Celebrating the Department Archives - Page 4 of 5

New Faculty Introduction – Jason Sellers

October 3, 2011 by Susan Fernsebner

Our department is pleased to welcome Dr. Jason Sellers (Ph.D., UC Irvine 2010), who joins us this year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of History. A specialist in U.S. Colonial History, Dr. Sellers recently completed a dissertation entitled ” Embodied Landscapes: Native Americans, English Colonists, and the Creation of Early American Communities.” In this study, he uses travel narratives, colonial era histories, treaty records, and other published and archival sources to examine connections between early American landscapes and bodies as well as their relation to different formations of cultural communities.

Dr. Sellers is teaching courses at UMW on Native American History and Colonial America, as well as lower-division survey classes in American History before and after 1865.

Filed Under: Announcements, Celebrating the Department, Faculty News

Dr. Jeffrey McClurken to Discuss Civil War Families on Public Radio

August 20, 2011 by Susan Fernsebner

When the Civil War ended, Confederate veterans and their families were faced with rebuilding their lives while also coming to terms with defeat. Jeffrey McClurken will share his research on how Confederate veteran families adjusted to life in the postwar South during an interview on the “With Good Reason” public radio program beginning Saturday, August 20.

Author of a new book that’s being called the “most complete community-based study of how Confederate veteran families adjusted in the postwar South,” Jeffrey McClurken is Associate Professor and Chair of the History and American Studies Department at the University of Mary Washington.

The interview can be heard on August 20 at 4:30 p.m. on WCVE 88.9 FM and on Monday, August 22 at 12:30 a.m. on WAMU 88.5 FM. A podcast for online listening is also available here.

Filed Under: Announcements, Celebrating the Department

Dr. Krystyn Moon Receives Outstanding Young Faculty Member Award

May 10, 2011 by Susan Fernsebner

Dr. Krystyn Moon received the top honor of the UMW Alumni Association Outstanding Young Faculty Member Award at Commencement on Saturday, May 7th.

A member of the History and American Studies Department, Dr. Moon is an expert in the history of U.S. immigration and ethnicity. During her five years at UMW, she has taught 14 separate classes and has broadened the curriculum at the university in crucial ways. Due to her focus on immigration and Chicano/Latino and Asian American studies, she has enlarged the repertoire of methodological approaches that students now use, as well as the diversity of content they study.

Richard Finkelstein, dean of UMW’s College of Arts and Sciences, said that Moon helps students recognize that important insights can be obtained by using innovative methods to examine the structures of everyday life.

As director of American Studies, Moon has brought an increasing number of faculty into the interdisciplinary program that enables students to explore the complex interactions of peoples, cultures, social structures and political institutions that have shaped the development of this country. She has spearheaded a revision of the American Studies curriculum and built a strong bond between students and faculty

Dr. Moon has also built a nationally respected reputation in her field of research. She is the author of Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s and her articles have appeared in key journals across a range of disciplines, including ethnic history, American musicology and African-American history.

She received a doctorate and a master’s degree from The Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College. Before coming to UMW, she spent four years teaching at Georgia State University.

Video of the presentation:

Young Faculty Award 2011 from Anand Rao on Vimeo.

Filed Under: Announcements, Celebrating the Department

Rachel Luehrs (’12) Awarded SHEAR/Mellon Summer Seminar Fellowship

March 30, 2011 by Susan Fernsebner

History major Rachel Luehrs has been accepted to the prestigious SHEAR/Mellon Summer Seminar. This program awards ten highly competitive fellowships annually to rising college seniors who are preparing for research on their senior theses at liberal arts colleges. Students who are accepted join a summer program “dedicated to providing talented, motivated undergraduate scholars the opportunity to pursue original primary source research in some of the finest archival collections relevant to early American history.”

As a member of this program, Luehrs will travel to Philadelphia this summer to pursue her research while working under the guidance of leading historians at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Luehrs’ study focuses upon the agency of disenfranchised people such as women and African Americans during the Early Republic. Of the research she has already completed and her upcoming plans, Luehrs notes, “I have encountered many entertaining stories on how these individuals manipulated the very systems which were meant to limit them to gain a sense of power over their lives and surroundings. Through my research in Philadelphia I plan to study what opportunities existed for women in a large northern city and for African Americans in a city which had one of the largest free African American populations.”

Dr. Will Mackintosh, who has guided Ms. Luehrs in her research thus far, will serve as her thesis advisor at the Department of History at UMW this coming fall.

Filed Under: Celebrating the Department, Fellowships

Charles Girard (’12) Wins Human Rights Campaign Scholarship

November 16, 2010 by Susan Fernsebner

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation awarded a Generation Equality Scholarship to University of Mary Washington junior Charles Girard ’12.

The $500 scholarship recently was awarded as part of the HRC Foundation’s Youth and Campus Outreach Program, which aims to provide tools, facilitate connections, and empower young people to fight for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) equality on campuses.

Girard is majoring in American studies with a concentration in gender and sexuality. Since 2008, Girard has held various roles on the executive committee of UMW’s PRISM (People Representing Individuals of Sexual Minorities), including secretary and webmaster.

He is a co-founder and current president of the Gender-Neutral Housing Project, formed in 2008 to establish a gender-neutral housing policy on campus. Also, Girard was chosen by Equality Virginia to serve on the Generation Equality board, their LGBT youth outreach program, and to speak at Equality Virginia’s statewide conference about UMW’s gender-neutral housing initiative.

Girard said he plans to continue working with PRISM to have gender identity and expression added to the school’s non-discrimination policy. After graduation, he said, “I want to work with transgender youth and use the tools that I am learning in college to continue to make a difference in the lives of my transgender brothers and sisters.”

Filed Under: Announcements, Celebrating the Department, Fellowships, Uncategorized

Margaret Greene (’06) Wins Fulbright-Hays Fellowship

July 16, 2010 by Susan Fernsebner

Margaret Greene, UMW History alum (’06), has won a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Currently a third-year doctoral student in Modern Chinese History at the University of California, San Diego, she is pursuing a dissertation entitled “The Sound of Ghosts: Chuanqi, Kun Opera, and the Staging of a New China.”

Her project focuses on the elite form of kun opera, particularly its celebrated genre of supernatural tales, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In contrast to the traditional narrative, which states that kun opera was on a steady decline from the later years of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) until the 1990s, her preliminary research has shown a flowering of kun opera in the 1950s and early 1960s – thanks in no small part to state efforts to preserve China’s illustrious artistic past (including ghosts!). Margaret’s work explores the interaction between state policy and artistic production, and how politicians, dramatists, and performers attempted to create artistic forms for a “new China” that were at once appropriately socialist and thoroughly Chinese in character.

Margaret will leave this fall for a year’s research in Shanghai, China, where she will be affiliated with East China Normal University (ECNU).

Filed Under: Alumni, Announcements, Celebrating the Department

Marissa Allison (’10) Wins State Department Fellowship

June 9, 2010 by Susan Fernsebner

Marissa S. Allison, a History and Middle Eastern Studies graduate (2010) of the University of Mary Washington, has won a Critical Language Scholarship from the United States Department of State. With this prestigious award, she will travel to Muscat, Oman for a 9 weeks of intensive study of the Arabic language.

As noted in UMW’s own announcement of the award, Marissa completed study abroad programs in Costa Rica, Jordan, and Egypt while a Mary Washington student. She also has gained experience as an Arabic media research intern with the global intelligence network Stirling-Assynt, as a research intern at the Palestine-Israel Journal in Jerusalem, and through a Baghdad Embassy virtual internship. In addition to being named to the Dean’s List and receiving honors with the Virginia Social Sciences Association for an undergraduate paper and student presentation (based on her senior thesis, written with Dr. Al-Tikriti, on the 1979 Siege of Mecca), Marissa is a magna cum laude graduate of UMW.

Filed Under: Alumni, Announcements, Celebrating the Department, Fellowships, Uncategorized