The Richards Center said goodbye in June to its longtime managing director Matt Isham, who will be focusing exclusively on his role as managing editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era. We thank Matt for his years of service and for playing such an important role in the center’s development. Among his many accomplishments, Matt has been key to the success of the center’s undergraduate summer internship program with the National Park Service. Although he will happily be close by at the Journal, we will miss him and wish him the best of luck in this next chapter!

 

 

Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies, has been featured on several news outlets and podcasts giving commentary about the summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan. She was a guest on the MSNBC podcast Into America with Trymaine Lee , on the Slate podcast The Waves, and on American Voices with Alicia Menendez on MSNBC, among others. 

Dr. Davis also recently spoke with seven Black women Olympians, all members of Team USA, about the racial politics of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Black women athletes’ efforts to advance change in their respective sports, and what it means to prepare for the Olympics amidst the ongoing pandemic. Dr. Davis’s interview appeared in Slate in July 2021. 

Gabrielle Foreman, Paterno Family Professor of American Literature and professor of African American studies and history, and Jim Casey, assistant professor of African American studies, history, and English and the managing director of the Center for Black Digital Research, spoke at Penn State Alumni Association’s “Why Didn’t I Know? Nineteenth Century Conventions and the Long History of Black Organizing” virtual speaker session this past spring. Drs. Foreman and Casey are co-editors of The Colored Convention Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press in March 2021.

Amy Greenberg, George Winfree Professor of American History, delivered the presidential address, titled “Cuba and the Failure of Manifest Destiny,” to the annual conference of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in July. Also in attendance were Julie Reed, associate professor of history, who served on the program committee and as a panel commentator, center director Rachel Shelden, who also gave comments on a panel, and former postdoctoral Fellow Alaina Roberts, who participated in a roundtable on histories of Black citizenship.

Zachary Morgan, associate professor of Latin American history and African American studies, published an article in the June 2021 issue of the Journal of Black Studies. Dr. Morgan’s article, “Soldier and Scholar: Abdias Nascimento and the Origins of Afro-Latin American Studies,” explores the military experiences of Abdias Nascimento, an Afro-Brazilian scholar, artist, and activist whose work had a formative impact on the development of Afro-Latin American studies as a discipline. Earlier this year, Dr. Morgan also contributed a piece to the Oxford Reach Encyclopedia in Latin American History about the conscription and corporal punishment of free Afro-Brazilians at the hands of the Brazilian state. 

Dara Walker, assistant professor of African American studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; and history, and a former center postdoctoral scholar, has been named a postdoctoral Fellow for 2021 by the National Academy of Education (NAEd), an honorary educational society whose mission is to improve education policy and practice by advancing high-quality research. Dr. Walker is one of twenty-five scholars selected from a competitive pool of 249 applicants. During the nonresidential fellowship, she will work on her upcoming monograph, High School Rebels: Black Power, Education, and Youth Politics in the Motor City, 1966–1973.

Doctoral candidate Edward Green earned a Whiting Indigenous Knowledge Student Research Award from the Penn State University Libraries to support his scholarly research. Green is a historian of the nineteenth century United States and its relationship with Native Americans. His current research project is titled “Changing Conceptions of Justice in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, 1830–1900.”

Doctoral candidate Heather Walser was awarded the Louis Leonard Tucker Alumni Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Norton Strange Townshend Fellowship from the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and the 2021 Friends Research Grant from the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah. A historian of the nineteenth-century United States, Walser’s research explores the roots of the amnesty crisis that occurred at the conclusion of the American Civil War.

Cecily Zander, who successfully defended her dissertation earlier this summer, recently contributed to Emerging Civil War, a blog featuring the writing of leading scholars in the field of the Civil War era. Zander’s essay explores Confederate General Braxton Bragg and the early days of the Civil War in Pensacola, Florida, a key harbor town on the Gulf Coast.

Jessica Marie Johnson's first book, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World,

was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African American experience. Wicked Flesh was published last summer by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Dr. Johnson (Johns Hopkins University) was the Richards Center's inaugural Fellow in African American history in 2012–13. During her fellowship, she developed the manuscript for Wicked Flesh from her dissertation.