturing growing U.S. cultural and economic influence outside the US, and its effects on U.S. busi-ness culture. His article, “’We’re Not in Kansas Anymore….’: Philanthropy and the ‘Perfect Democracy’ of Rotary International”, will be published shortly in David C. Hammack and Steven Heydemann eds., Philanthropic Projections: Sending Institutional Logics Abroad (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

2008-2009 EIHS RESIDENCY RESEARCH FELLOWS

2008-2009 EIHS POST-DOCTORAL FELLOW

2008-2009 EIHS VISITING SCHOLAR

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JANEY AND MELVIN LACK GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH FELLOWS

Allison Abra“On With the Dance: Nation, Popular Culture, and Public Dancing in Britain, 1918-1945”

Guillermo Bustos“The Crafting of “Historia Patria” in an Andean Nation. Historical Scholarship, Public Commemorations and Nationalism in Ecuador during the First Half of the Twentieth Century”

Emanuela Grama“The Politics of Heritage Revival in Contemporary Romania”

Drew Meyers“Sun Citizens: The Culture and Politics of Retirement, 1950-2000”

Deborah Solomon“Taking It to the Streets: The 1929 Kwangju Student Protests and their Repercussions for the Japanese Empire”

JOB PLACEMENTS FOR RECENT GRAD FELLOWSEIHS Post-Docs

Edward Murphy, Michigan State (Tenure Track)Eric Stein, Evergreen College, WA (Tenure Track)Tamar Carroll, Cornell University (Post-Doc)Roberta Pergher, University of Kansas (Tenure Track)

EIHS Lack Fellows

Edin Hadjarpasic, Loyola, Chicago (Tenure Track)Clapperton Mavhunga, M.I.T. (Tenure Track))Edward Murphy, Michigan State (Tenure Track)Aleksandra Pfau, Hendrix College, AR (Tenure Track)

EIHS EVENTS CALENDER - WINTER 2009

January 15-16 timothy tyson, Duke University

January 29-30 Kate brown, University of Maryland

February 12-13 Peter Perdue, Yale University

March 5-6 Hitomi tonomura, University of Michigan

March 19-20 Michael Watts, University of California Berkeley

April 2-3 Angela Zito, New York University

April 16-17 topographies of Violence roundtable

EIHS-BENTLEY ARCHIVE SEMINAR SCHEDULE 2008-2009(Tisch 1014, Fridays 12-2pm)

Sept 19 What is an Archive?

Oct. 24 Using the Archive

Jan. 23 Archives as Expressions of National and/or Social Memory

Mar. 6 Archives in the Digital Age

This workshop series on archives, co-organized by the Bentley Library and the EIHS, aims to pose intellectual questions and offer practical advice about the meanings and uses of archives in historical research and writing. How do his-torians locate and define their archives? Which boundaries and openings are implied in the term “archives?” How might we understand the written and unwritten rules that govern the structures and uses of archives? The workshop panels will feature professional archivists as well as UM history faculty and graduate students who have puzzled over these questions themselves.

GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH FELLOWLenny Urenais a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Her research interests include Modern Poland and Germany, postcolonial studies, race and gender, history of medicine and empire, and historical methods and theories. During 2003-2004, she was the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship. She plans on defending her dissertation, “The Stakes of Empire: Colonial Fantasies, Civilizing Agendas, and Biopolitics in the Prussian-Polish Provinces (1860-1922),” in spring 2009.