FACULTY NEWS
The History Department welcomes its newest member, Dr. Saeyoung Park, who will be teaching East Asian history starting in the spring semester 2012. Saeyoung Park (BA, MA, PhD John Hopkins University) specializes in East Asian History. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of "Sacred Spaced and the Commemoration of War in Choson Korea."
Jonathan Berkey
 Berkey is Davidson's new James B. Duke Professor. Ross said, "This flagship professorship came to us from The Duke Endowment in connection with its gift to found the Dean Rusk International Studies Program, and there's no more worthy international scholar to hold it now than Jonathan Berkey."
Berkey teaches the full range of Middle Eastern history since the rise of Islam, and has been a steadfast teacher in Davidson's Humanities Program. He was instrumental in developing the non-western cultural and civilizations tract of that program.
During his distinguished 18-year Davidson career, he has also held the title of E. Craig Wall Jr. Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, and the title of McArthur Professor. He holds membership in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and served as a visiting professorship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
His research and writing focus on Islamic religious culture and medieval Egypt and Syria. He is the author of the books The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education and Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East. His 2003 book, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800, received the top annual book prize from the Middle East Studies Association. He is currently working on a book titled Shattered Mosaic: The Middle East Since the Rise of Islam.
Berkey was an undergraduate at Williams College, and earned his master's and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. He has led Davidson's semester in India program, helped develop the college's program in Arabic, and frequently shares his insights on Arab history and culture with area media, church groups, civic organizations and school classes.
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan has been awarded tenure and promotion to the rank of associate professor.
Pegelow Kaplan specializes in modern European history with an emphasis on German history, Jewish history, and Holocaust and genocide studies. He teaches survey courses on modern European and Russian history, and upper division classes in German, the Holocaust, and genocide studies. His research focuses on violence, mass media and constructions of selfhood in Nazi and postwar Germany. He also examines histories of comparative genocide in the modern world.
Cambridge University Press recently published his first book, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry. He is currently working on a study of how leftist protest movements in West Germany and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s interacted in remaking imageries of mass murder and altering national and transnational memory.
In addition, he is putting together an extensively annotated primary source collection for a new book series by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., that will highlight the importance of petitions by European Jews in their struggles against the Nazi onslaught.
In 2001, he was this museum's Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Fellow, and he has led students on research expeditions in its archives. In 2009-10 he conducted research in Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam.
Professor Robin Barnes has been awarded a year-long fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies to finish a book about the role of astrology in the religious culture of the German Reformation. The work, to be published by Oxford University Press, argues that the spread of popular astrological ideas and images both prepared the cultural ground for, and shaped the course of, the reform movement begun by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century.
The Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award "seeks out and honors teachers who way of life uniquely inspires the full potential of each student. This award is given to a Davidson College faculty members judged by his or her peers to display an exemplary love of teaching." Dr. John Wertheimer won this award in May 2008. Previous winners include Malcolm Partin, Sally McMillen, and Ralph Levering.
Dr. Mike Guasco has had the following articles published recently: “To ‘doe some good upon their countrymen’: The Paradox of Indian Slavery in Early Anglo-America," Journal of Social History 41:2 (Winter 2007): 389-411; “‘Free from the tyrannous Spanyard’? : Englishmen and Africans in Spain’s Atlantic World,” Slavery & Abolition 29:1 (March 2008): 1-22; and “From Servitude to Slavery,” which appeared in The Atlantic World, 1450-2000, Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
An article, “The Prisca Theologia and Lutheran Confessional Identity c. 1600: Johannes Jessen and his Zoroaster,” by Dr. Robin Barnes has appeared in the book, Spätrenaissance-Philosophie in Deutschland, published at Tübingen (Germany) by Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Dr. Trish Tilburg is the author of Colette's Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914 (Berghahn, 2009).
Tilburg's Book Interprets French Celebrity "Colette" as a Third Republic Insider, Rather than an Outsider- Davidson College Professor of History Patricia Tilburg argues in a new book that the fin de siecle French writer and performer Colette was in many ways entirely representative of her Third Republic time in ways that have been overlooked by historians and most of her many biographer.
Dr. Sally McMillen has been giving talks on her book, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement(2008), in several states including New York, North and South Carolina, Colorado, and Arkansas. She recently spoke at the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, and at the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University.
Dr. Ralph Levering was a commentator at a conference on the politics of troop withdrawal at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia in June 2008.
Daniel W. Aldridge III addressed the Fall Speakers Forum/Erving Constitutional Issues Program at Western Piedmont Community College in Morganton, NC in October 2008. The program was sponsored by WPCC's Division of Humanities/Social Sciences and by the Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr. Library. Dr. Aldridge discussed African American struggles for voting rights in the South from 1955 to 1970, emphasizing the role of ordinary citizens rather than civil rights activists and political leaders.
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan was awarded a prestigious research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/1600.html) The fellowship will provide generous funding for his archival work during his upcoming sabbatical in Germany.
STUDENT NEWS
In late September three senior history majors--Alexandra McArthur, Caitlyn Culbertson, and Owen Fitzpatrick--were named Marshall Scholars for the 2008-09 academic year by the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia. This is the first time that Davidson students have been chosen to participate in the Marshall Undergraduate Scholarship Program.
Each of the scholars will write a major research paper, based largely on primary sources, dealing with a topic in diplomatic/military history or political affairs that occurred during Marshall's life (1898-1960). The scholars will attend two meetings in Lexington and a conference hosted by the U.S. Department of State in Washington in February.
The Marshall Scholarship includes a $250.00 cash award plus travel expenses.
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