Recent Faculty Scholarship and Activities
The Dickinson history faculty in front of Denny Hall, Sept 2017
Updated September 2017
Assistant Professor Say Burgin spoke in early September at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on “Judge George Crockett, Jr., and the ‘Police Riot’ in Detroit, July 1967.” Part of the Center’s Fifty Years after the Newark and Detroit Uprisings retrospective, Prof. Burgin talked about the renegade Judge Crockett, who criticized the ways in which his peers on the bench ran roughshod over black Detroiters’ rights during the uprising. Also within the past year, she published an article on anti-imperialist feminism during the US Second Wave, which came out in the Women’s History Review (vol. 25, issue 5).
Professor David Commins gave a lecture, “Saudi Arabia’s Sectarian Strategy at Home and Abroad,” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies for its Emile Bustani Middle East Seminar. The lecture examined how the Saudi government plays the sectarian card to buttress the power of the ruling family and the country’s regional position, and posed the question of whether the strategy could backfire.
Assistant Professor Emily Pawley published two articles in 2016: “Cataloging Nature: Standardizing Fruit Varieties in the United States,” in the Business History Review, and “The Point of Perfection: Cattle Portraiture, Bloodlines, and the Meaning of Breeding, 1760-1860” in the Journal of the Early Republic.
Associate Professor Matthew Pinsker recently helped launch a new online video series for the History Channel, called "Sound Smart." In 2016, he had an essay on Steven Spielberg's movie "Lincoln" published in a volume of collected essays from the U.S. Capitol Historical Society; you can find his chapter, "Mr. Spielberg Goes to Washington," online via Google Books. Also in 2016, Prof. Pinsker co-curated an exhibit at Google Arts & Culture with House Divided Project intern Sarah Goldberg on the story of Reconstruction, as seen through the experiences of a former slave and Union soldier from South Carolina named Prince Rivers. The exhibit is entitled, "Prince of Emancipation"
Professor Karl Qualls, in the past two years, has published three articles/book chapters in English and Spanish with Brill, Cambridge University Press, and Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea. All continue his research on Spanish Civil War refugee children who were then raised in the Soviet Union. His book on the topic is contracted and under review. With Alex Syniec ’18, he has created “Time Capsules: Unearthing the Complexity of History,” a set of mini-lectures on YouTube about modern European history.
Professor Steven Weinberger recently completed a study entitled "Asghar Farhadi, Film Censorship, and the Fulfillment of Iranian Cinema." This focuses on the work of Iran's leading filmmaker and two time Oscar winner, showing how he has introduced maturation and sophistication into Iranian filmmaking.
Assistant Professor W. Evan Young returned this fall (2017) from a semester abroad conducting archival research in Tokyo. His research was supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in order to develop his current book project on the cultural history of illness, therapy, and family in nineteenth-century Japan.
