History

To navigate a presidential election held during a pandemic, and amid high-pitched political polarization, CMC History Professors Lily Geismer and Tamara Venit-Shelton are offering an historical guide.

The pair came together in the days before the election to record a video to explain the various scenarios that could play out post-Election Day 2020.

Associate Professor of History Albert Park has received two prestigious fellowships to support a year in Japan and Korea researching how rural environmental movements influence contemporary agriculture infrastructure policies.

Park received a Fulbright Fellowship to support his work in east Asia and an Abe Fellowship for his research in Japan.

The Fulbright Fellowship facilitates relations between the United States and citizens of other countries. Park will be asked to give public talks, mentor students, and engage with the local community in addition to his research.

Associate Professor of History Lily Geismer has been named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2018 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Geismer will receive up to $200,000 to support sabbatical research for her book project "Doing Good: Public Policy and the Market from the War on Poverty to the Clinton Foundation."

Tamara Venit-Shelton, an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and author of A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850-1900, has been awarded the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Glen M. Cooper, a visiting assistant professor at CMC, is a historian with a broad swath of knowledge that covers many eras and cultures. Cooper came to the College from Brigham Young University in 2014 and has taught subjects that range from ancient Greek history to Islamic history to medieval Europe and even extending to India and Byzantium.

UPDATE 12/16: Read the Foreign Affairs review of Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment.

The Marc Raeff Book Prize has been awarded to Gary M. Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas at CMC, for his book Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801.

Diana Selig, the Kingsley Croul Associate Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow, was the keynote speaker at Convocation. Here is a transcript of her remarks.

It’s not often that an author writes what may come to be considered a seminal work. But that’s what Gary Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas at CMC, has done with his new book: Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500-1801.

Published by Yale University Press in June, the book offers an in-depth examination of every important Russian thinker and their ideas regarding faith, politics and reason over a period of three centuries.

Randall Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, wanted input from attendees of his Marion Miner Cook Athenaeum talk (“The Race Line in American Life”) last Wednesday.

The project for which he solicited input stems from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last public speech; the famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech he gave on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated.

History Prof. Shane Bjornlie's first book, Politics and Tradition Between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople (Cambridge University Press, 2013) has received the First Book Award for 2016 from the Classical Association of the Midwest and South.