Category: Faculty

Introducing Dr. Alexandra Montero Peters

We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Alexandra Montero Peters as our new Assistant Professor of Medieval History! Dr. Montero Peters specializes in the history of the medieval Mediterranean, specifically the cultural and intellectual exchange between Muslims and Christians of Iberia, North Africa, and the Near East. 

Ever since I was little, I have had a passion for the Middle Ages. I read every book I could buy or rent on King Arthur, and when it came time to go to college, I only applied to institutions that had a Medieval Studies major. However, before I began my degree, I had no concept of a Middle Ages beyond England, and as a heritage Spanish speaker—my maternal family is all from Ecuador—I didn’t realize that the cultural histories and language skills I had learned at home with family would change the trajectory of my academic interests to a different country and focus. In a fateful meeting with a professor of medieval history at my alma mater, UChicago, I discovered the world of medieval Iberia, sometimes called Spain of the three religions, and realized that I already had a key tool to dive headfirst into research: Spanish. It was a world that captivated me with its complex and fraught past of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian exchange, its rich artistic and literary traditions, and its overlapping history with Latin America. I could learn through the mirror of the past something about interfaith relations, a theme that felt urgent and timely, while at the same time growing in my own understanding of who I was and the past that had affected my own family across many generations.

Not long after diving into medieval Iberia as an undergraduate, I discovered a second passion on the dusty shelves of my library’s vast stacks. Filed next to my books in Spanish about Iberian history were rows and rows of Arabic tomes. This made perfect sense given the over 700 years of Islamic power in medieval Iberia. However, it sparked in me a curiosity to know more about how the books of the past—medieval manuscripts—reflected the close proximity of Christian and Islamic intellectual centers. What role, I asked, did interfaith relations play in how intellectuals of the period asked and answered some of the most pressing questions of their day, on everything from the power of freewill to the ways planets moved in the heavens above? How do manuscripts record for us their overlapping worlds, both literal and literary? Needless to say, this question led me to take years of Arabic, travel the world to study illuminated manuscripts in person, and it planted the seed for my current research on everything from medieval chess to race before modernity.

I am so excited to find myself at Texas State University, and I cannot wait for students to see the entwined histories of medieval and early modern Iberia with that of their own backyard. I will invite students to the fascinating world of medieval Iberia and many other cultures in my spring course on “Reframing Medieval Power.” As a big fan of staging historical simulations for students to tap into the past in meaningful, memorable ways, I’m doubly excited that this course features a multi-day, costumed, role-playing event where students embody real medieval people. They will scheme, negotiate, and perhaps even betray others as they vie for power, and I can’t wait to watch the drama unfold!

In my spare time and beyond the medieval, I am an avid nature photographer and a foodie, and I’m eager to learn from my new friends and students here where the best spots are for both hobbies. I also love to read new fiction, and before moving to the Texan heat, I also loved to run outside. We’ll see about that here!

Categories: Faculty, People, Research, Spotlights

International Film Festival and Symposium on Consent

 

Screenings: 4-14 April 2022

Symposium: Friday, 15 April 2022  9-5 in Centennial Hall G02

 

Sponsors: University Lecturers Committee, Honors College, College of Liberal Arts, Departments of World Languages and Literatures, Anthropology, Geography, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Centers for Diversity and Gender Studies, International Studies, and the Center for the Study of the Southwest. 

Albertine Cinémathèque is a program of FACE Foundation and Villa Albertine in partnership with the French Embassy in the United States and with the support of the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée) and the Fonds Culturel Franco-Américain. 

Week 1 

“Age of Consent & Abuse” / 3 films / Monday April 4 / 6-8 pm 

1) Online: Little Boy, by Roland Klick, 1968, German 

When the parents of a suburban, middle-class family go to a party, they leave Achim and his baby sister under the supervision of Monika, the neighbor’s daughter. Soon after the parents are gone, Monika ditches babysitting to go out with her boyfriend, and Achim murders the baby by means of suffocation. Roland Klick’s debut feature is a film that uses cinema as a means to comment on German society. Much of the film is spent in the aftermath of the crime with the parents and neighbors trying to figure out who is responsible with both Monika and Achim denying any involvement or taking any responsibility for their actions. 

Suggested and run by Dr. Lisa Haegele, Assistant Professor of German, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A 

2) On Campus (Centennial Hall G02): Slalom, by Charlène Favier, 2020, French 

This Cannes-selected #MeToo drama from debut filmmaker Charlène Favier follows the relationship between a teenage ski prodigy and her predatory instructor, played by Dardenne brothers’ collaborator Jérémie Renier. In a breakthrough role, Noée Abita plays 15-year-old Lyz, a high school student in the French Alps who has been accepted to an elite ski club known for producing some of the country’s top professional athletes. 

Run by Dr. Jennifer Forrest, Professor of French, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A 

3) In Community(Stellar Coffee co.): Little Girl, by Sébastien Lifshitz, 2020, French 

Petite Fille is the portrait of 7-year-old Sasha, who has always known that she is a girl. Sasha’s family has recently accepted her gender identity, embracing their daughter for who she truly is while working to confront outdated norms and find affirmation in a small community of rural France. 

Run by Dr. Carole Martin, Professor of French, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A

“Tales of Consent &Dissent” / 3 films/Wednesday April 6/ 6-8 pm

1) Online:Hyenas, by Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992, Senegalese 

Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty sets an intriguing tale that speaks to the African continent’s complex place in the global order: his protagonist comes back to her hometown with a proposal to give its citizens an extraordinary amount of money, if they accept to kill their future mayor, who, she reveals, impregnated and abandoned her when she was a teenager. The vexed citizens initially reject her offer, but as the town’s debt accumulates in the face of a flood of consumer goods, the abuser begins to fear for his life. 

Run by Babacar Tall, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A

2) On Campus (Centennial Hall G02): Nights of Cabiria, by Federico Fellini, 1957, Italian 

Cabiria works as a prostitute, becoming entangled in a series of relationships that eschew “consent”, before falling in love and accepting to get married to Oscar, yet another embezzler who intends to kill her and steal her money.   Like other neo-realistic films, Le Notti di Cabiria is aimed toward the development of a theme. Its interest is not so much the conflicts that occur in the life of the heroine as the deep, underlying implications that the pattern of her life shows. 

Suggestedand run by Dr. Jessica Pliley, Associate Professor of the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A

3) In Community (San Marcos Public Library): Sisters of the Gion, by Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936, Japanese Two geisha sisters lead a hard life in Kyoto’s Gion district. When one of them feels obliged to help a ruined businessman, the other sister cooks up various schemes to get rid of him. Whereas one sister embodies a very traditional discretion in expressing her emotions, the other flouts codes and morals. 

Suggested and run by Dr. Maria-Luisa Gomez Ramirez, Senior Lecturer of French, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A

Thursday Nuit Blanche / April 7 

From “Tales of Consent & Dissent” to “Consent in Post-Modern/Post-Colonial Societies” 

7 films (3 double features + 1 community screening) 

1) Online Double Feature 1 (French): 

a) Beauty and the Beast, by Jean Cocteau, 1946 

A defining influence on filmmakers as different as Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut, this adaptation of the classic fairy tale by iconoclastic novelist, playwright, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau is a deeply ambiguous work about the foundational role of consent. 

b) Portrait of a Lady on Fire, by Céline Sciamma, 2019 

In the late eighteenth-century, Marianne, a female painter, travels to an island off the coast of Brittany to paint a portrait of Héloïse, a young woman whose mother has recently taken her out of a convent to marry her to an Italian nobleman whom she has never met. But Héloïse refuses to sit for a portrait she knows will be offered to her prospective husband. 

Run by Scarlett Cado, with surveys but no discussion/6-10 pm 

2) Online Double Feature 2 (German and South-Korean): 

a) The Edukators, by Hans Weingartner, 2004 

Young, anti-capitalist Berlin activists involved in a love triangle, invade upper-class houses, rearrange the furniture, and leave notes identifying themselves. Weingartner, a former activist, wrote the film based on his experiences and chose to use nonviolent characters. His work has now become a cult production of the “German New Wave”, and it has inspired real-life actions. 

b) Parasite, by Bong Joon-ho, 2019 

The film portrays the history of a family of two parents and two teenagers that lives in extreme poverty. They are trying to find a way to better their lives, while ending up lying and deceiving rich people. The issue it raises is: how far can human beings take their scams to become better versions of themselves, and how come they lived in such poverty? 

Run by Dr. Malgorzata Citko-DuPlantis, Lecturer of Japanese, with surveys but no discussion/6-10 pm 

3) On Campus Double Feature in Centennial Hall G02 (American and Mauritanian): 

a) The Story of a Three-Day Pass, by Melvin Van Peebles, 1967 

Channeling the exuberance of the French New Wave, Van Peebles creates an exploration of the psychology of an interracial relationship as well as a commentary on France’s contradictory attitudes about race that laid the foundation for the blaxploitation cinematic revolution he would unleash just a few years later with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. 

b) Soleil Ô, by Med Hondo, 1970 The late Mauritanian-French writer-director-producer Med Hondo was a trailblazer in making independent films that featured the lives of African immigrants in Europe and denounced all forms of oppression. His first feature Soleil Ô, self-financed and shot over three years in the aftermath of May 68, follows the fortunes of an African immigrant in Paris whose initial excitement about the capital of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” turns into a withering verdict on the effects of colonial history. Run by Carole Martin, with surveys but no discussion/6-10 pm 

4) In Community(Stellar Coffee co.): Caramel, by Nadine Labaki, 2007, Lebanese

Labaki, a Lebanese writer, director, and actress depicts the life of five Lebanese women who work in a beauty salon in Beirut, Lebanon. They struggle between their desire to live free and their obligation to tradition, religion, and family rules. The contradictions and the issues they have to deal with in their life are woven in an intriguing manner that illustrates both compliance and resistance to societal norms. 

Suggested and run by Noha Mohama-Akkari, Instructor of Arabic, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A/6-8 pm 

Week 2 

“Consent & Family Affairs” / 3 films / Monday April 11 / 6-8 pm 

1) Online: 35 Shots of Rum, by Claire Denis, 2009, French 

35 Rhums portrays a family of two’s extreme closeness (between a widowed father, Lionel, and his university-student daughter, Joséphine) while suggesting its potential for suffocation. 

Run by Dr. Moira DiMauro-Jackson, Senior Lecturer of French and Instructor of Italian, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A 

2) On Campus (Centennial Hall G02): Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom, by Pedro Almodóvar, 1980, Spanish 

Pepi is raped by the policeman who catches her growing marijuana in her apartment. She seeks revenge by getting his masochist wife to leave him. 

Suggested and run by Dr. Louie Valencia, Assistant Professor of History, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A 

3) In Community(Stellar Coffee co.): By the Grace of God, by François Ozon, 2019, French 

This dramatization of the events that exposed the most significant sex abuse scandal to date in the French Catholic church focuses on what happens to victims once they speak their truth. It is an important contribution to awareness of the global problem of sexual abuse in the Church and the general conversation in the era of #MeToo. 

Run by Dr. Miranda Sachs, Assistant Professor of History, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/after-film Q&A 

“Consent in Post-Modern/Post-Colonial Societies” / 3 films / Wednesday April 13 / 6-8 pm 

1) Online: Pan’s Labyrinth, by Guillermo del Toro, 2006, Mexican 

This is a film that deals with the Spanish Civil War, Francoist period, and the struggle against an overpowering state, in which identity and self-determination are challenged. Yet El laberinto del fauno’s imaginary world presents a radical and rewarding model to examine consent under totalitarian regimes. 

Run by Carole Martin, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/short after-film Q&A 

2) On Campus (Centennial Hall G02): The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, 1974, French 

Six years after the publication of his Situationist classic La Société du Spectacle, Guy Debord released this essay-film adaptation, using the technique of “détournement” (think pre-digital remixing). He overlays a dizzying array of still and film images with text from the book to provide a sharp commentary on a world dominated by image and power. 

Run by Dr. Ron Haas, Honors College Director of Research and Writing, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/ after-film Q&A 

3) In Community(San Marcos Public Library): Night of the Kings, by Philippe Lacôte, 2020, Ivorian 

A young man is sent to “La Maca,” a prison in the middle of the Ivorian forest ruled by its inmates. As tradition goes, with the rising of the red moon, he is designated by the Boss to be the new “Roman”—or “Scheherazade”—and must tell a story for his life to be spared. He begins to narrate the life of the legendary outlaw named “Zama King” to the other prisoners. 

Run by Kenny Anagbogu, with short intro/pre-symposium survey/short after-film Q&A 

Thursday Nuit Blanche / April 14 / 6-8 pm 

2 pre-symposium screenings 

Online Double Feature: 

a) Becky’s Journey, by Sine Plambech, 2015 

Becky’s Journey provides rare insight into the hopes and fears of high-risk migration and human trafficking from a woman’s perspective. It documents Becky’s attempts to travel across the Mediterranean and tells the story of the many migrants that never reach Europe’s shores. 

b) The Rape of Recy Taylor, by Nancy Buirski, 2017 

Mrs. Recy Taylor was gang raped by six white boys in 1944 Alabama. Unbroken, she spoke up and fought for justice with help from Rosa Parks and legions of women. 

Run by Maria-Luisa Gomez Ramirez, with surveys but no discussion 

Friday Symposium / April 15 / Centennial Hall G02 

AM/9:30-10:50—Opening guest lectures with short intro and Q&A moderated by Dr. Jessica Pliley 

Dr. Sine Plambech, Danish Institute for International Studies, on filming Becky’s Journey 

Ms. Piper Nelson, The SAFE Alliance, Austin, Texas, “Stopping the Cycle of Violence in Central Texas” 

11 AM-1:50 PM–Students meet in survey-generated discussion groups (4 running concurrently from 11-12:20 and 4 from 12-30-1:50) with 8 moderators (Kenny Anagbogu, Moira DiMauro-Jackson, Maria-Luisa Gomez Ramirez, Lisa Haegele, Mona Mansard, Carole Martin, Noha Mohama-Akkari, and Babacar Tall) 

PM/2-3:20—Afternoon guest lectures with short intro and Q&A moderated by Dr. Louie Valencia 

Dr. Ourida Mostefai, Brown University, on consent in Beauty and the Beast 

Dr. Danielle McGuire, “Recy Taylor and the Roots of the Civil Rights Movement” 

PM/3:30-5–Roundtable with guests, moderated by Dr. Carole Martin, and Q&A with organizers, Drs. DiMauro-Jackson, Forrest, Gomez Ramirez, Haas, Haegele, Sachs, and Ms. Mohama-Akkari, Texas State students, and public. 

Categories: Center for the Study of the Southwest, Events, Faculty, History at Texas State, People, Undergraduate Students

An Interview with Dr. Anadelia Romo on her new book, ‘Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia’

Dr. Ana Romo holding book

We took a minute to catch up with Dr. Anadelia Romo on her new book, Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (University of Texas Press). Dr. Romo’s book shows how “Brazil shifted from a nation intent on whitening its population to one billing itself as a racial democracy.” Selling Black Brazil shows “that this shift centered in Salvador, Bahia, where throughout the 1950s, modernist artists and intellectuals forged critical alliances with Afro-Brazilian religious communities of Candomblé to promote their culture and their city.” In the book, Dr. Romo “reveals, concealed deep racial inequalities. Illustrating how these visual archetypes laid the foundation for Salvador’s modern racial landscape, this book unveils the ways ethnic and racial populations have been both included and excluded not only in Brazil but in Latin America as a whole.”

 

Congratulations! How does it feel to have your book published?

Dr. Romo: Thanks, I’m so relieved to have the book out in the real world and out of my head! This is my second book, and it was definitely more fun to write than the first. The second book felt different because I ended up working with art and visual culture, something that was new and exciting to me. And I also made a real effort with this recent work to write in a way that would be readable. I’ve gotten frustrated with history scholarship recently and wanted to make this book more accessible to students and a wider public. Trying to make the writing vivid and clear was its own challenge, but I’m really happy with the results and I hope that all that care comes through to readers.

What is the general argument of your book and how do you see is speaking to other works in your field?

Dr. Romo: My book has a few larger arguments and some smaller more specific arguments. My larger point is that Blackness has occupied an uncomfortable position in the visual culture of Latin America, and we can learn a lot by exploring that. One of the things we can look at is how Blackness gets treated in visual representations of the nation. These representations reveal how Blackness has been largely written out of the nation in the Americas (and I include the U.S. here) despite the important contributions and presence of so many from the African diaspora. My book looks at one of the most important centers of the diaspora, the city of Salvador, Bahia, and probes how and why Blackness came to be visually central for representations of the region, and for Brazil overall. Part of my larger point with this project is asking what is gained and lost in these symbolic representations. I argue that while depictions of Blackness came to be central for Bahia, these representations were often limited and stereotyped, and that visual inclusions did not, unfortunately, map onto larger political inclusions.

Can you tell our readers a bit about your research process, and the trajectory of the project more generally?

Dr. Romo: My research process for this book was unusual because I got to use a source base that many historians had ignored before—tourist guides. My first book had looked at changing ideas of race in Bahia and stopped in the decade of the 1950s. In the process I had noticed a strange number of tourist guides written by really big cultural figures in Salvador. So I became interested in why this happened, and why it began to really peak in the 1950s. And I also thought that these tourist guides, written by those within Bahia, proved a pretty ideal barometer for measuring racial attitudes in the city. Once I started to look more closely at them, I discovered that most of them were illustrated, again by some very high-profile artists and figures. Although I had not started the project with a focus on visual culture, as I read the guides it rapidly became clear that the illustrations of these guides were just as important, if not more, than the written texts themselves. And that caused me to really reassess the project. In the end I think the focus on this visual culture is really is one of its greatest strengths.

What were some of the major challenges you encountered while doing your research?

Dr. Romo: Some of the challenges I faced in this project were tracking down the tourist guides and also trying to get permissions to include such great art in the book. I have about ninety images in the book, and each image presented its own puzzle in order for me to find a high-quality reproduction and to get permissions to reproduce. Art historians are used to this, but I was not, and it was its own separate project! Trying to track down some of the tourist guides was also sometimes tough. Because these guides were considered to be outdated quickly, and because they were not typical historical documents, some of them were not widely preserved. Anyone who works on modern Bahia knows the difficulty of tracking things down in the many archives there. I had a lot of help from archivists and colleagues, but it was sometimes an adventure.

Where do you hope future projects will take you?

Dr. Romo: My future project for the long term involves a study of anthropology in Brazil, and especially the rise of the community study, a form of research originally pioneered by Robert Redfield in Mexico. I’m interested in how these ideas moved across the Americas and why Brazil proved so pivotal for anthropology in the Americas as a whole. I’d started this project already when I got “sidetracked” by the tourist guides, so I’m looking forward to getting back to it.

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State, News, People, Publications, Research

“The Legacies of History and the Defense of Academic Freedom, Here and Abroad”

By Dr. Elizabeth Bishop

Texas State faculty, staff, and students could be forgiven if they missed the most recent episode in the growing international tensions over academic freedom and freedom of speech. As we huddled for warmth, lit candles in the dark, and worried about access to clean water during the most severe winter storm in recent memory (while still carrying out the many adjustments we’ve had to make in our professional and personal lives during the COVID-19 pandemic), National Public Radio reported on political turbulence in and around the French university system. “The French academic world,” NPR told its listeners on 21 February, “is in an uproar after President Emmanuel Macron’s minister for higher education ordered a report into what she called Islamo-leftism in the nation’s universities.”

NPR correspondent Michel Martin brought this news home to her U.S. audience by placing it in the context of recent debate over how U.S. history should be taught, specifically highlighting the New York Times “1619 Project,” and reactions to it. In the U.S., the debate has centered around competing understandings of the place of slavery in the origins and development of the nation. In modern France, the context is the distinct, yet related, debate over the legacies of French imperialism and la lutte de liberation nationale (“the struggle for national liberation”), which was fought—well, I enter the words in Google, Google completes the phrase—in Angola, Algeria, in Africa, in Asia and in Africa, in Indochina, in Guinea, etc.

In the French higher education system, universities are public institutions with degree programs open to any student who has obtained a baccalauréat or its foreign equivalent. Let’s sit, for a moment, on those words, “or its foreign equivalent,” because this phrase refers to the 275 million people who speak French around the world, and who earn secondary degrees equivalent to the baccalauréat that is the standard for France’s population of just over 67 million. Embedded in this access to French universities for those in the Francophone world are the many, increasingly divisive, legacies of what was called impérialisme during the 19th century.

The 20th-century lutte de liberation nationale continues in many ways as culture wars both within French universities, and in debates over what they ought to be teaching. As James D. Le Sueur, Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told the National Press Club in Washington, DC (22 January) “Old but re-vivified identity debates abound as pro-integration forces rally their troops in defense of ‘laïcité’ (read: separation of [Catholic] Church and State).” In the world of French universities—and the debates about them—this controversy over laïcité overlaps with increasing tensions over academic freedom and freedom of speech.

While snow fell on Texas in February, these culture wars came to a critical point. French Minister of Higher Education and Research, Frédérique Vidal, instructed the CNRS (The French National Centre for Scientific Research) to investigate allegations of “Islamo-gauchisme” (roughly “Islamo-Leftism”) in French universities. Six hundred heads of universities signed an open letter, denouncing, as NPR put it, “what they called a sterile controversy over the issue of Islamo-leftism,” which they see as “an attempt to delegitimize certain fields of research like post-colonial studies.”

Recognizing the need to defend academic freedom in French universities as an important cause in its own right—and perhaps seeing its resonances with debates over what ought to be taught in higher education in other parts of the world, including the U.S.—two hundred Anglophone intellectuals (I included) signed a second open letter. This letter puts the key points directly: “First, the state has no right to censor research by academics who draw on their expertise to advance the production of knowledge… Second, the approaches now under attack were inspired by some of the most brilliant minds of the French philosophical, literary, and sociological traditions… Third, those responsible for higher education should address the pressing need to find concrete solutions to the problem of racial discrimination in France, rather than carry out a witch hunt against researchers.”

Further, the letter’s authors highlight the benefits of broad access to a university system committed to rigorous standards of academic freedom. “As scholars working in the United States and elsewhere,” they write, “we carry a great intellectual debt to France for training thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Hélène Cixous, Aimé Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.” The letter’s signators—including such institutions as California Scholars for Academic Freedom, the Society for French Studies (based in the UK), the Western Society for French History (US), the French Colonial Historical Society (international), The Society for the Study of French History (UK), the Council for European Studies (International), and the Committee on Academic Freedom of the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES, UK)—make the key point that higher education has historically been a space where the voices of those whose communities have suffered from systems of oppression (such as imperialism and chattel slavery) can flourish. If they create discomfort for figures like Frédérique Vidal, the path forward is further debate, not a push to silence critical perspectives.

International academics’ opinions are interesting news in France. A week ago, Le Monde published the Anglophone intellectuals’ letter. As a Texas spring smiles on us, it seems well worth our while to consider the arguments of French academics, and the lessons of these recent events in France. In doing so, I think we will recognize our good fortune to be able to engage in dialogue and debate at a university committed to the mission “to create new knowledge, to embrace a diversity of people and ideas, to foster cultural and economic development, and to prepare its graduates to participate fully and freely as citizens of Texas, the nation, and the world.”

Dr. Elizabeth Bishop joined Texas State’s History Department during 2008 with a PhD from the University of Chicago. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in her areas of her scholarly expertise—the history of the Middle East, Postcolonial Arab history, the history of the Global Cold War. You can visit her profile here.

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State

Dr. Margaret Menninger named Executive Director of the German Studies Association

Photo of Dr. Margaret Menninger

Congratulations to Dr. Margaret Menninger, who as of January 1, 2021 has become the third Executive Director of the German Studies Association.

The German Studies Association is a multi- and interdisciplinary association of scholars in German, Austrian, and Swiss history, literature, culture studies, political science, and economics who live and work around the world. The GSA holds an annual conference and publishes a scholarly journal, the German Studies Review.

Membership is open to anyone.

Photo: Dr. Menninger with her predecessor, David Barclay (Professor Emeritus in History at Kalamazoo College), upon her appointment to Executive Director, Pittsburgh 2019.

 

 

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State, News, People

Introducing Dr. Miranda Sachs

We welcome Dr. Miranda Sachs to Texas State this semester! Dr. Sachs specializes in European history, with a focus on France, women and gender, childhood and youth, and immigration. 

I had one of the best campus jobs imaginable as an undergraduate. My university had a special library dedicated to rare children’s books. The shelves of old books shared the space with a unique children’s room. I was first hired to help organize programs for kids. My job included writing a quest with rhyming clues, telling jokes while dressed as a Victorian lady, and gluing plastic salamanders on visors for a Holes watching party. But later I got to help the librarians tasked with working with the books. The collection is amazing! They have scrapbooks created by Hans Christian Anderson, the man who wrote “The Little Mermaid.” They have some of the first children’s books. These books are the size of a deck of cards and are over three-hundred-years old. They have lithographic stones that were used to print toy theaters in the nineteenth century. The stones are about the size of a laptop, but so much heavier.

One day while I was helping shelve books, I noticed an ABC book on World War I. I was already excited about European history, but this book got me thinking. What if I did my senior research project on the history of children in World War I? I had never thought about children as a topic to study, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to know. What was war like for the children who lived through it?.

Since then, I’ve studied and taught the histories of childhood and youth. My research looks at the experience of working-class children in nineteenth-century Paris. I am particularly interested in how childhood came to be a distinct stage of life. How and why did childhood become a time when young people are expected to be in school and dependent on their parents? I enjoy teaching about the history of childhood, because most students don’t expect children and childhood to have a history. We also don’t expect high school yearbooks or children’s drawings to be historical sources. If that sounds interesting, I will be teaching a class on “The Global Teenager” in the spring!

When I’m not studying history, I cheer on the San Francisco Giants and search for the best hot chocolate in the world. My favorites so far include Jacques Genin in Paris and City Bakery in New York, but I’m always looking for new recommendations!

 

 

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State, People, Research, Spotlights

Introducing Dr. Justin Randolph!

Photo of Dr. Justin Randolph

We are excited to welcome Dr. Justin Randolph to Texas State as our new Assistant Professor of Oral History this semester! Dr. Randolph specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. social and political history. 

I grew up in rural-rural Alabama, was the least athletic person to ever play baseball at my high school, and played the saxophone. You guessed it: I’m a nerd. But you know…a cool nerd. 😎

I’m coming to Texas State from my PhD program at Yale University. Whew. That was a strange experience. Did you know there are people whose grandparents AND parents got PhDs? I was the first person in my family to get an associate’s degree at community college, so I didn’t have much in common with most of my classmates. Luckily I met other first-generation/low-income (FGLI) students with whom I built community. We kept one another accountable and got through it together.

To get a PhD in history you must write the draft of a history book. We call this a dissertation. I wrote mine on the history of police and Black activists in a very rural part of Mississippi. I found this story by conducing oral history interviews with Black farmers—many of whom have owned land since the end of the Civil War. However, I also found that racist white sheriffs and police officers had threatened these families’ safety and security from the beginning. The book I’m now writing shows how states like Mississippi reformed their police forces to chase away the Ku Klux Klan but never fully thought about how the police adversely impacted Black communities.

At Texas State I teach the introductory class on twentieth-century American history (HIST 1320), an upper level course on American history from 1968 to now (HIST 4361), and a graduate seminar on oral history (HIST 5345D). In the next few years I hope to design new courses for Texas State history majors. First, I want to get undergraduates involved in oral history in and around campus. Then, I want to introduce students to the history of the police and criminal legal system—what historians call the “carceral state.”

Hobbies? When my health holds out I enjoy running. And when the global pandemic is over, I might once again enjoy recreational softball and tennis.

What am I reading? Fiction and non-fiction. Fiction: Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). She wrote it before age twenty-three. (What have I done with my life?!) Such amazing character development plus clear thinking on disability, racism, and radicalism. Go read this classic: I beg you! And nonfiction: Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019). I know Cottom’s writing on the university and the future of work. Now, though, I’m turning to this MacArthur fellow’s memoir-style analysis of American and academic culture.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State, News, People, Research, Spotlights

Introducing Dr. Ruby Oram!

Photo of Dr. Ruby Oram

We are excited to welcome Dr. Ruby Oram to Texas State this semester! Dr. Oram is a social historian of American women and gender, labor, education, and urban reform movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a public historian, Dr. Oram’s work centers on addressing issues of diversity and representation in historic preservation and local history.

I’m thrilled to join the History Department at Texas State University this year and contribute to the growing Public History Program! I have eight years of experience working as a public historian in the fields of museum education, collections management, public programs, and historic preservation. I earned my PhD from the U.S. and Public History Program at Loyola University Chicago in 2020, where I studied women’s and gender history, urban history, labor history, and the history of education in twentieth-century America. My current research examines a group of women who created vocational programs and schools for girls in progressive-era Chicago, and explores how their reform efforts reinforced class and racial inequalities between female students in the city’s public high schools. I’m also in the process of nominating a group of public vocational schools in Chicago to the National Register of Historic Places.

I’m excited to teach “Introduction to Public History” this semester, which provides a rare opportunity for undergraduate students to study the presentation of history to public audiences through museums, historic sites, digital projects, and more. Texas State University is one of the few universities in the state (maybe the only?) offering an undergraduate public history course, and I look forward to teaching it regularly! I also look forward to teaching “Local and Community History” for our graduate students in the spring. I hope to eventually teach courses in my research areas including U.S. women’s labor history and urban history, as well as additional public history courses on museums and material culture.

When I’m not thinking about history, I am often exploring the parks and trails around my home in South Austin or listening to music with my tuxedo cat, Gus. I have a firm conviction that Motown and Atlantic Records released the best American music between 1959 and 1967. Lastly, I never outgrew my teenage obsession with thrifting for vintage clothes on the weekends. I face a current crisis of where to store my vintage winter coat collection now that I’m a Texan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: Center for Texas Public History, Faculty, History at Texas State, Research, Spotlights

Introducing Dr. Louis Porter!

Photo of Dr. Louis Porter

We are excited to welcome Dr. Louis Porter to Texas State this semester! He studies studies Russian and Eastern European history.

After getting my PhD in Russian History at the University of North Carolina, I am stoked to be joining the Texas State University Department of History to teach Russian and East European History.

I am often asked why I study Russia and never have a pithy answer. However, my background provides a couple of reasons. In…. West Philadelphia (“born and raised”), I grew up living in a bunch of different worlds, kind of like the Fresh Prince. My parents split so I went to school in the suburbs where my mother lived while visiting my Dad in Philly on the weekends. With a Black father from the Cleveland projects and a white mother from a working-class family in West Virginia, I had to negotiate a range of racial and class settings from as far back as I can remember. This made me eager to learn how hierarchies of class and race structure history and how various people have struggled to overcome these hierarchies.

But, as a bit of a cynic, I decided to study the greatest failed experiment in overcoming these hierarchies––the Soviet Union. I am fascinated by Marxism (in theory and practice) and its historical contexts. I am also passionate about recruiting students of all backgrounds to join me in studying Russian and European history. When not in the classroom, I am writing a book that examines how Soviet citizens reacted to the idea of international organizations.

My courses at Texas State will cover a range of topics in Russian and East European history. If you want to learn about medieval Ukraine, the Russian Revolution, or why Putin…is the way he is, I got you covered! For now, I am teaching surveys of Russian history (HIST 4333 in the Spring and 4334 in the Fall) as well as Western Civ. But I hope in the future to teach classes on the Russian Revolution, Marx and Marxism, and the Cold War.

In my free time, I chase a skedaddling nine-month old, LJ, around my house with my wife. Apart from that, I love swimming, running, hiking with my dog, canoeing, watching basketball (Sixers or whatever team Lebron is on), and listening to music (everything from DaBaby to My Bloody Valentine to Bruce Springsteen). My favorite movie is Disney’s Robin Hood.

Categories: Faculty, History at Texas State, People, Spotlights

A Note from the Chair on the Fall 2020 Semester

Photo of Dr. Jeffrey Helgeson

Every semester begins with a sense of possibility, bringing both anxiety and excitement for what will come. This year, our anticipation mixes dramatically with an experience of rupture, a loss of the kind of certainty about habits and continuity that generally provide us with a foundation on which we bring some order to our semesters. This year, then, we are all working harder. We—as students, as teachers, as workers who keep our classrooms and offices running—face exponentially more difficult challenges as we get back to work. Nonetheless, I return this fall confirmed in my belief that the people in this department face disruption head-on and forge new paths out of difficult days.  

Teaching and learning in the contemporary university are always challenging. Limited resources—along with inequities, injustices, anti-intellectualism, and divisions in the society at large—impinge on the classroom. We always have to work to build and maintain the space where we can come together to study. Yet we do create that space.  

We all have known those moments when the university fulfills its promise. We see it in the light of realization in a student’s eyes, we hear it in the laughter of people working together to solve a problem, we can sense it in the air when professors and students are locked in mutual concentration on a difficult question. These satisfactions, and our memories of them, are what make the return to school such a time of promise.  

This year, the obstacles in our path can seem nearly insurmountable. Much of the extra labor we are doing can feel incomplete, frustrating, and even at times distractingly prosaic. A global pandemic, an economic calamity, the exhausting work of anti-racism in a time of surging bigotry and violence—these crises have revealed with painful clarity the structural inequities and divisions that threaten our communities. These challenges also threaten the energy and opportunity to engage in the study of history—even as that work has never seemed more important. 

To help our students enter into the study of history, the department is building on its recent growth. Four new faculty members add to the great energy in our public history and European history offerings. Students can choose from several new courses, including African American and Mexican American history surveys, which count toward core curriculum requirements; a course on creating podcasts that lift up unsung voices in history; the history of 20th-century social movements in the U.S.; and the history of childhood in Europe. Students can also visit the new library guide for researching #BlackLivesMatter, developed by Dr. Casey Nichols and subject librarian Margaret Vaverek. The department will be collaborating on public programs and courses with people across campus, including the history faculty leading the Center for Texas Music History, the Center for Texas Public History, the Center for the Study of the Southwest, and the Center for International Studies. The TXST chapter of Phi Alpha Theta and the student-led History Club (open to all Bobcats) are organizing regular events—from film screenings to an academic conference—that will provide opportunities to connect and outlets for graduate and undergraduate student research. There is so much going on…follow it all on the department’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds. 

 To move through tribulation in a way that seeks not just the familiar but the possible requires persistent support for each other and our students. Writing in the shadows of Nazism on the rise, the historian Walter Benjamin declared that the struggle for a just world “is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.” This phrase has been ringing in my ears as I have been working with the faculty, staff, and students in the history department to make Zoom work, to welcome our new faculty and students, to learn how to foster group discussions that are simultaneously in–person and virtual…and to figure out how to clear the algae from the fountain in our courtyard and order the coffee that will keep the department running. It can make for days that sometimes seem distressingly fragmented. Yet it is in working with the people in this department that I am reminded of the other half of Benjamin’s point: that the “spiritual things” we win out of the struggle come not as “spoils,” but “as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.”  

Dr. Jeff Helgeson

Chair and Associate Professor
Department of History
Texas State University

Categories: Alumni, Faculty, Graduate Students, People, Undergraduate Students