The History Department and the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution are happy to welcome Elizabeth Cross, a historian of eighteenth-century France and its empire whose work emphasizes the history of political economy and capitalism. Dr. Cross received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2017. Her current book manuscript, "The French East India Company and the Politics of Commerce in the Revolutionary Era," argues that the circumstances surrounding the creation and dissolution of the last French East India Company further our understanding of the roles played by globalization and economic institutions in revolutionary political transformations. Her publications include "The Myth of the Foreign Enemy?

We are very pleased that Nilay Özok-Gündogan, a specialist in Ottoman and modern Middle East history, is joining our department. Dr. Özok-Gündogan's major research project concerns the Kurdish principalities in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. Her work emphasizes questions of state-making, changing property regimes, and inter-ethnic relations in comparative imperial peripheries. Her recent publications include “Ruling the Periphery, Governing the Land: The Making of the Modern Ottoman State in Kurdistan, 1840-1870” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and the entry on the Ottoman Empire in Wiley's Encyclopedia of Empire. She has published numerous Turkish translations of English-language academic works. Dr. Özok-Gündogan received her Ph.D.

We are pleased to welcome Maximilian Scholz, a historian of religion with a specialization in the Reformation, who will join the department this fall. Dr. Scholz received his PhD in 2016 from Yale University, where his dissertation won the Elizabethan Club Award for best dissertation on a Renaissance or Early Modern topic. Entitled “Exile and the Recasting of the Reformation: Frankfurt am Main, 1554-1618,” it explores the fate and impact of religious exiles by focusing on the German city of Frankfurt am Main, which became a bastion of displaced peoples in the second half of the sixteenth century. Scholz is also the author of “Exile, Accommodation, and the Advent of Confessions: The Case of Frankfurt’s Reformed Walloons,” which will appear in Reformed Majorities and Minorities, ed. Herman Selderhuis (Vanderhoeck and Ruprechtt, 2017). He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Grant to Germany (2011), the William Crozier Award for excellence in teaching (2014), and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany (2016-2017). This fall he will teach courses on the Reformation (EUH 4144) and Modern World to 1815 (WOH 1023).

The Immigration and Ethnic History Society has appointed Prof. Suzanne Sinke as the new editor of the Journal of American Ethnic History. Read the announcement here. The Journal of American Ethnic History the JAEH "addresses various aspects of North American immigration history and American ethnic history, including background of emigration, ethnic and racial groups, Native Americans, race and ethnic relations, immigration policies, and the processes of incorporation, integration, and acculturation." Congratulations on this honor, Prof. Sinke!

We are delighted to welcome Anasa Hicks as our new Caribbean specialist. Hicks will receive her Ph.D. this summer from New York University. Her research focuses on Cuba with a Caribbean wide analytic lens. Based on extensive and original archival work in Havana and Santiago, Cuba, her dissertation (entitled "Hierarchies at Home") interrogates the ways that employers perceived domestic workers from the abolition of slavery in the late 1880s to the time before the 1959 Revolution. The work bridges a critical period in Cuban history and it complicates the historical understanding of the roles of home workers within systems of patriarchy and race. Her work has already received significant recognition, she was a 2014-2015 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. Hicks has also received prestigious awards from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as support to undertake research at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami. Prior to her graduate work at NYU, she earned her BA with Honors from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2011. In the fall semester of 2017, Professor Hicks will teach History of the Caribbean (LAH 4470) and Social Revolutionary Movements in Latin America (LAH 4748).

Dr. Ben Dodds, a scholar with diverse interests and an accomplished educator, joins the FSU history department in fall 2017, after many years at Durham University. Dodds is by training a historian of late medieval England, whose work has focused on social and economic history, particularly of the peasantry. In his book, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (2007), Dodds analyzed revelatory evidence in previously underappreciated sources, revealing peasants to have been savvy economic actors. Research on Robin Hood and banditry more generally then led Dodds to an entirely different area of inquiry, the bandit literature of Spain in the early modern and modern periods. A book on this topic is currently in preparation. Meanwhile, Dodds remains a committed medievalist, with ongoing research related to the impact of the Black Death in late medieval England.

On March 23 at 5pm at the Rendina Room, FSU Alumni Center, David Blight will deliver the Department of History's 4th annual James P. Jones Lecture. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. His books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation. Professor Blight's lecture is entitled "Writing Frederick Douglass's Life: Why and Why Now?"

Graduate students in HIS 6087: Exhibiting History created an exhibition: “All Ends are Beginnings: The Transformation of FSCW to FSU, 1930s to 1960s,” which will be on display at Strozier Library through much of the Spring semester.  Before Florida State University was the large state university that we know today, it was the Florida State College for Women (FSCW). This exhibit explores the transformation of FSCW to FSU from the 1930s through 1965, especially the time surrounding World War II. By highlighting the university as a women’s liberal arts college in the 1930s, a co-educational school in the 1940s and 1950s, and the beginning of racial integration in the 1960s, the exhibit guides you through this transitional period. The exhibit features contemporary photographs of the school and students from the era alongside artifacts from Florida State’s Special Collections and Archives and the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience. The exhibit examines the changes as well as the continuity of the university through an era of great transformation.

On May 20, FSU alumna Tameka Bradley Hobbs was awarded the Florida Historical Society’s Harry and Harriette Moore prize for her book, Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida (University of Florida Press: 2015).  The award is named in honor of the late Harry and Harriette Moore, who were murdered in 1951 because of their civil rights and voter registration efforts throughout Florida. This category recognizes an outstanding book or monograph relating to Florida's ethnic groups, or dealing with a significant social issue from a historical perspective.

The Department of History's 3rd Annual James P. Jones Lecture which will be given on April 21st at 5pm at the Rendina Room, FSU Alumni Center. This year's lecturer will be Jane Kamensky, Professor of History and Pforzheimer Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University.