FACULTY UPDATES
MARGARET LAVINIA ANDERSONhas recently taken a step away from her work in the field of history and is currently working as a script doctor for manuscriptsfor a press, a journal, and two of her friends.
THOMAS A. BRADY, JR.received the Anne Lake Prescott Prize for Mentorship at the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference on October 27, 2023 via Zoom. His PhD student, Amy Leonard, received it in person on his behalf since he was not able to attend. He was celebrated by Leonard and a number of his other graduate students from UC Berkeley who were able to attend the event.
MARGARET CHOWNINGpublished her bookCatholic Women and Mexican Politicsin early 2023. Her book won the 2023 Howard Cline Prize for Best Book in Mexican History.
BRIAN DELAYspent much of the past year and a half working as an expert witness in Second Amendment civil court cases. The Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen decision instructed lower courts to stop taking public safety into consideration when assessing the constitutionality of firearms laws. Instead, they were to decide those cases based solely on a law's relationship to history, text, and tradition. Gun Rights groups have responded with an unprecedented wave of challenges to firearms regulations around the country, and states have looked to the small handful of academic historians working on eighteenth and nineteenth century firearms history to help them defend those laws. Since then, DeLay has been involved in more than two dozen cases in eight states and the District of Columbia. In August 2023, he was part of a group of professors of history and law who submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in matter of U.S. v. Rahimi, another major Second Amendment case. "The Second Amendment work has been fascinating and eye-opening, but also a detour from finishing a book calledAim at Empire, about the arms trade in the age of revolutions," states DeLay. A preview of that book can be found in an article titled"The Arms Trade & American Revolutions,"which appeared in the American Historical Review in September 2023.
DZOVINAR DERDERIANorganized the “Translation and Armenian Modes of Communication: Bridging Times and Spaces” conference for UC Berkeley’s Armenian Studies Program which took place on April 15, 2023. Away from UC Berkeley, Derderian attended the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in Québec, Canada from November 2-5, 2023. There she gave a roundtable presentation titledArmenians, Kurds, and the Politics of Ottoman Historiography. Currently, Derderian is awaiting the publication of her forthcoming article, “Orders and Disorders of Marriage, Church, and Empire in Mid-Nineteenth- Century Ottoman Armenia,” which is set to appear in theInternational Journal of Middle East Studies.
SANDRA EDERwas appointed Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS) at UC Berkeley in September 2023. Outside of her work on campus, Eder participated in the Geschlecht, Kjønn, Sex, Gender: Translation, Adaption und Wissenszirkulation in de Medizin des 20. Jahrhunderts which took place at the Institute of the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité - University Medicine Berlin on November 20, 2023. During her time there she delivered a talk about her bookHow the Clinic Made Gender: The History of a Transformative Idea.
JOHN EFRONhas been on sabbatical for the 2023-2024 academic year to work on two books — a completed book manuscript titledAll Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meatand a book still currently in revision titledA History of Modern Jews.
PUCK ENGMANpublished his article“What Right to Property When Rebellion Is Justified? Revolution in Shanghai”inJustice After Moa: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of Chinawhich was published in August 2023.
ERICH S. GRUENwrote multiple articles in 2023 including“Displaced in Diaspora? Jewish Communities in the Greco-Roman World”forDiaspora and Literary Studies(July 2023),"Antisemitism in the Pagan World”forAntisemitic Studies, Volume 7, Number 2(October 2023) and"Nationhood: Was There Such a Thing inAntiquity?”forThe Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Volume 1: Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée(October 2023). Alongside his writing, Gruen participated in multiple lectures and conferences including "Greek Myth and the Jews" a remote lecture at Rockford University (March 2023), "The Sibyl, Cassandra, and Rome" a remote conference held in Naples, Italy (June 2023) and "Were the Ancient Greeks Responsible for Antisemitism?" a lecture held at Princeton University (October 2023). This year Gruen is awaiting the publication of his bookScriptural Tales Retoldwhich will be published through Bloomsbury Publishing.
DAVID HENKINwrote“Three Cheers for Partisanship: Politics is a team sport, and that's okay.”forAtlantic Magazine(online) in September 2023. In 2023, he also partook in multiple interviews including,“David M. Henkin | On his book The Week:A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are”forRorotoko(May 2023);“Why Do We Have a Seven- Day Week”for the BBC’sThe Forum(June 2023); and“Marking Time”for PBS North Carolina’sThe Articulate Hour(June 2023). Throughout the year, Henkin was also invited to give talks at Brown University, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Southern Methodist University, and Rikkyo University (Tokyo). Currently, he is working on finishing a cultural history of baseball for Oxford University Press, which should be published in 2025.
REBECCA HERMAN’s year was bookmarked by the success of her bookCooperating with the Colossus. In April 2023, she presented her book at the Organization of American Historians conference in LA as part of a panel featuring new books that feature both Panama and the United States. Throughout 2023, Herman also gave many talks about her book at various universities including the University of Washington, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, UC Berkeley (via the Social Science Matrix and Center for Latin American Studies), and as part of a series co-organized by Sciences Po and Leiden University. She also was interviewed about her book on two podcasts includingLawfare Podcastin November 2022 andNew Books Networkin March 2023.
Cooperating with the Colossusalso won the 2023 Tonous & Warda Johns Family Book Award (awarded to "the outstanding monograph or edited volume in the history of U.S. foreign relations, immigration history, or military history") from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association as well as Honorable Mention for the 2023 Pacific Coast Branch Award (given to "the outstanding first monograph on any historical subject) from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. It was also named a "Best Book of 2023" by Foreign Affairs and received Honorable Mention for the Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.
Outside of promoting her book, Herman spent much of 2023 contributing to various publications and academic groups. In June 2023, she became a member of the inaugural cohort of scholars who participated in The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University's Institute for Society and the Environment. While at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations meeting in Alexandria, VA in June 2023, she organized a roundtable on Transnational Environmental Activism and presented the work featured in her Environmental History Article. During her time at the meeting of the Humanities and Social Sciences section of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, which met in Lisbon in June 2023, she organized and participated in a panel on the 1980s in Antarctic history. Most recently, at the American Historical Association, Conference on Latin American History meeting in San Francisco in January 2024, she contributed to a roundtable on Social and Environmental Histories of Waste in Latin Americaand chaired two other panels.
Herman also made a couple of radio appearances in 2023, apprearing on the American Historical Association'sHistory in Focuspodcast to discuss her contribution to the Forum on International and Transnational History and on Mendocino Public Radio'sKZYX Public Affairs, to discuss Argentine history.
Alongside her public appearances, Herman published an essay titled "Latin America and the Guts of Global History" in theAmerican Historical Reviewin March 2023 as part of a Forum on International and Transnational History. An edited volume which she had previously contributed to which was orginally published in Portuguese in Brazil, was also translated and published in English under the titleThe Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United Statesvia Lexington Books.
Most recently, in January 2024 an article titled"Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina"was published in the journal,Environmental History. This is the firstpublication to result from the research Herman has been doing on her new book project which focuses on Antarctica in the 1970s and 80s. Notably, this same book project allowed Herman to return to Buenos Aires in 2023 for further work in military and civilian archives documenting the Argentine military dictatorship's efforts to populate one of its bases on the Antarctic peninsula with a settlement of families.
Currently, Herman is completing her time as a 2023-2024 Social Science Matrix Faculty Fellow and awaiting the publication of an afterword she wrote for a forthcoming volume on Antarctica and Colonialism, which will be published in 2024.
HIDETAKA HIROTAwas a guest lecturer at the Irish American Heritage Museum (online) on September 27, 2023. There he gave a lecture titled “Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth- Century Origins of American Immigration Policy.” On November 13, 2023, Hirota appeared inBerkeley Voicesto discuss the immigrant labor used for railroadconstruction in the nineteenth-century United States. In December of 2023, he servered as a guest editor for a special issue of theJournal of the Civil War Era Volume 13, Number 4, which explored the United States' engagements with Asia and the Pacific during the Civil War Era in the nineteenth century. Hirota's article“Transpacific Connections in the Civil War Era,”can be found within the issue.
So far in 2024, Hirota has attended the American Historical Association conference in San Francisco on January 6th; appeared inBerkeley Voicesagain to discuss the origins of immigration law in the United States on January 8th; and appeared inMuster: How the Past Informs the Presentto discuss the special issue on Pacific Connections in the Civil War Era in the Journal of the Civil War Era. Most recently, in January 2024 he was elected Vice President/President Elect of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the leading scholarly organization for historians of US immigration. After serving as vice president for three years, he will start his three-year term as president in 2027.
DAVID A. HOLLINGERserved as a session panelist at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the United States Intellectual History Association, and was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of Phi Alpha Theta of Southern California. Alongside his in person appearances, he did a number of podcast and video interviews related to his most recent book,Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. Additionally, Hollinger published an essay-review titled“The Religious Tide’s Withdrawing Roar: Heard on American Shores”in theReviews in American Historyin September 2023. In 2023, he also continued his service on two committees of the American Philosophical Society and two committees of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and completed two years of service as President of the UC Berkeley Emeriti Association.
MARTIN JAYpublished three books in 2023,Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure;La razon despues de su eclipse, Sobre la Teoría Crítica tardíawhichwas translated by Fernando Huesca; andUtopía y Dialéctica: Ensayos sobre Herbert Marcusewhich was translated by Leandro Sánchez Marín and Sebastian David Giraldo. In addition to his book publications Jay published a number of articles including,“Bill Barr and ‘The Unitary Executive Theory’,”Salmagundi(Summer 2023); "The Idiosyncrasies of Artists and the Art of Politics,”Dispatches, Volume 4(June, 2023);“The Aesthetic Alibi and the Protection of Black Art,”Salmagundi(Fall, 2023-Winter, 2024);“Intersecting with PB,”Thesis Eleven, Volume 179, Issue 1(2023); “Introduction to ‘Truth and Politics’,”On Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Proposalsfor an Exhibition, curated by Gavin Delahunty (London: Richard Saltoun Gallery, 2023); a Japanese translation of"Fused Horizons? Downcast Eyes in Japan,"inVision and Interculturality, edited by Takashi Kakuni and Daisuke Kamai;Afterword toThinking of the Medieval: Mid-Century Intellectuals and the Middle Ages, edited by R.D. Perry and Benjamin A. Saltzman (2023);Foreword to Robin Maialeh,Critical Theory and Economics: Philosophical Notes on Contemporary Inequality(2023).
Proving to be quite indemand, Jay also did quite a few interviews including, “Martin Jay İle Söyleşi: Frankfurt Okulu, Postmodernizm ve Angajman,” Ayrinti Dirgi (Ankara) on March 1, 2023;“Fifty Years after Martin Jay’s Dialectical Imagination”forThe New Book Networkon July 24, 2023;“Martin Jay and the Fate of Radical Ideas”for theChronicle of Higher Educationon October 11, 2023;“Martin Jay, Immanent Critiques”forThe New Book Networkon November 15, 2023;“Cem anos do Instituto de Pequisa Social. Entrevista com Martin Jay,”forCadernos de Filosofia Alemã(São Paulo);“Cem anos de Escola de Frankfurt: Uma conversa com Martin Jay,”forTempo Social,Revista de Sociologia da USP (São Paulo);“100 Jahre Einsamkeit? Grenzen und Perspektiven der Kritischen Theorie—Interview mit Martin Jay,”Diskus(Frankfurt) on January 16, 2024; and “The Centennial of the Frankfurt School and the New Era of Critical Theory – An Interview with Martin Jay” (in Chinese) forThe Ming Pao Daily News(Hong Kong) on January 17, 2024.
Outside of his published work, Jay spent the year attending various conferences including, "1968 in and Expanded Field: The Frankfurt School and the Uneven Course of History," at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico City in May 2023; "Can History Judge? Can History Absolve?" at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, in Mexico City in 2023; "The History of the Frankfurt School in Expanded Fields," conferences on the centenary of the Institute of Social Research at the Universidad Central de Ecuador in Quito, Ecuador (via zoom) in July 2023; University of Frankfurt, Germany in September 2023; Harvard University in October 2023; Wuhan University, China (via zoom) in October 2023; the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (via zoom) in October, 2023; and he gave a response to a panel at the Jewish Studies Association in San Francisco in December 2023.
Currently, he is working on his bookMagical Nominalism: The Discourse of the Event, Aesthetic Re-enchantment and the Photographwhich will be published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024.
ETHAN KATZappeared on theJewish Currentspodcast hosted by Peter Beinart, alongside Dylan Saba, staff attorney at Palestine Legal, in January of 2023. The trio discussed the nine student groups at UC Berkeley, who in 2022 declared that they would not host Zionist speakers, and the subsequent investigation by the U.S. Department of Education on whether the university is a hostile environment for Jewish students. Additionally, as a 2022-2023 Matrix Faculty Fellow, Katz convened a symposium with an international group of scholars on "Jews and Other Groups Who Resisted the Nazis — Means, Motivations and Limitations” in April 2023. Notably, Katz also gave multiple endowed lectures, in particular he gave one in late November 2023 at Brown University, titled "Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism? New Perspectives on a Controversial Subject." The talk received considerable attention and led to Katz being invited to reprise it before other audiences on a number of campuses throughout the country. Katz ended his year by presenting his current research at the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference in San Francisco in December 2023.
Alongside his public appearances, in October 2023 Katz served as a co-editor and contributing author forWhen Jews Argue: Between the University and the Beit Midrash, which was published as both an annual of the journal for theJewish Law Association Studiesand as a book. He also wrote“Dusting Off the Before-Lives of Resistance,”for a French Jewish Studies Forum in theJewish Quarterly Reviewjournal. Katz also had the opportunity to workshop drafts of five different chapters from his current monograph,Midnight in Algiers: Jews, the French Empire, and the Unholy Alliance That Helped the Allies Win World War II, at three different symposiums he convened on the History of Resistance in World War II, which took place at UC Berkeley, the Vanderbilt History Seminar, and at a History seminar at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
MARIA MAVROUDIwas honored to be invited as a Faber lecturer at the Classics department at Princeton, where she gave a lecture titled "The medieval transmission of ancient knowledge in colonial and post-colonial narratives: moving beyond them with help from the Greek and Arabic Grammarians."
During 2023, she also published four articles on a wide variety of topics, including“Byzantine Translations from Arabic into Greek: Old and New Historiography in Confluence and in Conflict”for theJournal of Late Antique, Islamic, and Byzantine Studies, Volume 2, Issues 1–2. Her second article, a longer article on the transmission of botanical knowledge, titled“Arabic Terms in Byzantine Materia Medica: Oral and Textual Transmission”was published both , both orally and in writing inDrugs in the Medieval Mediterranean: Transmission and Circulation of Pharmacological Knowledgeand was edited by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Dionysios Stathakopoulos. A third article appeared in a volume dedicated to the distinguished scholar of medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy Sarah Stroumsa: “Historiographical Debates and Modern Political Considerations In Writing A Cultural Historyof the Holy Land: A Byzantinist’s Perspective,” inReligious and Intellectual Diversity in the Islamicate World and Beyond Volume I: Essays in Honor of Sarah Stroumsa, edited Sabine Schmidtke and Omer Michaelis. The fourth article is titled “Subaltern Byzantinism”, which appeared inIs Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Toward a Critical Historiographywhich was edited by Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanova. The article discusses the contemporary use of Byzantine-style art to broadcast progressive political messages and focuses, among other examples, on icons and frescoes by Bay Area painter Mark Doox for two San Francisco Churches — the St. Gregory of Nysa Episcopal Church and the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church.
In June 2023, Mavroudi presented a paper at the Second Arabo-Greek Workshop, held at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The paper was an overview of the Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek and included excerpts from her recently published article on this topic. During the same month, she presented a second paper at the workshop New Perspectives on Manuscript Bologna, 3632 held inside the old library of the University of Bologna. Its holdings include one of the most important manuscripts for the transmission of the Greek magical, divinatory, and scientific tradition, which was copied in the fifteenth century in Constantinople. There Mavroudi discussed the texts from it that pertain to dream interpretation. More than twenty-five years ago, she had worked on these texts for her doctoral dissertation out of a black- and-white microfilm. At the time, this was one of more than thirty Greek and Arabic manuscripts with which she had worked with. Mavroudi states, “It was a thrill to see the Bologna manuscript for the first time and concentrate exclusively on its contents, the personality of its scribe, and the particularities of the texts on dream interpretation that it contains.”
MASSIMO MAZZOTTIpublished his new bookReactionary Mathematics: A Genealogy of Puritythrough The University of Chicago Press in May 2023.
MAUREEN C. MILLER’s research essay“Abbot Balsamon’s Book: The Origins of Administrative Registers at Cava Dei Tirreni”was honored in January 2023 with the Nelson J. Minnich Prize for the best article published by theCatholic Historical Reviewin 2022. Miller also notably completed her year as President of the Medieval Academy of America on February 25, 2023 by giving her presidential address in Washington, DC. The address — "Reframing the 'Documentary Revolution' in Medieval Italy" — highlighted the influence of her UC Berkeley students on her research. In July 2023, her address was published as the lead article in the issue of the Academy's Journal,Speculum, Volume 98, Number 3. Recently, she has given numerous lectures at institutions such as the Cambridge University Mediaeval History Seminar, the History Department at Williams College, and the World History Seminar of the Chinese University in Hong Kong.
DYLAN PENNINGROTHparticipated in a number of interviews for various publications including"The Forgotten Years of the Civil Rights Movement,"with Kate Masur and Jeffrey Rosen for the National Constitution Center (October 5, 2023);“Before The Movement The Hidden and Vibrant History of Black Civil Rights”for KQED’sForum(October 30, 2023);"Lessons from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Fight to Mobilize the Black Church"forTIME(January 13, 2024); and most recently“Dylan Penningroth: The Hidden History Of Black Civil Rights”with Judge LaDoris Cordell for the Commonwealth Club of California (February 22, 2024).
Alongside his various interviews, Penningroth also published his article for theUniversity of Pennsylvania Law Reviewtitled“Race in Contract Law”in 2022 and his bookBefore the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rightsin September 2023. Outside of his work for various publications, Penningroth attended the Plenary Address for the American Society for LegalHistory annual meeting in Philadelphia on October 27, 2023 and joined theHistory Historians Council on the Constitution at Brennan Center for Justicein 2023.
BERNADETTE PÉREZis currently on sabbatical and living in Los Angeles while she works on her book manuscript,The Violence of American Sugar, at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. During her time away from campus she has also been workshopping a chapter of her book manuscript titled “The Shortcomings of Nature” at a consortium conference at Stanford University (April 2023); participating in a roundtable discussion on Sarah McNamara's book,Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, at the Labor and Working-Class History Conference (May 2023); presenting her research at the Huntington Library's Long-Term Fellows Symposium (October 2023); and participating in a panel at the Western History Conference on Policing Indigenous and Mexican Lives and Labor in the Borderlands (October 2023). Notably, in 2023 Pérez was also awarded the 2023-2024 Dana & David Dornslife Long-Term Fellowship from The Huntington Library.
ELENA SCHNEIDERreturned to teaching full-time in 2023 after parental leave following the birth of her son. She also took her first research trip to visit archives in Spain since COVID-19, with her one year old in tow. “It turns out he's not a great research assistant, though he has other charms,” states Schneider. Her research in Madrid advanced her current book project on Afro- Cuban returnees to West Africa during the waning days of the slave trade. She is currently tracing the stories of several hundred men, women, and children — many of them survivors of the Middle Passage — who attained their freedom in Cuba and managed to return to their wartorn homelands in Yoruba territory (present-day Nigeria) during their lifetimes. Alongside her return to teaching and her travels, Schneider wrote an article titled“Afterword: Looking Backwards in Time from the Eighteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic World,”which appeared in theColonial Latin American Review, Volume 32, Number 1in March 2023.
STACY VAN VLEEThad her article“Medical Culture and Manuscript Culture”published inTibetan Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Volume II: Elaborationswhich was edited by Matthew T. Kapstein and published on March 15, 2024. Van Vleet has also recently been awarded the 2024-2025 Townsend Fellowship by Townsend Center for the Humanities.
HANNAH ZEAVINwas awarded The Mahoney Prize for Best Article in the History of Computing and Information Technology published in 2022 from the Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS), part of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), for“THIS IS WOMENSPACE: USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983-1986,”which was published inTechnology and Culture, Volume 63, Number 3in July 2022. In 2023, Zeavin also wrote various articles including“Editors’ Introduction: Archives of Survival, Networks of Care,”special issue on media histories of care,Feminist Media Histories, co-edited with Olivia Banner (January 2023);“Beyond Diagnosis: The Hotline & State Apparatus in The Slender Thread,”special issue on “Diagnosing America,”American Literary History, Volume 35, Issue03(June 2023); and“The Medium Inside,”“In Focus” Special Section on “Quotidian Media Studies,” for theJournal of Cinema and Media Studies, Volume 62, Issue 04(Summer 2023). Alongside her academic publications, Zeavin continued writing for the public with essays inBookforum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education,andParapraxis. Currently she is working on two books. The first,All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance, which was bought by Penguin Press in 2023 and marks her third book sold. The second,Mother Media: Technology in the American Family, is currently in its final stages before production and is set to be published by MIT Press in 2025.
