Newsletter Archives - Page 2 of 2

History Students Pursue Honors Research

June 5, 2024

Trying to understand contemporary politics? Trying to source supplies for the next great widget? Trying to mitigate traffic in Knoxville? It all requires research, and our History Honors Concentration students are becoming experts at it, learning the craft of research as they explore historical events, issues, and problems about which they are deeply passionate.

History Honors students take two intensive honors courses in history and then cap off their experience with a two-course thesis writing sequence in which they conceive, plan, and execute a 50-page (or more) original research project.

This year, Aiden Ponder is diving deep into the gangs of New Rome (Constantinople). These were chariot racing fans who organized themselves into something like politic pressure groups who could even influence emperors.

James Singhel tackles the gangs of New York, Irish immigrant gangs and groups who in the nineteenth century worked to find a place in US society.

Joseph Espinal investigates the invention of stringed keyboard instruments like the piano and the accompanying music and social changes during the Renaissance.

Thomas Hyde examines the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when conservative women leaders led various cultural and political fights against what they saw as dangerous encroachment of evil in American life.

Olivia Kapinos digs into nineteenth century women textile workers in Massachusetts who bravely struggled for better working conditions and better pay.

Cole Fritts takes up a trio of pro-Union reverends from East Tennessee who resisted the Confederacy by word and even by deed, sabotaging a new railway line.

Samantha Konsavage sifts through the impressions of southern soldiers abroad in World War II in both the European and Pacific theaters of war, drawing upon an incredible archive of letters from abroad housed here at Special Collections in Hodges Library.

Alexander O’Connor confronts the efforts by Catholics in Germany to recover their political power after collaboration with the Nazi regime, eventually leading to the most successful political party in post-war Germany.

History Honors students get to work on topics they love, while they develop skills that will serve them well whatever they do after graduating.

Undergraduate Update: A Vibrant History Club

June 5, 2024

Students at a History table on pedestrian walkway

by Keeley Wade, History Club President

This year the UT History Club completed its first full year as a registered student organization. Students brought the club back to life in the spring of 2023, hoping to promote community within the history department, create a space for the discussion of historical topics, and connect students with professionals and faculty.

The club has reached a significant number of undergraduate students from a variety of majors, and its five officers strive to create unique and engaging meetings each week. The club hosts faculty members from across departments, including history, classics, and theatre, who have shared their research and professional advice with students.

These faculty visits are not limited to traditional lectures. Students were particularly excited to play a Reacting to the Past game, led by the history lecturer Marina Maccari-Clayton. The club also gives students the opportunity to present their own ideas, including class projects, independent research, and advice for fellow students. Occasionally, the club hosts trivia nights with questions written by members and catered to the interests of the group.

A few times a semester, the club ventures outside of the classroom. In the fall, a group of club members had a great time at the Tennessee Medieval Faire in Harriman. More recently, members saw the Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of The Giver, followed by a discussion with Gina Di Salvo, the show’s dramaturg.

One of our most popular events, though, is the annual Department Social, which gives students a chance to meet fellow undergraduates, plus faculty members and grad students of the department.

It’s been a packed year for this club, and officers hope to continue to grow in numbers and offer a wider selection of events and resources to members. Members are thankful to the department for supporting us financially and to all the faculty and staff at the university who have provided their time, expertise, and passion for history with this group of undergraduates.

Graduate Program Notes

June 5, 2024

The excellent work of our program’s graduate students, present and former, continues to be recognized with competitive research fellowships and success in a challenging job market.

Current Students

PhD candidate Kaitlin Simpson accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of US history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette starting in August 2024. She will be defending her dissertation, “The Flowers of El Dorado,” on the transnational history of the cut flower trade in the US and Colombia during the 20thcentury, in the early summer.

Thomas Maurer defended his PhD dissertation in June 2023, and not long thereafter, took a position as assistant professor of History at Ave Maria University in Florida. Maurer was also a finalist for a Fulbright to Italy.

Kyle Vratarich was recently awarded a fellowship from the White House Historical Society to undertake dissertation research. He will spend two months in Washington, DC, searching through repositories such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Kiplinger Research Library to develop his research on Orville Babcock’s role in the Grant Administration, the scandals in which he was involved, and his work to develop the physical landscape of the nation’s capital.

Roraig Finney was awarded a one-week Filson Fellowship at the Filson Historical Society, the primary historical archive and library of the state of Kentucky. Finney will travel to Louisville to conduct research for his dissertation on the politics of immigration in the US South in the latter half of the 19th century. He also received a Special Collections Research Travel Grant from the Louisiana State University Libraries, which will allow him to pursue dissertation research.

Ashley Cornell, current premodernist master’s degree student, received a competitive grant from the College of Arts and Sciences to research AI literacy and its utility in the humanities classroom. This was part of the College’s recent AI Educational Campaign. I’m very excited to see the results of Ashley’s work!

Alumni

2018 doctoral graduate Allen York’s first book, Our People are Warlike: Civil War Pittsburgh and Home-Front Mobilization, will be published in November by the University of Tennessee Press.

2021 doctoral graduate Alexandra Garnhart-Bushakra started a position as academic program manager and course instructor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

2014 doctoral graduate Jordan Kuck, now an associate professor of history at Brevard College, was selected to serve as the keynote speaker of the World Affairs Conference’s national conference in Washington, DC. Kuck will be speaking on “How the War in Ukraine Melted Frozen Conflicts in the Baltic States.”

Grad Student Stacie Beach Lobbies for the Humanities in DC

During the 2024 spring break, history PhD candidate Stacie Beach traveled to Washington, DC, to attend the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) Annual Meeting and Advocacy Day. The NHA works with humanities faculty, institutions, and advocates to bolster humanities enrollments, promote public engagement with the humanities, and increase funding for the humanities. During the annual Humanities Advocacy Day, Beach joined others in meeting the state’s Congressional leaders to discuss and promote the humanities and funding programs that support work in the humanities.

The primary focus for the Tennessee delegation, with members from the University of Tennessee, Eastern Tennessee State University, and Vanderbilt University, was to advocate for Congressional support for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). While the NEH provides research grants to university faculty in the humanities, most of the money the NEH receives from the government is dispersed through local history councils to help support museums and public outreach across the country.

Eggers Chronicles Congo Refugee Experience

June 5, 2024

Nikki Eggers sitting in a gray chair in front of a brick wall, wearing a black tanktop and sunglasses

Assistant Professor Nikki Eggers published her first monograph in 2023, Unruly Ideas: A History of the Kitawala on Congo (Ohio University Press, 2023). There she combined oral histories with archival research to recount the history of the Congolese religious movement Kitawala from its colonial beginnings in the 1920s through its continued practice in some of the most conflict-riven parts of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo today.

Eggers’s new project is “Refuge in the Spirit: Religion in the Lives of Congolese Refugees,” supported by a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Eggers, who has been recognized for her valuable work supporting East Tennessee’s own community of Congolese refugees, is teaming up with Roger Alfani of Seton Hall University on this research. Though on a well-deserved leave this year, we asked her to tell us more about the work in progress.

Most historians in our department conduct research in more-or-less comfortable archives, but yours involves field work in refugee camps in Kenya and Burundi. What are some of the challenges and opportunities of this sort of research?

What I do is indeed a little unorthodox for historians! Though I think that most historians recognize the value that oral history methods bring to the field. Conducting interviews with refugees offers a multitude of opportunities to better understand the lived experiences of people affected by what I think can be called one of greatest humanitarian crises of the past half century: the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). Our interviews help us to understand not only these individual experiences, but also how certain systems—particularly migration networks and humanitarian systems like the UNHCR—function (and don’t function). The interviews also offer insight to the social and political conditions on the ground in Congo and various host countries (Kenya, Burundi, Uganda, US) and serve as a kind of archive of the present that can help future historians understand this era better as well.

Of course, as you note, it does not come without challenges. Some of these challenges are logistical. Most of the refugee camps we visited are, by design, located in remote and difficult to access areas. But there are also ethical challenges when conducting research with vulnerable individuals like refugees. On the one hand, we must protect the identities of people who have often fled politically contentious circumstances and whose lives and stories are often interrogated by refugee systems themselves. We don’t want someone’s resettlement case to be adversely affected by something they told us in confidentiality or for them to have repercussions for criticizing people and institutions with power over them and their livelihoods.

On the other hand, this kind of research can touch on very traumatic events in people’s lives and we must be careful to protect both participants and, frankly, ourselves as researchers from the adverse effects that interrogating such trauma can have. We have to be cognizant of such risks and take steps to mitigate them.

Your project examines the religious lives of these refugees. What draws you to that focus?

Professor Alfani and I both have extensive experience writing about the role of religion in DR Congo. He is a religious studies expert who has published widely on the role of religious actors and institutions in peace building processes in eastern Congo. I have also published on the role of religion and spirituality in the social and political history of Congo, in both the colonial and post-colonial eras. So, our interest in the significance of religion, spirituality, and religious actors grows out of our collective expertise on the subject and experience observing the central role that religion and spirituality play in the socio-political terrain of Congo, both in the present and the past.

As we both became interested in the experiences of refugees, we began to realize that religion has often been treated as a marginal aspect of that experience in the refugee studies literature, when discussed at all. Knowing what we already knew about the role of religion and spirituality in Congo, we found this to be a significant oversight.

And our research up to this point really has illustrated that such oversight obscures an important aspect of the social and intellectual lives of refugee individuals and communities. Focusing on religion helps us to see important forms of agency and resilience that are exercised by people who are too often treated as a problem to be solved. Moreover, because religion touches on so many other parts of people’s lives it also helps us to see the myriad of challenges refugees have experienced—and continue to experience—as they navigate their displacement.

Historical research is so often a solitary endeavor, but through this grant you are able to work with Roger Alfani. What does this chance to collaborate add to your research?

It is hard to overstate the value that collaboration has added to this project. To begin with, he and I have different but complementary disciplinary expertise. Alfani is very much a social scientist, who has extensive knowledge of social science theory and praxis, including significant experience conducting qualitative research on religion, conflict, and peace building in Congo. Meanwhile, as a historian, I bring important skills in historical analysis and narrative building, as well as extensive experience conducting and analyzing oral history interviews at multiple sites in the field in Congo. Our different disciplinary perspectives often lead us to ask different kinds of questions, opening new realms of inquiry that neither would necessarily investigate alone.

Nikki Eggers and Roger Alfani pose for a photo outdoors with mountains in the background

Nikki Eggers and Roger Alfani pose for a photo with research participants

Our different identities have also shaped our research in profound ways. As someone born and raised in Congo, who has also lived and been educated outside of Congo, Alfani has brought unique knowledge and experiences, as well as personal networks, to the project that have been crucial to the process of conducting and interpreting our research. As an informed outsider, with an extensive knowledge of the regional history and a number of my own connections in the field, I bring a different perspective and different networks that have helped us to navigate the research process and interpret the findings. We have also found that our different racial and gender identities—both how we present to and are interpreted by others and how we experience the world—have shaped both the process of research and our interpretation of the findings. As have our different personal relationships to and experiences with religion and spirituality. Because I assure you, we did not escape—nor did we try to escape—conversations about our own faith with participants in this research. Our methodological approach was to treat people very much like equals in a conversation, rather than subjects of scientific observation. Overall, we are both keenly aware that this research has been quite different—and I think richer—than it might have been had either of us done it alone.

The college has recognized the valuable work you have done to support those Congolese refugees who have arrived in East Tennessee in recent years. In addition to interviewing refugees in Africa, you are studying the lived experience of these new neighbors here in Tennessee. What dimension does this add to your study of the religious life of these families?

As I have indicated above, we have observed in our research—both for this project and previous projects—the central role that religion and faith play in the lives of many Congolese people. Part of the reason we are interested in talking to refugees resettled to Knoxville is to understand whether and how that role has changed as they have become a part of American society. How has resettlement reshaped their understanding of faith and spirituality? How has it reshaped their religious communities? How has resettlement reshaped their understandings of themselves and their own identities and, in turn, their understanding of the role of churches and religious communities in their lives?

On the other hand, how has the religion and faith community served as a mechanism to preserve a sense of identity and community in a very different cultural, political, and economic context of the US? These questions matter both because they offer insight into the larger history of Congolese people and the US, but also because they can help us to better understand how to serve and support resettled refugees.

Last fall Eggers and Alfani co-wrote an editorial essay based on their research visits to the refugee camps in Africa, sounding the alarm regarding dangerous food shortages.

Many Changes! – Message from the Department Head

June 5, 2024

A lot has happened since our last newsletter. We have a new department head, we’ve moved from Dunford Hall to the Stokely Management Center (SMC), we’ve welcomed two new faculty members, and we’ve continued to be active and productive scholars. I started as department head on August 1, 2022, when Ernie Freeberg stepped down after heroically serving nine years. I agreed to take this on because we have such a great department, as you’ll see in the stories that follow.

We learned in August that we would definitely be moving out of Dunford Hall by the end of 2023. The soon-to-be-demolished Dunford, Greve, and Henson halls are making way for a new Haslam College of Business building. After months of uncertainty and unsuitable plans, we finally ended up on the sixth floor of SMC, former home of the Haslam College of Business Department of Accounting. We moved in January 2024, getting hit by a major snowstorm right in the middle of transferring our boxes and furniture into our new space.

We could not have done this without the hard work of our staff, Kim Harrison, Bernie Koprince, and Mary Beckley. We have been assured that we are in temporary space, as we hope for a new interdisciplinary classroom and humanities building to go up in the next ten years. In the meantime, if you are in Knoxville, stop by to see our new home.

In August of 2022, we welcomed Assistant Professor Duygu Yıldırım, our new historian of the modern Middle East. In August of 2023, Assistant Professor Emma Snowden, our new historian of early Islam, joined us. Next fall we will have three new faculty faces: Yasser Nasser (modern China), who deferred his arrival for a year; Emma Schroder (gender & sexuality, environmental history); and Natalia Doan (modern Japan).

As usual, we have had new books, fellowship awards, grants, and awards to celebrate:

Assistant Professor Brooke Bauer saw her award-winning Becoming Catawba: Catawba Women and Nation-building, 1540-1840 (University of Alabama Press, 2022) into print.
Assistant Professor Victor Petrov published Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023).
Assistant Professor Nikki Eggers welcomed her Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo (Ohio University Press, 2023) to bookshelves. Eggers has also had 2023–2024 to work on her next project, funded by an NEH Collaborative Research Grant.
Yıldırım, too, has had 2023–2024 to finish her first book with the help of an ACLS fellowship, while Professor Sara Ritchey took Fall 2023 on a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The College of Arts and Sciences gave Associate Professor Tore Olsson the James R. & Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award for 2022, and Ritchey a New Research, Scholarly, and Creative Projects in the Arts & Humanities Award.
In 2023, we were pleased that the college recognized Bauer with an Early Career Research Award and Professor Charles Sanft with a New Research, Scholarly, and Creative Projects in the Arts & Humanities Award.

All this doesn’t begin to cover the articles, book chapters, and conference papers our faculty have contributed to historical scholarship.