Faculty – Texas State History Blog

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

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 19^th century.

The 20^th-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

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

A Note from the Chair on the Fall 2020 Semester

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

History Faculty Recognized by College of Liberal Arts

Congratulations to our History faculty members who have been recognized by the College of Liberal Arts!

Scholarly/Creative Activity

Dr. José Carlos de la Puente (Achievement Award)
Dr. Louie Dean Valencia-García (Golden Apple)

Service

Dr. Nancy Berlage (Achievement Award)
Dr. Shannon Duffy (Golden Apple)

Teaching

Dr. Sara Damiano (Golden Apple)
Dr. Jeff Helgeson (Achievement Award)

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

Meet the Chairs: Dr. Murphy and Dr. Helgeson reflect on the History Department and its future

Dr. Angela Murphy, who has served as chair of the department since 2017, reflects on her time as chair and shares some of her upcoming research. Incoming chair, Dr. Jeffrey Helgeson, gives us a glimpse into his vision of the future of the department.

Join them both on 9 March 2020 from 5:30-6:30 PM in Taylor-Murphy Hall 101 for a discussion sponsored by Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Society.

A Note from Dr. Angela Murphy

It has been rewarding serving as chair of the History Department for the past few years. It has given me a chance to get to know students on a different level, beyond the classroom, and to help further the vision of my fellow faculty. Students should know that they are front and center in that vision. I am proud to say that although the department is made up of world-class researchers, student success has remained one of its highest priorities. This can be seen not only in the way in which faculty interact with students both in and out of the classroom, but also in the type of people we have hired over the past three years, in the efforts that have been put into modernizing the curriculum, and in the accomplishments of our students both while they are enrolled with us and afterwards.

While I am grateful for the experience of serving as chair, I am very much looking forward to stepping back into to my old faculty role in which I get to teach more (hands down my favorite part of my work) and engage more heavily with my research. Next year I will return to teaching the first half of the U.S. history survey and upper level and graduate courses on the history of the United States during the Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction Eras. I also will be able to dedicate more time to writing a monograph that has been long in the making – a biography of 19^thcentury African American activist, Jermain Loguen, who was one of the primary Underground Railroad operatives in New York State.

I am excited to pass the torch to Jeff Helgeson, who is a natural leader in the department already and whose dynamism and commitment will surely take the department to new heights!

A Note from Dr. Jeffrey Helgeson

It is an incredible honor to be able to say that in September 2020 I will be beginning my eleventh year here at Texas State in a new role as chair of the department of history. Over the course of the past decade, I have had the great good fortune to learn from, and have the support of, our previous chairs: Dr. Frank de la Teja, Dr. Mary Brennan (now Dean of the College of Liberal Arts), and Dr. Angela Murphy. To a great extent, as leaders of the history department, they have created the foundation for my success here as a scholar and a teacher, and they have helped guide the energy I have put into helping to foster the growth of Texas State as a whole (the kind of work academics label, “service,” that includes not just serving on committees, but, among other things, making decisions about how we will teach our classes, who we will hire, and how the university can live as a community of inclusiveness and student growth in difficult times). I hope to follow in the footsteps of the previous chairs, to support my colleagues in their work.

The history department has a reputation for being a well-run department. This means that the chairs who have come before me have been highly successful at doing the work of managing the department. They lead the way on the work that happens behind the scenes to make sure that students have the classes, advising, and academic support they need. They work to ensure that our faculty has the resources they need to develop their research, as well as coursework and extracurricular programs (study abroad, study in America, student clubs, teacher training programs, etc.) that make the Texas State history department such a vibrant place.

The Department of History is a dynamic living community, the health of which depends upon the dedicated work of dozens of people. Our academic counseling and teacher training leaders are amongst the leaders in Texas and the nation. Our public history program has established itself as a national leader, placing graduates in internships and jobs with institutions like the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, and dozens of museums, archives, and history enterprises nationwide. Our undergraduate major in history prepares students to be leaders in the professional worlds of education, the media, public service, the arts, and much more. Moreover, through our connections with vibrant areas of study across campus—including, but not limited to, the Center for International Studies, the Center for Texas Music History, the Center for the Study of the Southwest, the Center for the Study of Gender and Diversity, and minors in African American and Latino/a Studies—the history department opens doors for students to have a grounding in sophisticated historical thinking while pursuing academic and career paths that could take them literally anywhere in the world. None of this wide-ranging work would be possible if not for the department’s outstanding administrative staff—I know I am going to learn so much from Madelyn Patlan, Roberta Ruiz, Adam Clark, and the student staffers in the office.

As you can see, I am a big believer in the ongoing work of the Department of History. I have seen my colleagues dramatically transform the lives of thousands of students over the years. I want to do nothing that will slow down those achievements. Indeed, one of my goals is to sustain the department’s record of continuous excellence, and to build upon recent gains we have made in funding graduate student research and travel, in creating resources to foster undergraduate research, and to support our faculty in their awe-inspiring research on historical themes that span thousands of years of global history.

In addition to maintaining our ongoing success, I also pledge my energies to the tasks of making the Department of History a place where even more students—undergraduate and graduate, alike—can find a path for themselves, while gaining the kinds of skills and worldview that will give them the power to constantly reinvent themselves in the face of life’s inevitable challenges. This means that I am committed both to the fostering of a community of scholars, even as I show up day in and day out to ensure that the nitty gritty work of making the department run well gets done.

Looking forward, I have to admit that I find my new role to be somewhat daunting. Yet I return to advice I received years ago from none other than my own mom. She said, if you want to take on big challenges in life, be sure to surround yourself with people whom you respect and who are doing interesting things. The Department of History is a complex institution, it is also my academic home—a place where I look forward to learning from, and working alongside, fellow faculty members, deeply competent and friendly staff, as well as curious and profoundly interesting students.

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

Call for Abstracts—Southwest Historical Quarterly Special Issue “The Persistence of Forced Labor in the Southwest, 1865-2000”

The Southwestern Historical Quarterly is seeking expressions of interest to submit articles to a special issue on coerced labor, forced labor, and slaveries in the Southwest in the period between 1865 and 2000. The Southwest is defined as the border states of the United States west of the Mississippi. Sitting at the crossroads of empires, nation states, and migration streams, the American Southwest has long been a site of labor exploitation, and it continues to be a home to modern slavery. Since the 2000 passage of the Trafficking victims Protection Act and the formation and adoption of the United Nations’ Palermo Protocol, human trafficking and modern slavery has captured the attention of human rights activists, academics, jurists, labor organizers, and many others. Reports that the number of people caught in conditions of modern slavery continue to rise, as do the types of interventions to fight modern slavery. At the same time scholars of contemporary trafficking note that trafficking correlates to immigration restriction. Consequently, the Borderlands of the Southwest provide a fertile ground for interrogating the history of modern slavery. This special issue seeks to take the global phenomenon of modern slavery and trafficking, and ground it in the Southwest, considering the ways that labor migration, immigration restriction, border violence, and economic inequality combine to produce the soil that can give rise to modern slavery.

We are especially interested in work that:

Engages critically with the historical production of categories such as “peonage,” “forced labor,” “slavery,” and migratory “illegality” as they have pertained to the Southwest.
Examines ways border control regimes produced or exacerbated new vulnerabilities.
Explores the historical lived experience of forced labor in public and private institutions (such as reformatories, detention centers, prisons) in the Southwest.
Places trafficking and forced labor within a wider discourse of indenture, slavery and un-freedom; as well as imperialism, mobility, and globalization, while showcasing the ways these dynamics played out in the Southwest.
Explores how vulnerability, co-ethnic exploitation and solidarity, or disability, age and/or sexuality can serve as catalysing factors in producing forced labor.

All submissions must be historical in focus.

Prospective contributors to this special issue are asked to send an extended abstract of 1,000 words to the issue’s guest editors, John Mckiernan-González (mckiernangonzalez@txstate.edu) and Jessica Pliley (pliley@txstate.edu) by 15 January 2020. Abstracts should describe the prospective article and how it explicitly engages with the theme of the special issue. Authors should also include a discussion of the sources—archival or published—they will be using in the article.

Selected contributors will be informed within two weeks and asked to submit a complete manuscript by 1 March 2020, which will go through the Southwestern Historical Quarterly’s standard process of peer and editorial review. If the manuscript is accepted for publication at the end of this process, it will be published in the special issue.

Categories: Center for the Study of the Southwest, Faculty, History at Texas State, Publications, Research

Who was Retta Murphy?

One hundred years ago, in 1919, Retta Murphy arrived to San Marcos, Texas to teach history on the faculty of what is now Texas State University. Although she did not have her PhD when she arrived, she eventually went on to become the first Texas State University woman faculty member to hold a Ph.D. (Latin American History from U.T.-Austin in 1938.) Thousands of people have taken classes in the building that bears Dr. Murphy’s name, Taylor-Murphy Hall—the home of the Texas State Department of History.

In his book, Up the Hill, Down the Years, Dr. Ronald Brown writes: “When the History Department moved into the old Fine Arts Building, the faculty requested that the building be renamed to honor James Taylor and Retta Murphy, who had shaped the modern History Department and were early advocates of gender equity.” Dr. Murphy certainly left her mark on the University.

Dr. Emmie Craddock—a history professor, former mayor of San Marcos, and the founder of what is now the Texas State University Honors College—shared an office with Dr. Retta Murphy for a time. She called Dr. Murphy “one of the great legendary figures” of Texas State University.

Many years after Dr. Murphy’s death, Dr. William C. Pool said of Murphy, “She was a tower [of] strength… in the department…[She had] a fine dry wit that was almost unbelievable. Yes, we all loved Retta Murphy.”

Describing Dr. Murphy at a commencement address, Dr. Craddock said, “For years on end Dr. Murphy arrived at her office every morning at nine and left at five, except on Saturdays when she went home at one; and she studied as diligently on the last day she ever taught as she had from the first day of her teaching.”

Dr. Craddock continued, “Literally thousands of students who were lucky enough to have a course with her felt the clarity of her mind, the absolute integrity of her life in all of its aspects. She had no time for preten[s]e or sloppy thinking and she dearly loved to deflate the arrogant, a feat she could accomplish instantly with a comment both cryptic and deadly.”

Although she was known for “a rather brusque exterior” Dr. Craddock said underneath that “lay a heart as malleable as a child’s and a generosity of spirit which knew few bounds.” For Dr. Craddock, “[Murphy] never demanded more of others than she asked of herself, and few ever left her classes without feeling the rapier thrust of her mind and the breadth of her learning. She also had a quick and wonderful wit.”

Although, as a woman, Dr. Murphy certainly faced her obstacles. Despite temporarily serving as chair of the Division of Social Sciences, Dr. Murphy was not offered the position permanently. When asked why she was not named chair herself, she replied, “Because I wear my pants on the inside instead of the outside.’”

“She was a marvelous Presbyterian, a wonderful history teacher, straight as a die, and not afraid of anything, the devil included,” Dr. Craddock said of Dr. Murphy.

To celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Dr. Murphy coming to San Marcos, we wanted to share with you her 1909 travels through Europe, 110 years ago, which lasted from 14 June-4 September 1909. Her entire scrapbook is available online through Texas State University Archives.

Here is a sneak peek: