Paul M. Renfro studies United States history since 1945, with specific interests in gender/sexuality, the carceral state, and childhood and the family. Before arriving at FSU, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. His book, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, will be published by Oxford University Press in June 2020, and his coedited anthology Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in December 2019. Renfro’s other scholarship has been published in Feminist Studies, Enterprise & Society, Southern Cultures, American Quarterly, and Disability Studies Quarterly. His popular writing has appeared in Dissent, the Washington Post, and Atlanta Studies.
News
Prof. Katherine Mooney will use the Edith and Richard French Fellowship from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University to study the movement of women into male-dominated professions between the Civil War and World War II. Read more at Arts & Science News.
The department is proud to congratulate John Cable, winner of the Martin-Vegue Dissertation fellowship, and Taylor Tobias, winner of the Walbolt Dissertation Fellowship for Fall 2019. Each will receive funding for a semester to support research and/or the writing of their dissertations.
Congratulations to John and Taylor!
Professor Emeritus William Warren Rogers passed away on October 7, 2017 at age 88. Professor Rogers taught at FSU from 1961 until his retirement in 1996. He published widely on the 19th Century American South. A remembrance by Gerald Ensley, published in the Tallahassee Democrat, can be read here.
Rafe Blaufarb's The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (Oxford University Press, 2016) has been awarded the J Russell Major Prize by the American Historical Association. The prize is awarded annually for the best work in English on any aspect of French history. Congratulations, Rafe!
Will Hanley's new book Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria has been published by Columbia University Press. From the publisher: "Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth or naturalization determines where he or she can and cannot be and what he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal, even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In Identifying with Nationality, he uses the Mediterranean city of Alexandria to develop a genealogy of the nation and the formation of the modern national subject. Identifying with Nationality traces the advent of modern citizenship to multinational, transimperial settings such as turn-of-the-century colonial Alexandria, where ordinary people abandoned old identifiers and grasped nationality as the best means to access the protections promised by expanding states. The result was a system that continues to define and divide people through status, mobility, and residency." Congratulations Will!
Kristine Harper's new book Make It Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America has been published by The University of Chicago Press. From the publisher: "In Make It Rain, Kristine C. Harper tells the long and somewhat ludicrous history of state-funded attempts to manage, manipulate, and deploy the weather in America. Harper shows that governments from the federal to the local became helplessly captivated by the idea that weather control could promote agriculture, health, industrial output, and economic growth at home, or even be used as a military weapon and diplomatic tool abroad. Clear fog for landing aircraft? There’s a project for that. Gentle rain for strawberries? Let’s do it! Enhanced snowpacks for hydroelectric utilities? Check. The heyday of these weather control programs came during the Cold War, as the atmosphere came to be seen as something to be defended, weaponized, and manipulated. Yet Harper demonstrates that today there are clear implications for our attempts to solve the problems of climate change." Congratulations Kristine!
Andrew Frank's new book Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami has been published by The University Press of Florida. From the publisher: "Before the Pioneers takes readers back through forgotten eras to the stories of the people who shaped the land along the Miami River long before most modern histories of the city begin. Andrew Frank begins the chronicle of the Magic City’s long history 4,000 years ago when Tequesta Indians settled at the mouth of the river, erecting burial mounds, ceremonial centers, and villages. They created a network of constructed and natural waterways through the Everglades and trade routes to the distant Calusa on the west coast. Centuries later, the area became a stopover for Spanish colonists on their way to Havana, a haven where they could shelter from storms and obtain freshwater, lumber, and other supplies. Frank brings to life the vibrant colonies of fugitives and seafarers that formed on the shores of Biscayne Bay in the eighteenth century. He tells of the emergence of the tropical fruit plantations and the accompanying enslaved communities, as well as the military occupation during the Seminole Wars. Eventually, the small seaport town flourished with the coming of “pioneers” like Julia Tuttle and Henry Flagler who promoted the city as a place of luxury and brought new waves of residents from the North.
Also joining the History Department and the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution is Cathy McClive, a social and cultural historian of medicine, gender, embodiment and expertise in ancien regime France. Dr. McClive has published widely in French and English on masculinities, legal medicine, pregnancy, puberty and menstruation in early modern France. Her articles appear in History Workshop Journal, Social History of Medicine, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Eighteenth-Century Studies and Annales de Demographie Historique.