Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma presented his forthcoming paper, “‘Critical but stable’: Agricultural Propaganda, Politics and Hunger in Zimbabwe,” at the Young Scholars Initiative, Exploring the Dark Side of the Moon: The History of Economics in the Global South workshop on October 17.

History and biology alumna Katherine Montgomery ’23 presented a paper, titled “A Crafty Woman in a Mangled World: The Intersection of Art and Facial Reconstruction in Anna Coleman Ladd’s Mask Making,” at the Virtual Graduate Conference of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine held on September 13. Katherine originally worked with Chair and Associate Professor of History Joseph E. Hower on this project during her history capstone course. After graduation, she worked with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones to turn her project into a piece for publication. Her presentation explored the intersections of gender, disability, surgery, and military history to highlight the innovative work in the field of prosthetics of Anna Coleman in the late 1910s.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce, Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin, Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma, and Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro had their abstract “Teaching With Color: Thematic Hires and the Politics of Teaching in Texas” accepted as a special feature for the 10 Year Reflection Special Issue on pedagogy and hope in the Journal for the Sociology of Race & Ethnicity. The article will be both a pedagogical reflection on hope in the classroom and on thematic hires. The issue will be available in early 2025.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma attended the 29th Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) at the University of Johannesburg on June 26-27, where he presented fieldwork notes from Mellon PEH Summer Fellowship-supported research on commodities, trade, and pre-colonial African society.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma attended the Institute for Global Law and Policy Global Scholars Academy in Stellenbosch, South Africa on June 28, where he presented his paper titled, “‘Put it in their food’: Food, Power, and Control in southern Zimbabwe.”

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited to participate in a workshop of the “Seminar of the social and cultural history of health and disease in Mexico,” held at the Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Discussants contributed their chapters for an upcoming volume on hidden histories of health and disease in Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Hernandez Berrones’ contribution, titled “Recovering the relics of modern medicine in Mexico: Homeopathy, vitalism, and religion, 1853-1912,” examines the associations between heterodox religious and medical systems in the construction of a plural therapeutic market place in modern Mexico.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes has been appointed as a production editor for H-France Review.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes reviewed Katharina Fritsch’s book, The Diaspora of the Comoros in France: Ethnicised Biopolitics and Communitarianism, for H-France. It can be read here.

Associate Professor of History Joseph Hower found time, between beignets, to chair and comment on a panel on “Environmental Justice in Postwar America” at the Organization of American Historians Conference on American History in New Orleans.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han was invited to give a talk in the “Asia in Depth” series at Georgetown University. Her talk was titled “The Rise of the Shatuo Turks: Identity Formation in Medieval China.”

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented as part of “New Directions in the Historiography of Post/Colonial France: A Book Panel,” at the Society for French Historical Studies annual meeting at Hofstra University.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes gave a guest lecture at the University of Maryland-College Park on “Race and Activism in France: From the Algerian War to #BLM.” While in the DC area, she also gave invited talks at American University and Georgetown University about her recent book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes gave a public talk on the history behind the book and recent Netflix series, All the Light We Cannot See, at Lark & Owl Booksellers in Georgetown.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma presented a paper titled, ‘‘Agriculture is a scam!’: Modified seeds, fertilizers and the agrarian fallacy among African grain farmers in colonial Zimbabwe, the 1950s to 1979, at the European University Institute, Knowing the planet: Environment, technology, and development in the 19th and 20th centuries workshop.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma published an article in the journal Critical African Studies, ‘Our stomachs are still hungry’: The colonial state, African Nutrition and small grains in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), c.1950 to 1970s.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes was part of a roundtable on “Difficult Conversations in the Liberal Arts Classroom” that followed a workshop by the same name at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, CA. Mercedes Chervony ’23 presented her research, “From the Chicago Freedom Movement to Cabrini-Greene: The Limitations of Legal Activism and the Foresaking of the Projects,” at an undergraduate lightening round, also at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, CA.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published her book Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon as part of the France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization Series at the University of Nebraska Press.

Associate Dean of the Faculty & Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower published the chapter, “Utopia’s Empire: Thomas More’s Text and the Early British Atlantic World, c. 1510-1625,” in Thomas More’s Utopia, edited by Phil Withington and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). The piece explores the broad context in which one of the most famous–and incompletely understood–books of the sixteenth century were written and read, arguing that doing so allows us to come to a fuller understanding of the nature, significance, and utility of Utopia and of the empire created alongside it.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma published a co-authored piece in the Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. The paper titled “Future Directions” was a collaborative work by six scholars across six time zones, reimagining the future of environmental history. You can find the book here.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma attended and presented his paper Unholy Alliances! Hunger, Politics and Control in Southern Africaat the African Studies Association Annual Meeting held in San Francisco from Nov. 30_Dec. 3. In this paper, Kauma explores the politics and weaponization of food by political and cultural elites in postcolonial southern Africa.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published a coedited volume on Fertility, Family, and Social Welfare between France and Empire: The Colonial Politics of Population. The book is the first in the New Directions in Welfare History series published by Palgrave Macmillan. It examines issues of race, demography, medicine, and social policy from the 17th century to the 20th across the breadth of the French Empire (including Algeria, Canada, Cambodia, India, and Senegal). In addition to cowriting the introduction, she contributed a solo-authored chapter, “Criminal Fertility: Policing North African Families after Decolonization,” which traces the connections between sexuality, surveillance, population control, and police power in the Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han was invited to give a talk in the China Humanities Seminar (CHS) series at Harvard University. Her talk was titled, “Forging a New Sino-Inner Asian Order: The Brotherly Relations Between the Shatuo Turks and Kitans (907–979).”

Associate Dean of the Faculty & Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower’s book, Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), co-edited with Valerie Schutte, won the best collaborative project award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Hower co-wrote the introduction and single-authored a chapter in the volume, the first of three books on the queen that she has written in the past two years.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower published the book Mid-Tudor Queenship and Memory: The Making and Re-making of Lady Jane Grey and Mary I. It is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s internationally renowned “Queenship and Power” series and features 11 original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Hower coedited the book with Valerie Schutte and also single-authored both the introduction as well as the chapter, “’As the Kinges of this Realme her Most Noble Progenitours’: Historical (Self-)Fashioning at the Accession Moment.” The volume is available on the publisher’s website here and on Amazon.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited to present his work in the seminar “Itinerante” of History and Historiography of Sciences and Technologies jointly hosted by UNAM, CINVESTAV, and COLMEX. In his talk titled “Homeopathy in the light of biology: The Limits of Medical Science after the Mexican Revolution,” he discussed how MDs used the emerging paradigm of experimental physiology to establish the limits between what counted as legitimate medicine and not in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Given their professional differences, homeopaths and its detractors adopted and adapted the paradigm to criticize each other´s curriculum and practices. While the different interpretations created a boundary between both types of practitioners, patients and authorities regarded both approaches as scientific and, therefore, susceptible to consumption and support. You can see the entire session (in Spanish) on YouTube or Facebook.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published a discussion of police violence, anti-racist activism, and the current French protests on the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published a review of Jane Berger’s A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement in the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper entitled, “‘The recovery of her ancestral and hereditary right’: History, Memory, and Female Succession in the Mid-Tudor Era,” at the Female Succession in Late Medieval and Early Modern Monarch—Contestation, Conflict, and Compromise Conference at Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain, 24-26 May 2023.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “Out of Their Beds and into the Streets: Care, Violence, and AFSCME’s Response to Deinstitutionalization in the Long 1970s” before the 2023 meeting of the Labor and Working-Class History Association at Rutgers University.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower gave the keynote lecture for the Queen Elizabeth I Society at their annual meeting in conjunction with the international South Central Renaissance Studies Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, 27-29 April 2023. Hower’s talk was entitled “A Tale of Two Pales: Dublin and Calais in the Tudor Imperial World” and served as a transition of sorts from my first monograph into a new stream of research on the once-English, now-French city and its history, myth, and heritage from the sixteenth century to the present.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower organized the Britain and the World 2023 Conference at Duquesne University, held June 20–22. The conference welcomed 125 interdisciplinary scholars from across the globe for three full days of papers, plenaries, and roundtables on Britain’s relationship with the wider world from the 16th century to the present. In addition to evaluating abstracts, coordinating the program, and helping lead things on the ground, Hower chaired a panel on “Rivalry and Restoration in the Early Modern British Atlantic” and led Dr. Carole Levin, a world-renowned scholar of Elizabeth I, “in conversation” for a lunchtime plenary session about Levin’s distinguished career and contributions to women’s, gender, and royal studies.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “’Out of Their Beds and into the Streets’: Public Sector Labor and the Politics of Mental Healthcare in the Long 1970s” on March 30 to the 2023 OAH Conference on American History in Los Angeles, California.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han served as chair and discussant in the panel, “Revisiting the Jin from Digital, Political, Geocultural, and Long-Term Perspectives,” at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2023 annual meeting in Boston. The panel was sponsored by the Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented her work, “Activist Echoes: Connecting French Anti-Salazarism to Opposition to the Algerian War,” at a panel on ‘Leftist Expertise” during the joint Society for French Historical Studies and Western Society for French History conference in Detroit over Spring Break. She also moderated a discussion with three authors on their newly published books about youth activism, anti-imperialism, and radical politics in the Francophone world.

Samantha Alvarado ’22 (Anthropology) presented a paper titled “Challenging Norms: Gender, Obstetrics, and the Gynecological Massage in Mexico in the 1920s,” coauthored with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones at the Southern Association for the History of Science and Medicine 2023 Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA. This project was the culmination of a faculty-student research collaboration with Hernández Berrones, who mentored her through the design of the project, archival work in the summer of 2022 in Mexico City, and the production of the conference paper. Alvarado received multiple compliments for the breadth and depth of her project and even an invitation by the editor of the top-notch blog on the history of medicine, Nursing Clio, to submit her work for online publication.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han presented the paper, “An Integrated Empire: The “Great Liao” in the Tenth Century,” at the 233rd Meeting of the American Oriental Society in Los Angeles.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower recorded an episode for the “Tudors Dynasty” Podcast. In the episode, Hower’s co-author, Valerie Schutte, and Hower discussed their two-book edited collection, Mary I in Writing and Writing Mary I, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in mid-2022, and the complicated life and afterlife of England’s first crowned queen regnant. The pair were the final, culminating episode in a special series on Mary I. “Tudors Dynasty” has been running since 2017 and has over 130,000 downloads per month. The episode is available here.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published a review, “The Last Dreams of Empire,” as part of a Tocqueville21 forum discussing Megan Brown’s recent book, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han presented the paper, “The Newly Integrated Empire: Liao Taizong’s Rule over the Middle Kingdom,” at the Kitan Network Annual Symposium 2023, hosted by Waseda University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “The Municipal Doomsday Machinist? Ralph de Toledano and the Popularization of Public Sector Union Critiques in Postwar America” to the DC Labor History Seminar Series on January 13.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited as a lecturer and discussant to the inquiry immersion elective course on Decolonization within the Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He virtually gave the talk: “Colonial Legacies in the Mexican Pharmaceutical Industry: The Instituto Médico Nacional (1888-1905) and the Exploration of Medicinal Plants” to medical students and guided a discussion about how to dismantle those legacies.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited to participate in the seminar Itinerante of History and Historiography of Sciences and Technologies jointly hosted by UNAM, CINVESTAV, and COLMEX. He responded to and commented on the presentation “El genérico espectacular: los medicamentos y la simipolítica en México,” The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and theSimipolitical in Mexico by Cori Hayden. The seminar was broadcasted on YouTube and Facebook.

Associate professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper entitled “Securing Thresholds: Housing, Family Size, and Alleged Delinquency” at the Western Society for French History Annual Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, on November 4.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower recorded an episode for the “Not Just the Tudors” Podcast, hosted by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. In the episode, Hower’s co-author, Valerie Schutte, and Hower discussed their two-book edited collection, Mary I in Writingand Writing Mary I, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan earlier this year, and the fraught history and memory of England’s first crowned queen regnant more generally. “Not Just the Tudors” has been running since April 2021 and has had over 6 million downloads. The episode is available here.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled, “‘Sole Hope of Caesar’s  Side’: Humanism and History in the Reign of Mary I and Philip II,” at the Northeast Conference on  British Studies annual gathering, which took place in a hybrid format at Bates College and online  October 21-23.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited as the inaugural lecturer of the First-Year Experience lecture series at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio on October 12. Berrones’s talk drew from his own research and career trajectory to reflect on the role of the liberal arts in education, the value of interdisciplinary study, and a commitment to lifelong learning.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published virtually three translations of primary sources from and on the Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing, a school that thrived in Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with other translations on reproduction, abortion, and obstetrics from Mexico and Brazil, the translations are part of the new “Advanced Topic: Reproductive Histories” section of the History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean (HOSLAC) archive hosted by the University of New Hampshire. The contributors’ goal is to create a repository of primary sources accessible in their original format, transcribed in their original language, and translated into English to teach reproductive histories to undergraduate and graduate students. The new section is available on the HOSLAC website along with Hernández Berrones’s three translations: “Handbook from Nursing and Obstetrics School (1920),” “Three Clinical Histories (1929–1931),” and “Report on Nursing and Obstetrics School (1936).”

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower moderated a conversation with Peniel E. Joseph of the University of Texas at Austin at Lark & Owl Booksellers in Georgetown on his new book  The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. 

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published the chapter “Healers and Doctors: A History of the Healing Occupations in Mexico” in the book Healthcare in Latin America: History, Society, Culture,  edited by David S. Dalton and Douglas J. Weatherford (University of Florida Press, 2022). From the perspective of medical pluralism, this chapter takes an innovative historiographical approach to trace the healing professions in the history of Mexico. The pluralistic nature of Mexican medicine has been a reality since colonial times, yet medical professionals disqualified healers with non- or limited academic background as unscientific, unreliable, and even criminals. If historians of medicine in Mexico writing in the first half of the 20th century admired the professionalization of medicine and made it the center of their narratives, late 20th-century historians questioned the utility of a process that privileged physicians and limited the scope of narratives to one form of health care. Structured with the periods and categories of the history of biomedicine to help readers compare with other national contexts, the chapter shows how the complex relationships among a wide array of health providers, government administrations, and historical frameworks shaped new and varied forms of healthcare provision that adapted to the social, cultural, and political landscape.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “‘An Empire of Itself’: Constructing and Contesting Imperial Kingship in the Early Modern World” at the 2022 Kings & Queens Conference, held June 29–July 2 via hybrid format at Nantes University in France. The conference, which was sponsored by the Royal Studies Network at the University of Winchester in England and the Center for Research on International and Atlantic History at Nantes University, focused on the theme “Monarchy and Empire.” 

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower organized the Britain and the World 2022 Conference at the University of Plymouth in England, held June 14–17. The conference welcomed nearly 150 interdisciplinary scholars from across the globe for three full days of papers, plenaries, and roundtables on Britain’s relationship with the wider world from the 16th century to the present. In addition to evaluating abstracts, coordinating the program, and helping lead things on the ground, Hower presented a paper, “Patrons of Empire: Mary I, Philip II, and the Broadening British World, 1553–1558,” based on her latest edited book project; took part in a delayed launch for her 2020 monograph, Tudor Empire; and chaired two sessions, a roundtable on the academic job market on both sides of the Atlantic and a plenary featuring an expert in the study of piracy and lead historian behind the recently announced discovery of the Gloucester, which was shipwrecked in 1682 off the coast of Norfolk. 

Associate Professor of History Jess Hower published Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, and Fiction, the second book in a two-volume edited collection. The companion to Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representation, which was published earlier this spring, the book is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s internationally renowned “Queenship and Power” series and features 10 original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Hower wrote the introduction with her coeditor, Valerie Schutte. The archival research, writing, and (especially) editing processes were supported by a Jones Competitive Course Release Sabbatical across the 2020–2021 academic year. The book may be ordered online.

History major Saúl Zúñiga ’22 presented a poster titled “To Live and Birth On: Mexican Midwives’ Prosperity into Modernity” at the 95th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, held April 21–24 in Saratoga Springs, New York. The poster is the culmination of a faculty-student research project carried out in the summer of 2021 with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones and a King Creativity Fund award Zúñiga used to further his archival research in Mexico City in the winter of the same year.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published the chapter “An Undesirable Past: Free Medical Schools and the First Doctors of the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1945” in the book Transforming Medical Education: Historical Case Studies of Teaching, Learning, and Belonging in Medicine, edited by Delia Gavrus and Susan Lamb. The chapter examines the tensions between proprietary medical schools and post-revolutionary governments. It argues that free schools offered a space between popular and state medicine for the training of working-class Mexicans who reached communities with little access to medicine decades before government-sponsored medical schools and public health institutions implemented programs to do so. Sanitation as a cultural policy to modernize the nation led government institutions to treat free schools and their graduates as germs subject to eradication. Although unsuccessful, these institutions aimed to erase the schools’ history and ban their graduates from practice. The chapter demonstrates the central role of popular actors in the regulation of medical training and practice in Mexico after the revolution. 

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower published Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representation, the first book in a two-volume edited collection. The book is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s internationally renowned “Queenship and Power” series and features 12 original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Hower wrote the introduction with her coeditor, Valerie Schutte, and also wrote a stand-alone chapter, “‘Horrible and Bloudye’ or ‘Most Serene and Potent’: Mary I and Empire.” The archival research, writing, and (especially) editing processes were supported by a Jones Competitive Course Release Sabbatical across the 2020–2021 academic year. The first volume is available here; volume two should be out later this summer.

Associate Professor of History Jess Hower presented the paper “‘Verye True and Undoubted Heire and Inheritrix’: Mary I, Lady Jane Grey, and History” at the 2022 South Central Renaissance Conference (SCRC), which was held virtually March 3–5. The conference was sponsored by the University of Alabama and included the Queen Elizabeth I Society. The paper stemmed from a chapter Hower wrote for an edited collection of 12 essays on mid-Tudor queenship that she is coediting for Palgrave Macmillan’s “Queenship and Power” series. She has been invited to present the keynote address at the 2023 SCRC at the University of California, Berkeley.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones discussed his chapter “Mystic of Medicine, Modern Curandero, and ‘Improvised Doctor’: Francisco I. Madero and the Practice of Homeopathy in Rural Mexico at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” from The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America,edited by Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gomez, during the undergraduate seminar Cultures and Media of Environmental Health taught by Rebecca Earles at Rice University.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published the article “Plural Medicine, Medical Expertise, and Public Health in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexico” [十九世纪和二十世纪墨西哥的多元医学、医学专业知识和公共卫生] in the collective volume “Disease and Health in Latin American History” edited by Diego Armus and published by the University of Shanghai’s Journal of the Social History of Medicine and Health. The collection brought together both U.S. and Latin American historians who offered an overview of thematic interests and methodological approaches in the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, and the southern cone of South America. Originally written in English and translated into Mandarin, Hernández Berrones’s article examines the persistent tension between traditional and biomedical healing approaches in modern Mexico and offers the kaleidoscopic landscape of healing traditions in Mexico, including indigenous medicine, homeopathy, and spiritual healing.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones organized a panel titled “Reproducing the Nation: Midwives, Mothers, and Citizenship across the Americas” for the American Historical Association 135th Annual Meeting, held January 6–9 in New Orleans, Louisiana. In addition to Hernández Berrones, the panel included scholars studying the medicalization of motherhood in 20th century Colombia and the practice and regulation of midwifery in New Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. Hernández Berrones presented a paper titled “Birthing the Children of the Revolution: The Practice of Midwifery in Mexico City, 1920–1940” where, using clinical histories written by midwives, he shows the role that gender, class, new medical knowledge, space, and patient-doctor-midwife relationships played in the birthing room during the construction of a national public health system in Mexico. 

Southwestern University was well represented at the 11th Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference, held October 20–23 in Baltimore, Maryland. The SU Racial History Project presented a panel featuring research from both 2020 and 2021 SCOPE projects. The panel included:

• Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson: “The Southwestern Racial History Project: An Overview”
• Kristine Velez ’22 (Anthropology): “McKenzie College: A Plantation on the Edge of Indigenous Territory”
• Saul Zuniga ’22 (History): “Soule University, Slavery, and the Confederacy”
• Juan Mojica ’22 (Anthropology): “Hispanics, Methodism, and the Reproduction of Whiteness”
• Rini Mannankara ’22 (Political Science and Anthropology): “The Presence and Representation of Blackness in the 1960s and 1970s at Southwestern University”

In addition, SU alumna Esther S. Ramos-Garcia ’19 (Latin American and Border Studies), who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies program, presented “Accompanando Ninos Migrantes ‘No Accompanados’: A Feminist Geopolitical Perspective on Central American Unaccompanied Minors in U.S. Long-Term Foster Care (LTFC)” as part of a panel titled “Asylum in Crisis.”

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower co-organized two panels for the Northeast Conference on British Studies Annual Conference, which took place virtually October 22–23. For the first panel, “Queen Mary I and Lady Jane Grey: Contemporary Perspectives and Representations,” she presented a paper titled, “‘Most Rightful Enheritoure of the Crowne Imperial of England’: Mary I, Lady Jane Grey, and the Power of Historical Precedent.” For the second, “Queen Mary I and Lady Jane Grey: Posthumous Perspectives and Representations,” she served as chair. Both panels came out of a new collection of 10 original essays Hower is coediting with Valerie Schutte on mid-Tudor queenship, currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan and slated for publication in late 2022 or early 2023.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship. Fellowships are awarded to those who have made an original contribution to the discipline of history, normally through the authorship of a book.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published an article titled “Anti-Salazarism and Transnational Solidarity: Franco-Portuguese Student Activism in the 1960s” in French History and Civilization (vol. 10). Byrnes considers the role of migrants in the 1968 protests, early networks of transnational activism, connections between campus life and broader social inequities, and students’ shared strategies for opposing authoritarianism, fascism, and imperialism.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published the chapter “Mystic of Medicine, Modern Curandero, and ‘Médico Improvisado’: Francisco I. Madero and the Practice of Homeopathy in Rural Mexico at the Turn of the 20th Century” in the volume The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America, edited by Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gómez. Through biographies of marginalized historical actors, the volume demonstrates the power of challenging traditional analytical dichotomies in the history of health and disease to illuminate the nuances and intricacies of Latin America’s medical past. In his chapter, Hernández Berrones describes the health and healing cultures in which one of the future leaders of the Mexican Revolution operated. Madero adopted spiritism and homeopathy, two innovative European practices, to find meaning in the world that surrounded him and to act upon it, inadvertently aligning with local popular health beliefs and practices and challenging the modern medical institutions that the regime he would overturn a decade later shaped.

Double major in Spanish and environmental studies Jasmine Herrera ’21 and history major Saul Zuñiga ’22 presented “Mapping the Past” at the ninth Phi Alpha Theta History Conference, held at Texas State University (TSU) on April 24, 2021. Their poster was awarded first place for undergraduate virtual presentations. The poster was selected from 19 submissions by students from TSU, Baylor, and UT Dallas, and the award included an honorarium and a certificate.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower presented the paper “Drawing an Empire: Elizabeth I, The Armada Portrait, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World” at the Dressing a Picture: Reimagining the Court Portrait 1500–1800 conference, held virtually May 6–7, 2021. The conference was organized, sponsored, and run by the University of Cambridge, where it was originally scheduled to take place.

Please join us in congratulating the recipients of the following awards:

• 2021 Teaching Awards
• Tenured: Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore
• Tenure-track: Assistant Professor of Business Gabriela Flores
• Visiting, part-time, and staff with faculty rank: Director of General Chemistry Labs Willis Weigand
• 2021 Jesse E. Purdy Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Works Award
• Tenured: Associate Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar
• Tenure-track: Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower
• 2021 Excellence in Advising Award
  • Professor of Spanish Laura Senio Blair

Double major in Spanish and environmental studies Jasmine Herrera ’21 and history major Saul Zuñiga ’22 presented a paper titled “Mapping the Past: A Look into the Distribution of Midwives from Escuela Libre de Obstetricia y Enfermeria in Mexico City during the 1920s and 30s” at the 9th Phi Alpha Theta History Conference organized by Texas State University and held virtually on April 24, 2021. Herrera and Zuñiga undertook their research, wrote the paper, and prepared the presentation under the mentorship of Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones during the 2020–2021 academic year. You can see their presentation here.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “Solidarity for Some, Solidarity for Later? Prison Guards, Police, and the (Labor) Politics of Mass Incarceration in the United States, 1960s–1990s” at “While There Is a Soul in Prison, I Am Not Free”: The History of Solidarity in Social and Economic Justice, a special conference jointly convened by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, the Cunningham Memorial Library, Indiana State University (ISU), and ISU’s Department of History on April 10, 2021.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower presented the paper “‘To Her Whose Virtues and Kingdoms He Inherits’: The Politics and Practice of Tudor Imperial Queenship” at the annual South Central Renaissance Conference, which was held virtually March 25–27, 2021. The conference was sponsored by Penn State University and included the Queen Elizabeth I Society (QEIS). The paper, which stemmed from a chapter Hower wrote for a two-volume edited collection of 20 essays on Mary I that she is coediting in Palgrave Macmillan’s Queenship and Power  series, won the QEIS’s Brandie Siegfried Memorial Prize for best paper by a senior scholar. The prize honors the paper “whose rigor, clarity, and elegant delivery embodied the scholarly principles Brandie demanded of herself and others.”

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones presented his research project “Birthing the Children of the Revolution: Midwifery in 20th-Century Mexico” to the Rice University Medical Humanities working group on February 12, 2021. He showcased the contributions of his former and current research assistants. His current research assistants, Eugenia Agobe ’23, Jasmine Herrera ’21, and Saul Zuñiga ’22, attended the event and learned about similar initiatives alongside graduate students at Rice.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower published a book with Palgrave Macmillan’s scholarly monographs division in December 2020. The book, titled Tudor Empire: The Making of Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485–1603, is part of the field-leading Britain and the Worldseries. Find the book here.

Associate Professor of History Melissa K. Byrnes published a piece on the lessons learned from the Paris riot of February 6, 1934, in relation to what could possibly happen and what should come after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Find the piece here.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published the article “‘You’ve Come a Long Way—Maybe’: Working Women, Comparable Worth, and the Transformation of the American Labor Movement, 1964–1989” in the December 2020 issue of the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly publication in the field of U.S. history. Read the article here.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes took part in the virtual joint 66th Society for French Historical Studies Conference and 22nd George Rudé Seminar in French History and Civilisation, which sadly did not take place as planned in Auckland, New Zealand. She gave a paper on student protests and state violence, “Anti-Salazarism and Transnational Solidarity: Franco-Portuguese Student Activism in the 1960s.” She also moderated a roundtable on Teaching French History in a Global Frame.

Meili Criezis  ’17 published a peer-reviewed article as part of the CTC Sentinel  special June issue on coronavirus and counterterrorism: “Pandemic Narratives: Pro-Islamic State Media and the Coronavirus.” Criezis also published “Islamic State Telegram Stickers: Purposes, Themes, and Narratives” for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology at King’s College London.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones presented virtually the paper titled ”Birthing the Children of the Revolution: Professional Midwifery in Mexico City during the 1920s and ’30s” at the Latin American Studies Association on May 14, 2020. In this paper, Hernández Berrones argues that the Escuela Libre de Obstetricia y Enfermeria was a gendered space where different medical knowledges, obstetrical practices, and political positions coincided, offering midwifery students a poorly defined and consequently open space for challenging the growing presence of male doctors in the intimacy and domesticity of women´s reproductive lives.

Meili Criezis ’17 published the peer-reviewed article “Online Deceptions: Renegotiating Gender Boundaries on ISIS Telegram” in the University of Leiden’s online journal Perspectives on Terrorism in February. She has since taken a new position as a program associate with the Polarization and Extremism Research Lab at American University. 

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones presented a paper titled “Midwife Tomasa C. De Jumper: The Appropriation of and Contestation to Obstetrical Knowledge after the Mexican Revolution” in the panel “Health and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Latin America” at the 67th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies celebrated in Austin, TX, in March 4–8, 2020. In his paper, Hernández Berrones discussed how clinical histories taken by midwives in Mexico City in the 1930s demonstrate the key role midwives trained in proprietary medical schools had in helping women give birth to their children both in public spaces and in domestic settings. These highly skilled women challenged assumptions by male physicians and government authorities about their training institutions and practical skills. They were the ones in charge of giving birth to the children of the revolution.

Danyale Kellogg  ’19, a graduate from the history department at SU and now a Master of International Affairs candidate at the Bush School of Government and Public Service of Texas A&M University, presented a paper at the 11th Annual Texas A&M History Conference, “The Challenge of Change,” in February. The paper, titled “Forgotten Intelligence from the Forgotten War: Victory Disease, American Intelligence Failures, and the US Government´s False Perception of the Chinese During the Korean War,” was based on her final capstone paper where she examined US Intelligence failures to anticipate the Chinese intervention in the Korean War in the early 1950s.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones reflected on the relevance of homeopathy for understanding access to medicine in Mexico and Latin America in the past and in the present in an interview for the blog of the Brazilian journal História Ciências Saúde—Manguinhos. You can read the interview here.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones’s entry “A Recipe for the Body: Chiropractic Medicine in Mexico (Part I)” was published by The Recipes Project, a blog dedicated to food, magic, art, science, medicine, and everything related to recipes, from magical charms to veterinary remedies. The entry offers a brief analysis of a few documentary ingredients Hernández Berrones found prospecting the archival mines of unorthodox healers in postrevolutionary Mexico in his efforts to concoct a nuanced narrative of 20th-century medicine in that country. Mexican chiropractors navigated a still-undefined space where national traditions blended with domestic and foreign modernities. Their bodily recipes kept the bodies of thousands of Mexicans fit to modernize a nation, and their activism pushed for the health of the medical body politic.