2021 History Publications and Grants

* Indicates student co-author

Ferguson, Heather. “Unseating ‘State’ and ‘Archive’: Mobility and Manipulation in Past Environments and Present Praxis.” Itinerario, vol. 44, issue 3, 2021, pp. 591-608.

Abstract: These concluding reflections assess how the contributors to this special issue intervene in key assumptions that shape the current field of archival studies. As the “archival turn” gains ground, forms of Euro- and state-centrism reappear in scholarship otherwise innovative in its attention to the textual remnants of the past. Here, instead, we explore the methodological stakes involved in defining both the “archive” and the historical power brokers who created and preserved a documentary record in pursuit of their varied social, cultural, economic, and political projects. The essay points to the resurgence of culturalist and civilisational indices for comparative archivistics, and follows the arguments collected in this issue to assert by contrast the often uneven and uneasy regional, administrative, and procedural definitions at work within preserved records. Identifying “mobility” as both a methodological tactic and a historical process, this conclusion presents a fluid rather than fixed textual landscape and presents an alternative frame for investigating preservationist practices.


Gharipour, Mohammad, Heather Ferguson, and Charles Davis II. “DEI Discourse in Higher Education Could Do More Harm Than Good.” Baltimore Sun, December 17, 2021.

Geismer, Lily and Eithan D. Hersh. “Laugh at the ‘S.N.L.’ School Skit, Take Your Local Politics Seriously.” New York Times, November 1, 2021.


Geismer, Lily and Matthew Lassiter. “Stop Worrying about Upper-Class Suburbanites.” Jacobin, January 2, 2021.


Geismer, Lily. Review of The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, by Cristina Viviana Groeger. Business History May 12, 2021.

Hamburg, Gary. “Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin: Christian Modernist.” Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia edited by Paul Vallieree and Randall A. Poole. Routledge Press, 2021, pp. 132-150.

Abstract: Analysis of the religious and legal thinking of the Russian liberal Boris Chicherin (1828-1904), emphasizing his attempt to distinguish moral law from civil and public law. My essay treats his links to Hegel, Kant and the German tradition of philosophical Idealism, as well as the Russian context.


Hamburg, Gary. “Politics and Enlightenment in Russia.” Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought, edited by Marina F. Bykova, Michael N. Forster, and Lina Steiner. Palgrave Macmillian, 2021, pp. 25-50.

Abstract: Analysis of the concept of enlightenment [prosveshchenie] in Russian thought from the late seventeenth century to 1796, of governmental attitudes toward enlightenment and politics, and of dissenting political views.


Hamburg, Gary. Russia in War and Revolution: The Memoirs of Fyodor Sergeyevich Olferieff. Hoover Institution Press, 2021.

Abstract: Fyodor Sergeyevicch Olferieff (1885–1971) led a remarkable life in the shadows of history. This book presents his memoirs for the first time, translated and annotated by his granddaughter Tanya A. Cameron. Born into a noble family, Olferieff was a Russian career military officer who observed firsthand key events of the early twentieth century, including the 1905–7 revolution, the Great War, the collapse of the imperial state, and the civil wars in Ukraine and Crimea.

Livesay, Daniel. “The British Caribbean.” Handbook of Latin American Studies, edited by Katherine McCann and Tracy North. Library of Congress, 2021.

Abstract: Essay describing the last two years of historical publications that focus on the British Caribbean. Includes more than 50 annotations of the articles and books published during the period.


Livesay, Daniel. Review of Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom, by A.B. Wilkinson. William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 2, 2021.


Livesay, Daniel. Review of Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, by Trevor Burnard. New West-Indian Guide vol. 95, 2021, pp. 115-16.

Lower, Wendy. The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed. Mariner, 2021.

Abstract: In this book, I delve into the history of one photograph of a murdered Jewish family taken in a small town in Ukraine in October 1941. Every facet of the image is explored to reconstruct the history of the Holocaust, stressing the role of resistance in atrocity photography, the role of family in genocide, the pursuit of justice with visual evidence, the environmental and cultural importance of the crime scene as a burial ground, and the search for the missing.

Park, Kyong, Albert Park, and Annie Pedret. CiViChon: A City in a Village. Vienna Biennale for Change 2021. Art, Vienna.

Abstract: This art exhibition for the 2021 Vienna Biennale, which included the publication of an exhibition catalogue, features the re-imagination of a South Korean village based on ecological principles. In particular, it explores how to bring together urban and rural inhabitants and living to establish a pathway for environmental sustainability. This project was co-sponsored by EnviroLab Asia, UC San Diego and Seoul National University and included the work of EnviroLab Asia Student Fellows.


External Grant: Park, Albert, director. “For the Environments of East Asia, an Open Access Book Series to be Published by Cornell University Press.” Henry Luce Foundation, 2021, $240,000.

Abstract: The Henry Luce Foundation has awarded Claremont McKenna College, under the direction of Prof. Albert L. Park, a $240,000 grant to launch an open-access book series on The Environments of East Asia with Cornell University Press. This is the first book series that integrates scholarship on East Asia with environmental studies ever published with an academic press. Funding will be used to advance the successful work of EnviroLab Asia, a 5C initiative founded in 2015 with support from the Luce Foundation. Prof. Park has served as a principal administrator for EnviroLab Asia, which is designed to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and train leaders on solving complex global issues—particularly with a focus on environmentalism and the continent of Asia.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Culture Matters: Warnings and Implications from the Holocaust.” Advancing Holocaust Studies, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth. Routledge, 2021, pp. 101-113.

Abstract: This essay argues for the importance of cultural history in attempting to understand the Holocaust. This includes stressing the significance of propaganda and cultural property, among other topics. As per the directive of the editors, there is an element of personal reflection in this piece as well.


Petropoulos, Jonathan. Göering’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World. Yale University Press, 2021.

Abstract: Goering’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and His World sees Professor Petropoulos sharing a biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the post-war art world.

Dr. Bruno Lohse (1911–2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Göring to the Nazis’ special art looting agency in Paris, he went on to supervise the systematic theft of over 30,000 art objects taken from French Jews. By the 1950s, Lohse was officially denazified, back in the art dealing world, and offering masterpieces to American museums. The former SS officer became active in numerous networks that crossed international borders, with Switzerland and Liechtenstein playing key roles. After Lohse’s death, dozens of paintings by Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro, among others, were found in his Zurich bank vault or adorning the walls of his Munich home. Jonathan Petropoulos spent nearly a decade interviewing Bruno Lohse, trying to understand the art dealer’s networks and the fate of looted works thought to be in his possession. In taking the story of Nazi art plunderers up to the present, Mr. Petropoulos offers a troubling portrait of segments of the art world. Petropoulos will be in conversation with NAC Governors Raymond Dowd, a partner with Dunnington Bartholow & Miller, LLP. He handles disputes over contracts, shareholder issues, copyright, trademark, art law and trusts and estates. In 2014, he recovered a 3200 year-old Assyrian tablet for the Pergamon Museum and multiple important Egon Schiele artworks for Holocaust victims.


Petropoulos, Jonathan and Nicholas Sage*. “Nazi Looted Art.” 20th Century and Modern Art Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Abstract: This bibliography runs over a hundred pages in length and provides an annotation for each entry (as well as introductions to the entire bibliography and to each distinct section, of which there were over 25). CMC Nicholas Sage assisted me with the project and received co-author credit.


Petropoulos, Jonathan. “Advice to Writers.” ATW Interviews, April 27, 2021.

Abstract: I discuss the practical aspects of writing books and articles.


External Grant: Petropoulos, Jonathan. Fellowship as a Senior Research Scholar in the European Studies Council at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, January-June 2021.

Sarzynski, Sarah. “Before They Were Ecologically Noble Savages: Gendered Representations of Amazonian Peoples and Nature in the 1970s.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 4, issue 2, 2021, pp. 47-62.

Abstract: An analysis of media representations of the Amazon and indigenous peoples reveals how media producers and filmmakers foregrounded discourses naturalizing gendered and racialized differences that distinguished the Amazon from the West in the 1970s, a decade during which the Brazilian military dictatorship promoted development projects in Amazonia. These representations often sexualized indigenous peoples and the Amazon itself, portraying them as primitive, cannibal savages, animals or part of nature, or victims of exploitation. The, “Othering‚” of the Amazon and Amazonians was further elaborated through a discourse of binary oppositions that portrayed Western white men as explorers and exploiters who dominated the screen, scripts, studies, and development projects even if they were doomed to fail. By relying on a symbolic system of difference, global media coverage and films about Amazonia in the 1970s were complicit in legitimizing authoritarian decrees promoting large-scale development that depicted indigenous peoples and the environment as obstacles.

Venit-Shelton, Tamara. Review of Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in North America, by Chelsea Rose and J. Ryan Kennedy. Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 122, no. 3, 2021, pp. 314-316.


Venit-Shelton, Tamara. “Chinese American Herbal Medicine: A History of Importation and Improvisation.” The Recipes Project, 2021.