GOOD NEWS BULLETIN, September 2000

Note: This is the first of this year's Good News Bulletins of the UIC

History Department.  New and old colleagues in the Department and those with

graduate or undergraduate degrees in History at UIC are invited and

encouraged to send news of interest to rmfried@uic.edu

Women's Studies will publish Ph.D. candidate LEE BAKER's article "Survival

Strategies of Widows in Dijon during the French Revolution."  He will give a

paper on "National Priorities and Local Choices: Elections in Dijon during

the French Revolution," at a conference at Eastern Illinois in October.

Prof. ROGER BILES (Ph.D., 1981) of East Carolina University is now book

review editor for H-Urban.  His article "Public Housing on the Reservation"

appeared in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (24:2 [2000]).

He is a co-editor of a new book: From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In

Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America.

Prof. PAUL BUELOW presented "Fostering a Global Perspective: Using Old Maps

to Extend Understanding of World History" at the National Council for the

Social Studies Great Lakes Regional Conference in March. This and earlier

presentations (some in conjunction with Prof. GERALD DANZER) are part of an

NEH-funded project to integrate world history more fully into the

undergraduate teaching methods course (History 320).

Ph.D. candidates NICOLE BUTZ and SEAN HARRIS were wed on May 21, 2000, in

(historic) St.Monans, Scotland.  Sean has won a fellowship from the National

Institute of Mental Health and a King Hostick Award, both of which will

allow him to finish his research in the remote corners of Illinois. And

thanks to a University Fellowship, Nicole will be able to devote the year to

writing.  Finally, the couple are also pleased to announce that they

recently became the proud adoptive parents of 'Mo', a four-month-old mutt,

who seems also ready to sink his teeth into a dissertation--somebody's, anyway.

Ph.D. candidate GARETH CANAAN's article, "'Part of the Loaf': Economic

Conditions of Chicago's African-American Working Class," has been accepted

for publication by the Journal of Social History in the September 2001 issue.

Prof. JONATHAN DALY had book reviews in Social History (May 2000) and The

American Historical Review (April 2000).

Prof. RICK FRIED presided at a panel on 20th-century US political history at

the OAH Regional Conference in Ames, Iowa, in August.

Ph.D. candidate CHERYL R. GANZ curated the exhibition "Pots of Promise:

Mexicans, Reformers, and the Hull-House Kilns, 1920-1940." The exhibit is in

the Montgomery Ward Gallery in CCC from Friday, September 22 to Friday,

October 27, 2000. Her essay "Science Advancing Mankind," analyzing a

sculpture at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, will be the cover essay in the

October issue of "Technology and Culture." The Lemelson Center of the

National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution has

granted her a travel award for this winter to do research on inventions and

world's fairs.

Prof. MEL HOLLI published "Toledo's Golden Ruler: Samuel M. Jones" in the

July-August number of Timeline.  On Sept. 13 he will deliver a paper at the

Nordic Studies Association meeting at Helsinki University on US historians'

ranking of American presidents.  He was recently interviewed on Illinois

Radio (Springfield) and quoted in the Sun-Times regarding African American

vote turnout in Chicago. He spoke on multi-culturalism at Finnfest 2000, an

international ethnic history and culture conference in Toronto.

Prof. LAURA HOSTETLER's "Qing Connections to the Early Modern World:

Ethnography and Cartography in Eighteenth-Century China" appeared in the

July 2000 issue of Modern Asian Studies. Last spring she gave a paper, "From

Empire to Nation: Ethnic Minorities and the Chinese State," at a workshop on

"Renegotiating the Scope of Chinese Studies" in Santa Barbara.

Grad student BOB HUNTER's paper proposal on "Fail Safe and Colossus:  The

Forbin Project" has been accepted for the California film and history

conference in November.

Prof. RICHARD R. JOHN has published an essay on "Recasting the Information

Infrastructure for the Industrial Age," in A Nation Transformed by

Information:  How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial

Times to the Present, edited by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and James W.

Cortada ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).  He has also published a

review essay on several recent works in American business history:

"Contentualizing the Corporation," Journal of Policy History, 12, no. 2

(2000) [on Thomas K. McCraw, et al. Creating Modern Capitalism, Neil J.

Mitchell, The Conspicuous Corporation, and William G. Roy, Socializing

Capital].  In addition, he has published "The Postal System and the Making

of German Literary Culture" in Electronic Book Review

(http://www.engl.uic.edu/~jtabbi/ebr/reviews/rev10+/r10+john.htm)].

VIRGIL KRAPAUSKAS (Ph.D. 1998) has received a tenure-track position at

Chowan College in North Carolina.  He will be teaching courses in European

and World History as well as supervising student teachers.

Prof. JOHN KULCZYCKI was elected a member of  the Commission Internationale

des Etudes Historiques Slaves by that body's General Assembly at a meeting

in Oslo, Norway, in August. He gave a paper, "Re-Polonization' or

Germanization? The Native Population of the Recovered Lands,'" for a panel

on "Aspects of Nationalism under Communism:  Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and

Romania," at the VI World Congress, International Council for Central and

East European Studies, Tampere, Finland, in July.  He was a discussant on a

panel on "Social Elites and National Identity in an Era of Change: The Case

of Poland after the Partitions" at the same congress.  He chaired a panel on

"The Contribution of Solidarity to the Process of Political and Economic

Transformation of Poland and Other Post-Communist Countries" at a conference

on "The Ethos of Solidarity: 1980-2000" sponsored by the Consulate General

of Poland in Chicago and the Polish Museum of America in Chicago on August 25.

Ph.D. candidate SEAN LaBAT's article "Chicago Atomic Scientists and U.S.

Foreign Policy" was published in the Summer 2000 issue of Illinois History.

Ph.D. candidate GWEN McNAMEE is a winner of the Dean's Award for 2000-1 to

facilitate completion of her dissertation

Recent UIC history Ph.D. GEORGE PABIS has received a tenure-track teaching

position at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta.

PADMA RANGASWAMY's (Ph.D. 1996) book had a publication party for her book

Namaste America: Indian Immigrants in an American Metropolis was recently

published by Penn State University Press.  On Aug. 3, the Chicago Historical

Society hosted a publication launch party.  The event was graced with

remarks by U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (9th C.D.)

Prof. BARBARA RANSBY received a Ford Postdoctoral fellowship for 2000-2001

to work on a project on the National Black Feminist Organization.  Her

article "Black Feminism at Twenty- One: Reflections on the Evolution on a

National Community" was published in the Summer 2000 issue of Signs.  Her

essay "Fear of A Black Feminist Planet," originally published in In These

Times, has been reprinted in Civil Rights Since 1787 (Jonathan Birnbaum and

Clarence Taylor, eds., NYU Press, 2000).  In April she participated in a

conference on international women's movements at the Rockefeller Center in

Bellagio.

Prof. GREG SCHNEIDER (Ph.D. 1996) of Emporia State University was

commentator on a set of papers on 20th-century US politics at the OAH

Regional Conference, Ames, Iowa, in August.

An article by Prof. JAMES SEARING has been translated and appears as a

chapter in a book published in France:  Mariella Villasante-de Beauvais,

ed., Groupes serviles au Sahara: Approche comparative a partir du cas des

arabophones de Mauritanie" (CNRS editions, 2000). The chapter is entitled

"Aristocrates, esclaves et paysans: pouvoir et dependance dans les Etats

wolof, 1700-1850."

Ph.D. Candidate PAUL SIEGEL has won a University Fellowship for 2000-2001.

Prof. DAN SMITH was interviewed on WGN's morning program on July 4th about

the meanings of the Declaration of Independence.

PAMELA SMITH-IROWA (Ph.D.1997) is Associate Editor for African Geography at the

Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Grad student MAREK SUSZKO was selected for the Junior Scholars'  Training

Seminar, co-sponsored by East European Studies at the Woodrow Wilson

International Center for Scholars and the American Council of  Learned

Societies, which convened in August at the Wilson Center. There he gave a

paper titled "The Formation of the Polish Socialist Nation under Stalinism,

1945-1956. The Zielona Gora Region: A Case Study."  His article "Kultura and

European Unification, 1948-1953" will be published in the next issue of The

Polish Review.

BEN WHISENHUNT (Ph.D., 1997), Associate Professor of History at the College

of DuPage, presented (in October, 1999) a lecture on Don Cossacks in Russian

history as a pre-performance lecture for the dance and choral group "The Don

Cossacks of Rostov" who performed at COD.  In May, 2000, he was granted

tenure.  In each of his three years at the College of DuPage he has been

nominated for the Outstanding Faculty Award by students.   In November, he

will chair the session "Memoir Literature As Historical Source in Late

Imperial Russia," at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the

Advancement of Slavic Studies in Denver.   During spring 2001, he will be a

visiting lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church College in Canterbury, England.

        Topping the good news, Ben's revised dissertation, "In Search of Legality:

Mikhail M. Speranskii and the Codification of Russian Law" has been accepted

for publication by East European Monographs of Columbia University Press.

Ph.D. candidate BENN WILLIAMS spent the past year as an "associated

researcher" at l'Institut d'histoire du temps  présent in Paris.  He has

been invited to present a paper entitled "Denunziatorische Briefe im

Verwaltungsbezirk Lyon, 1940-1944" at the "Denunziation: Zwischen

Komparatistik und Interdisziplinarität" conference to be held in Rothenburg

o.d. Tauber (Germany) this October. The paper will appear in a collection

published by Verlag edition diskord in Tübingen.

Ph.D. candidate CHRISTOPHER YOUNG has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon

Fellowship, which will underwrite four weeks of study at the Massachusetts

Historical Society.