Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma presented a seminar paper, titled “Food, Gender, and Power in Environmental History in Southern Africa,” at the National University of Lesotho in Roma on September 3. The paper historicizes how African women variedly used food to shape and control cultural, political, and economic landscapes in southern Africa and how this enables us to rethink their contributions within African Environmental History.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes was invited to be part of a workshop on “Anti-Racism after Empire (1968-2005)” at Queen Mary University of London. She presented a paper titled “From Anticolonialism to Antiracism in Saint-Denis,” drawing from her latest archival research in the Paris suburbs to look at evolving forms of solidarity.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han was invited to give a talk, titled “The Rule of the Shatuo Turks: Identity Formation in Medieval Sino-Inner Asia,” at the Asia Center at Seoul National University.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han was invited to give a talk, titled “The New Three Kingdoms: Reframing the Legacy of Tang,” at Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology in Taiwan.

Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History Jessica Hower had her article, titled “Teaching Pirates: The Perils and Promises of Using Piracy in Pedagogy,” published in The History Teacher, Volume 59, Number 3 (May 2026). The piece, which reflects on her experiences teaching in Southwestern’s FYS program, is also the cover inspiration for the issue, titled “The Craft of Teaching: Novel Approaches to History.” More information is available here.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma presented a paper titled “‘Put it in their food:’ Food, Power and Social Control in Zimbabwe” at the Workshop on Southern Africa (WoZA), held in Connecticut from May 1–3. The paper stems from an ongoing SURF project exploring the gendered history and politics of African foodways.

Communications and Latin American and border studies double major Mia Santoscoy ’26 and political science major and Latin American and border studies minor Natalia Morales Robles ’27 presented, along with Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Border Studies Jethro Hernández Berrones, at the Southwestern Council of Latin American Studies 73rd Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV. Their presentation, titled “Mapping Midwives from Mexico City: A Visualization Project Introducing Undergraduates in the United States to the History of Reproduction in Mexico,” described the methodology to produce historical digital maps and a website showcasing the history of the Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing in Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the work of some of its graduates. Students discussed their contributions to the project and the impact this work has had on their academic experiences and skill development. The website can be viewed here.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han presented the paper “Identity Changes of the Elite Xianbei in Medieval China” at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2026 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han was invited to give a talk titled “From Kin to Pseudo-Kin: The Transformation of Kinship Politics and Diplomacy from the Early Medieval Period to the Liao–Song–Jin Era” at The Great Entanglement: Reframing East Eurasian Histories in the Longue Durée workshop hosted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The workshop was sponsored by the University of British Columbia, Cornell University, and the James P. Geiss & Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes took part in two roundtable sessions at the Society for French Historical Studies annual conference. For “Writing the French Empire Today,” she spoke about her 2023 book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (University of Nebraska). As part of “French History in the Small Liberal Arts Classroom,” she discussed “Using France to Teach about Race.”

Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History Jessica Hower gave an invited talk titled “‘Bring[ing] Up the Bodies’: Queenship in History, Fiction, and the Public” at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma published the article “‘Political Grains’: Hunger and the Struggles for Food in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, c.2000–2010” in The Journal of Asian and African Studies. This piece reflects on the everyday experiences of ordinary citizens in accessing food during the protracted crisis years in Zimbabwe’s history. The article can be read here.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes took part in a roundtable review of Isaac Stanley-Becker’s book Europe without Borders: A History for the H-Diplo/Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum. The review can be read here.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes organized and helped lead a workshop titled “Leadership in a Small Liberal Arts College History Program” at the American Historical Association’s (AHA) annual meeting in Chicago. Dr. Byrnes is co-chair of the AHA’s working group on small liberal arts colleges.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes was featured on the New Books Network podcast for her book Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (University of Nebraska Press, 2024). The episode can be heard here. Dr. Byrnes’ book was also recently reviewed on H-Diplo. The review can be read here.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma recently published a book chapter titled “‘Agriculture is a scam!’: Agrotechnologies and the Agrarian Fallacy Among African Grain Farmers in Colonial Zimbabwe, the 1920s to 1970s” in Environment, Technology, and Development. The chapter explores the experiences of grain farmers and demonstrates the socio-environmental impacts that fertilizers and hybrid seeds had on African agriculture and food (in)security during the colonial years in Zimbabwe. This chapter is also available Open Access here.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes was part of a roundtable on “The State of the Field: European Urban History” at the Urban History Association Conference in Los Angeles. Her opening remarks focused on cities as imperial (and postcolonial) spaces, renewed emphasis on community agency, and the rich intersection of local and transnational histories.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan U. Kauma presented the paper “‘Political Grains:’ Bad Politics, Hunger, and the Weaponization of Grain in Zimbabwe, c.2000-2010” at the 2025 Rocky Mountain Workshop on African History, held at Portland State University from September 12-13. The paper has also been accepted for publication by the Journal of Asian and African Studies.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper titled “French Anti-Salazarism in the 1960s: Allying against Imperial Violence” at the Global Consortium for French Historical Studies in Paris, organized on the theme of “Resistance.”

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes contributed to a published roundtable review of Jack Snyder’s book Human Rights for Pragmatists  for H-Diplo and the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum. It can be read here.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han presented the paper “Changes to Diplomatic Relations through Marriage Alliance Systems in Middle Period China (304-907)” at the T’ang Studies Society Conference, hosted by the T’ang Studies Society and the Elling Eide Center in Sarasota, FL.

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma was awarded the inaugural American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) Research Fellowship at the just-ended ASEH annual conference in Pittsburgh. He also presented his forthcoming paper, “Farming the God’s Way: Rethinking Fertilizers and Hybrid Seeds in African Grain Production in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1950s to 1970s.”

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones presented a brief lecture titled “Mapeando las prácticas de partería de la ciudad de México: La Escuela Libre de Obstetricia y Enfermería y la visualización de los partos en casa después de la revolución. [Mapping Mexico City’s midwifery practices: The Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing and the visualization of at-home births after the revolution].” The presentation was part of the activities of the second workshop of MX.digital, an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the United States and Mexico, including historians, anthropologists, geographers, and computer scientists, interested in the creation of digital repositories and maps for the visualization of the history of Mexico, organized by the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Aguascalientes, and sponsored by John Hopkins University. He became a member of the curricular committee tasked to design a general and flexible curriculum to disseminate knowledge, methodology, and projects on digital and public history for the collection, organization, and visualization of historical information.

Assistant Professors of Sociology Adriana Ponce and Amanda Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin, Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma, and Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro published “Teaching with Color: Thematic Hires and the Politics of Teaching in Texas,” in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. This article joins a growing conversation in the humanities and humanistic social sciences on ways faculty of color shoulder the burden of thinking about our shared futures as racialized, intersectional, and collaborative. You can find the article here.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes co-led a workshop on “Building a Small Liberal Arts College History Department,” as well as a mentoring session for early career scholars interested in working at a small liberal arts college, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). She is about to begin a term as co-chair of the AHA working group on small liberal arts colleges. She also currently serves on the AHA’s Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award committee.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones presented his work, titled “Visualizing at-home births in Mexico City after the revolution: Midwives from the Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing, 1920s and 30s,” at the seminario permanente de investigación de Atlas.mx, sponsored by CIDE, CONACYT, INEGI, UCMexus, UC Riverside, and John Hopkins University. He discussed his previous work with students to develop a digital map to locate midwives who graduated from this school and the women they aided. The talk also introduced his new project, co-directed with Assistant Professor of Geographic Information Sciences Stephanie Insalaco, to create an interactive digital map aimed at making the historical archive of these midwives public.

Professor of History Melissa Byrnes convened a salon session, “Engaging the Public through French History,” at the Western Society for French History’s fiftieth-anniversary annual conference in San Francisco. She also chaired and commented on a session about “Managing Gender and Families in Mid-Twentieth-Century France.”

Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma gave a poster presentation titled, “‘Eating money’: Dollarization and the monetization of grain in Zimbabwe, 2000-08,” at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ Workshop on Commodity Price Volatility in New York, on October 31.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones participated in a roundtable titled “Reproductive Science: Comparative Perspectives on the Past; Global Inspirations for the Future” at the 2024 annual meeting of the History of Science Society. His contributions were based on his most recent research project, titled “An In(di)visibilized Labor: The Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing and the Erasure of Professional Midwifery in Post-Revolutionary Mexico City.” He argues that this free school offered an alternative program that challenged the state’s model of birth by giving its graduates more autonomy to perform their services, including complicated births, at home without male doctors’ oversight. Despite the essential role of midwives both at home and in welfare institutions, the normalization of natural births, the regulations that restricted midwives’ intervention to natural births, and their ability to exercise obstetric autonomy just at home rendered midwives’ labor necessary for the reproduction of the Mexican nation, yet invisible.

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.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones coauthored the introductory piece for a special dossier titled “Homeopathy in Latin America and Spain: Local Developments and International Networks” with historian Patricia Palma for the journal História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos. The authors came up with the idea of this collection when they saw the number of contributions on this topic at an international conference in Rio in 2017. The dossier is the first collection of articles on the topic for Latin America.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published an article titled “Breaking the Boundaries of Professional Regulation: Medical Licensing, Foreign Influence, and the Consolidation of Homeopathy in Mexico” in the journal História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos. Prompted by colleagues and students who attended the 2017 Borderlands Symposium, he reexamined his doctoral research considering historical actors beyond national borders and produced this analysis. Hernández Berrones argues that Mexican homeopaths’ plural approach to medicine reflected their own plural political position on professional values and regulations. Raising the concerns of the national medical community, they liberally used foreign credentials, knowledge, products, and professional associations to increase their clientele, impress government officials, and obtain support for the successful institutionalization of homeopathy in Mexico.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published a short review of Steven Attewell’s People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan in the September issue of History: Reviews of New Books.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “From Benign Mascot to Enemy of All Mankind, and Back Again: The Problem and Promise of Pirates in Pedagogy” and led the plenary roundtable on teaching piracy studies at the Problem of Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Plunder at Sea across the World from the Ancient to the Modern, at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, June 24–26, 2019. The conference was sponsored by the Royal Historical Society, the Society for Nautical Research, and the University of Strathclyde.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published “Public Sector Unions in the United States” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History (ed. Timothy Gilfoyle; Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 271–285). The essay is a (slightly) modified version of a piece that was originally included in the digital Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History and was selected for traditional print publication based in part on heavy online traffic.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones was invited to present his work in the Seminar on Otherness at the Center of Interdisciplinary Research in the Sciences and the Humanities of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He presented the paper “Mystic of Medicine, Modern Curandero, and ‘Improvised Doctor’: Francisco I. Madero and the Practice of Homeopathy in Rural Mexico at the Turn of the 20th Century” on June 14, 2019. Hernandez Berrones discussed with undergraduate and graduate students the fluid limits among religious medical beliefs, indigenous healing rituals, and academic medicine as well as the geographic, social, economic, and cultural elements that shape and disrupt these boundaries in Mexico.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published an article, “Diplomacy at the End of Empire: Evolving French Perspectives on Portuguese Colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Cold War History.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “The Union of the Future: The Politics of the Presidency in a Public Sector Union, 1958–1964” at the annual meeting of the Labor and Working Class History Association Conference, held May 30–June 1 at Duke University in Durham, NC.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones was invited to the Permanent Seminar on the History of Medicine and Public Health in Latin America at the School of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He presented the paper “Proletarian or Bourgeois? The Dilemma of the Mexican Medical Profession after the Revolution of 1910” on May 28, 2019. In the paper, Hernandez Berrones describes the tensions among different groups of physicians between their professional liberty and their limitations in the context of the postrevolutionary government´s efforts to provide health to all Mexicans.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of History Iris Ma was invited to give a presentation titled “The Making of ‘Youth’ in Modern China: Reflections on the May Fourth Movement” for the panel commemorating the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Revolution on May 2, 2019. The event was jointly organized by the Institute for Historical Studies and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes served as discussant on a panel on “The Empire beyond the Ivory Tower: Non-Academics and the Legacies of Colonial History in Contemporary France” at the Society for French Historical Studies Annual Conference, in Indianapolis, IN. She also spoke at a round-table discussion on “Using Digital Tools to Do Public History.”

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower  attended the British Scholar Society’s annual Britain and the World conference in Kansas City, MO, April, 11–14, 2019. She served as chair on two panels, “Rethinking ‘Centers’ and ‘Peripheries’ in the Early Modern World” and “Commercial and Imperial Relationships in the Early Modern British World,” and took part in the editorial board meeting.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones was awarded a prestigious 2019 Summer Stipend by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). NEH grants are highly competitive. Applicants go through a three-step review process that involves specialists, NEH staff, and the National Council of the Humanities. This year, the NEH offered grants to 11% of approximately 1,000 applications. Hernandez Berrones will use the grant to continue working on the manuscript of his book project, A Revolution in Small Doses: Homeopathy, the Profession, and the State in Mexico 1910–1943.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes  published a review of Paul Silverstein’s Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic  in H-France Review  Vol. 19 (March 2019), No. 43.

Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power  (University of Florida Press, 2018) has won the 2019 Best Book Award from the United Association of Labor Education. Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower  contributed a chapter titled “‘A Threshold Moment’: Public-Sector Organizing and Civil Rights Unionism in the Postwar South.”

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes chaired a panel on “Survival in the French Empire: Health, ‘Heathens,’ and Heritage” at the 20th & 21st Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium in Oklahoma City, OK, March 14.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower‘s chapter “‘… And Greedily Devoured Them’: The Cannibalism Discourse and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1536–1612” was published in the book To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic (ed. Rachel B. Herrmann, University of Arkansas Press, 2019, pp. 97–114.)

History major Danyale Kellogg ’19 was selected to receive the Cooperative Education and Internship Association (CEIA) 2018 Internship Student Achievement Award. CEIA recognizes distinguished achievement and excellence by annually recognizing outstanding students who have excelled in or made significant impact in work-integrated learning. Kellogg will receive a plaque and scholarship, which will be presented to her at the Awards Banquet during the annual CEIA conference in Chicago, IL.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “‘Descended of Bastard Blood’: The Creation of Monarchy, Nation, and Empire in the Early Modern British Atlantic World, ca. 1485–1510” at the Monarchy and Modernity since 1500 Conference at the University of Cambridge, Jan. 7–9, 2019.

Eleven Southwestern University faculty members have won Sam Taylor Fellowship grants to support their research, with award amounts ranging from $1,000 to $1,600. Sam Taylor Fellowships are selected through a competitive application process and are provided by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church. This year’s recipients are

• Professor of Physics Steven Alexander, “Generating Energy from Hot Sidewalks” (awarded $1,200)
• Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala, “The Politics of Stealth Halal: Re-Presenting the Islamic Origins of U.S. Meat Products” (awarded $1,600)
• Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth , “Nature Education in the German Classroom: Possibilities for Integration and Inclusion?” (awarded $1,400)
• Professor of Biology Romi Burks, “Unravelling the Mystery: Genetic Differentiation of Chinese and Japanese Mysterysnails Using 16S” (awarded $1,400)
• Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones, “With Indigenist Spirit: Doctors on Spiritual Practices in Post-Revolutionary Mexico” (awarded $1,500)
• Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson, “Human–Jaguar Becomings and Racial Capitalism in Belize” (awarded $1,000)
• Associate Professor of French Francis Mathieu, “Research on Claire de Duras’s Avant-Garde Novella, Ourika” (awarded $1,400)
• Associate Professor of French Aaron Prevots, “Gestures toward the Sacred: Guillevic, Vargaftig, Tellermann, Michel” (awarded $1,400)
• Associate Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar, “Contemporary Modes of Parenting: Disrupting the Representation of Stepmothers in Popular Culture” (awarded $1,500)
• Associate Professor of Spanish Maria De Los Angeles Rodriguez Cadena, “Cultural Memory and Historical Fiction: Women of the Past on Television and Film by Four Contemporary Mexican Women Directors” (awarded $1,400)
• Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, “Researching Attachments to American Political Institutions” (awarded $1,600)

Meili Criezis ’17 published an article titled “Islam, Gender, and the Algerian Revolution for Independence” in Visions & Revisions: New Scholars, New Interpretations, vol. 11 (2018). Visions and Revisionsis an interdisciplinary journal for outstanding graduate and undergraduate essays, published annually by the History, Politics, Languages and Cultures Department at Edinboro University. The article was based on Criezis’s history capstone project and drew from her original archival work as part of a faculty–student research project with Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes in Paris during the summer of 2016.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones organized and moderated a panel titled “Contending Positions: Science, Medicine, and Religion in 19th- and 20th-century Mexico” for the 2018 History of Science Society annual meeting in Seattle, WA, Nov. 1–4. Gathering a diverse set of panelists at different career stages, the panel was one of three at the meeting discussing the history of science and medicine in Latin America. Dr. Hernández Berrones also presented a paper titled “Medicine in Revolution: Mapping Homeopathy in the Landscape of Mexican Medical Science, 1861–1934.” This paper argues that Mexican homeopaths used vitalism, a natural philosophy in tension with mechanicism, to promote an approach to medicine centered on the human being. In opposition to the model proposed by the National University, the homeopaths’ approach adapted to the economic and social needs of the rural and working-class population they served.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper, “Using ‘Rights’ to Enshrine Discrimination and Disadvantage: Local Policymakers and North African Migrants in the French Suburbs after 1945,” at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Phoenix, AZ, Nov. 10.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History  Joseph Hower  traveled to Phoenix, AZ, for the 43rd annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, Nov. 8 – 10. He participated in a roundtable discussion of Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Julia Riechert’s new work-in-progress,  The 9-to-5 Project , which explores the struggles of working women in the 1970s and 1980s. While in Phoenix, he also chaired and commented on a panel titled “Race, Inequality, and the Struggle for Workers’ Rights in Brazil, South Korea, and the United States.”

Meili Criezis’17 was a panelist for a showing and discussion of Gillo Pontecorvos’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiersat the Southwestern Historical Association’s annual meeting in Orlando, FL, in October.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones presented a paper titled “Teaching Medicine to the Working Class: Private Medical Schools in Revolutionary Mexico, 1910–1940” at the 15th International Reunion of Historians of Mexico in Guadalajara, Mexico, Oct. 18–21. In this paper, he argues that “free schools” proposed a transitional model of medical training between the Porfiriato and the revolution. This model proposed to socialize the medical profession, keeping it free from state regulation before the revolutionary state decided to implement policies and programs aimed at regulating medical certification, geographic distribution, and labor.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented two papers at the 40th Annual North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. The first, “Forty Years after Prop 13: The Past, Present, and Future of Public Sector Anti-Unionism,” explored the connection between antitax conservative politics in the 1970s and the recent wave of legal and legislative challenges to government employee unions. The second, “The Memory of Memphis and the (Un)Making of the Modern Public Sector Labor Movement,” examined the way that union activists have used instrumental commemorations of a strike by 1,300 sanitation workers that culminated with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. over the past half century. Both papers drew on portions of his current book project about public-sector unions in the postwar United States.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones was invited to participate in a workshop of precirculated papers titled The Gray Zones of Medicine(s): Towards a History of Healers and Healing in Colonial and Modern Latin America and the Caribbeanat the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He presented the article “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.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published a chapter titled “‘A Threshold Moment’: Public-Sector Organizing and Civil Rights Unionism in the Postwar South” in Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power, eds. Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt (Gainesville: University of Florida Press).

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “‘Partners Both’ in Gender and Empire: Mary I, Elizabeth I, and the Construction of Female Imperial Kingship, ca. 1550-1570” at the seventh Kings and Queens conference, “Ruling Sexualities: Sexuality, Gender and the Crown,” at the University of Winchester and Hampton Court Palace, United Kingdom, July 9–13, 2018. Her attendance was funded by a grant from the conference, which was sponsored by the Royal Studies Journal, Royal Studies Network, University of Winchester, Society for Renaissance Studies, and Historic Royal Palaces.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower delivered a paper titled “The Politics of Work and the Work of Politics: Public Sector Labor and the Tax Revolt at Forty” on July 4 at a special one-day conference on “The American Moment: Past, Present, and Future” at the University of Reading, United Kingdom.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published an op-ed column titled “With Janus, the Supreme Court Guts the Modern Labor Movement” in the Washington Post’s Made by History digital feature.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “‘Bloody’ or ‘Most Serene and Potent’?: Mary I, The British Empire, and the Making of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” at the British Scholar Society’s annual Britain and the World Conference at Exeter University, Exeter, UK, June 21–23, 2018. She also chaired a panel on “Relations and Perceptions in the Early Modern Caribbean.”

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes was featured in a podcast on the legacies of 1968. Listen here: Part I, Part II.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower was the featured guest for Union City Radio’s “Labor History Today” podcast for the week of May 13. He discussed the life of labor leader Jerry Wurf and the upcoming Supreme Court case of Janus v. AFSCME. The full podcast is available here. The discussion begins at the 18:00 minute mark.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “‘Thy bright sphere’: Elizabeth I, the Armada, and the Atlantic World, ca. 1570–1600” at the “Elizabeth I: The Armada and Beyond, 1588 to 2018” Conference, sponsored by Royal Museums Greenwich and the Society for Court Studies, at Queen’s House and National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, United Kingdom, April 19–21, 2018.

Emma Walsh,  class of 2018, presented a paper based on her history honors research, “The Nuremberg War Trials and the Legacy of the Armenians,” at the 9th Annual Texas A&M History Conference, “Conflicts and Resolutions.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “Betty the Bureaucrat?: Public Workers and Comparable Worth in the Long 1970s” at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Sacramento, Calif., April 13.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower published an article titled “‘All Good Stories’: Historical Fiction in Pedagogy, Theory, and Scholarship” in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 23, no. 1 (January 2019, online publication March 28, 2018): 1–48. She was also appointed to the Journal’s editorial board.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper, “Awakening the Public Conscience: The French Committee for Amnesty in Portugal and Anti-Salazar Activism,” at the Society for French Historical Studies Annual Conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., March 8–10. She also chaired and provided the formal comment for a panel on “Transnational Human Rights in the Twentieth Century: Decolonization and Activism in the ’68 Years.”

Esteban Woo Kee , class of 2018, presented his research on “ACT UP and the Revolution of Gay Rights” at the 6th Annual Human Rights Undergraduate Research Workshop at Illinois Wesleyan University, Feb. 23 – 25, 2018.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper titled “Anti-Salazarism and Student Solidarity: Franco-Portuguese Student Activism in the 1960s” at the 1968 in Global Perspectives conference hosted by the University of South Carolina, Feb. 15–17, 2018.

Associate Professor of History Melissa K. Byrnes  gave a talk for the Newcomers & Friends of Georgetown about philanthropy, community engagement, and the lessons and experiences from her First Year Seminar, “Doing Good and Doing It Well.”

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower gave an invited talk on her current book project, Tudor Empire: The Making of Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485-1603, at Oxford University, Oxford, UK, on Oct. 31, 2017. The lecture was part of “The Long History of Ethnicity & Nationhood Reconsidered Seminar Series,” Michaelmas Term 2017, sponsored by TORCH: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, Bing Overseas Studies Program Stanford University, and the University of Birmingham BRIHC: Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones co-organized the symposium “(Un)Bounded Doctors: Nation, Profession, and Place in the Local and Global Formation of Medical Groups in the 19th and 20th Centuries” together with Dr. Beatriz Teixeira Weber from Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil, for the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 23–29, 2017. The symposium brought together scholars from McGill University (Canada), University of Western Ontario (Canada), Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (Brazil), Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz (Brazil), Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (Mexico), Brown University (USA), and Southwestern University (USA) to discuss the demography of doctors as a result of state-building processes, migration, professional organization, and the provision of health. In this panel, Hernandez Berrones presented the paper “From Foreign Healers to International Doctors: Internationalism and the Consolidation of Homeopathy in Mexico, 1853–1942.” The ideas for this paper resulted from conversations with Latin American & Border Studies committee members about the inclusion of Borderland Studies in the Latin American Studies Program and with students and faculty during the First Borderlands Symposium in the fall of 2016.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “’Every Candidate…Is Running Against Our Union’: AFSCME’s Response to Tax Cut Fever in the Late 1970s” at the annual meeting of the Labor and Working Class History Association at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones organized the panel “Medical Pluralism in Latin America Revisited: Chinese Medicine, Homeopathy, and Psychoanalysis in the Latin American Landscape in the 19th and 20th Centuries” for the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn. (May 4–7, 2017). In this panel, he also presented the paper titled “’Hostilidad,’ ‘Desorden’ and ‘Indisciplina’: The Challenges of Medical Pluralism at the National Homeopathic Hospital during the Age of Institutionalization of Biomedicine in Mexico City, 1893–1934.”

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper “From ‘Ghetto’ to ‘Apartheid’: Education Policy as Housing Discrimination in 1970s Lyon” at the Society for French Historical Studies Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. She also participated in a special roundtable on “Human Rights in the Modern Francophone World.”

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “To bere the sam good hart’ of Empire: The Meaning and Making of British Imperialism in the Sixteenth Century” at the annual British Scholar Society’s Britain and the World Conference in Austin, Texas, on Apr. 6, 2017.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower published “Public Sector Unionism” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, eds. John Butler et. al.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower won a Summer Stipend fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the completion of his book, A Revolution in Government: Jerry Wurf and the Rise of Public Sector Unions in Postwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower delivered a paper titled “A Threshold Moment: Public Sector Organizing and Civil Rights Unionism in the Postwar South” at the biennial meeting of the Southern Labor Studies Association in Tampa, Fla. He also chaired and commented on a panel discussion titled “Organizing the New, New South: Labor Unions and Employers in the South during the 1970s and 1980s.”

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published an article titled “Ramadan in the Republic: Imperial necessity and local religious assistance to Muslim migrants” in a special issue of French Cultural Studies: “Religion in France: Belief, identity and laïcité.”

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “’We could not suffer it’: Kings, Popes, and the Construction of British Empire, ca. 1450–1550” before the Ecclesiastical History Society’s Winter Meeting at Magdalene College at Cambridge University in Cambridge, England on Jan. 14. The conference theme was “Church and Empire.”

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes debuted as an official contributor to the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog. Her first post, “2016 – Year of Complacency,” is on the importance of remembering as a means to combat complacency.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower delivered a pre-circulated paper titled “You’ve Come a Long Way—Maybe: Pay Equity, Public Workers, and the Transformation of American Labor, 1964–1985,” to the D.C. Labor Studies Seminar at George Washington University on Dec. 10.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones was the guest speaker of the History and Philosophy of Science Colloquium at the University of Texas, Austin, on Nov. 18. His talk titled “Medicine in Revolution: Mapping Homeopathy into the Landscape of Mexican Medical Science, 1861-1934” examined the tensions among several medical theories in the projects to bring European medical science to modernize national medical institutions and to provide scientific medical training to the Mexican population.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes gave the keynote address at the annual luncheon for the Seeds of Strength giving circle in Georgetown. She shared experiences, ideas, and open questions that came out of her First-Year Seminar, “Doing Good and Doing It Well.”

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “Utopia’s Empire: Thomas More, his Readers, and the Development of British Imperialism in the Tudor Century” before the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Bruges, Belgium, on Aug. 19, 2016. The paper was part of a special panel convened to mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of More’s Utopia (1516).

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower delivered a Brown Bag lunch talk titled “Pay Equity, Public Workers, and the Transformation of the American Labor Movement, 1972–1985” at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower received a John Fell Research Fund Grant from Oxford University to present a paper entitled “Auld Enemies and Auld Empires: Scotland, England, and Early Modern British Imperialism” at a special two-day conference on “Imperial Comparison” at All Soul’s College, Oxford University, in Oxford, United Kingdom on July 8–9, 2016.

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower attended the British Scholar Society’s Britain and the World Annual Conference at King’s College in London, United Kingdom, on June 22–24, 2016 where she presented the paper titled “A Whig in Wolf’s Clothing: Pop Culture, Historical Fiction, and British History from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Hilary Mantel.” The paper was part of the the conference’s very first pedagogy panel, and combined theory, teaching, and scholarly research.

Assistant Professor of Art History Allison Miller chaired a panel and presented the paper, “Jade Suits and Royal Power: Illuminating Artistic Production in the Regional Centers of the Western Han,” at the Seventh Worldwide Conference of the Society for East Asian Archaeology, held at Harvard University and Boston University on June 10th.

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe presented a lecture titled “Strolling with Power: New Studies on Movement and Viewing from the Elite Roman Villas of Stabiae” at the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Southern Italy with a special emphasis on “Politics and Performance in Western Greece.” The Symposium was held at the SCIE Center in the Palazzo Borgia in Siracusa, Sicily on Thursday, June 2, 2016. Howe is also the Scientific Director for Master Planning and Archaeology of the Stabiae Project.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones presented the paper titled A Revolution in Medical Training: The Making, Remaking, and Enduring of the National School of Homeopathic Medicine in Mexico, 1895–1936 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Minneapolis on April 30, 2016.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper, The View From Below: What We Learn From Local Migrant Histories, at the Council for European Studies (CES) International Conference in Philadelphia. She also chaired the committee that granted this year’s CES/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowships.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower’s article, “‘The Sparrows and the Horses’: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Family Assistance Plan, and the Liberal Critique of Government Workers, 1955–1977,” was published in the Journal of Policy History 28, no. 2.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes was part of a roundtable discussion on “Teaching Decolonization” at the Society for French Historical Studies Annual Conference in Nashville on March 4. Byrnes spoke about strategies to teach decolonization across an undergraduate history curriculum, with an emphasis on connecting the process of decolonization to other major developments.

American Association for the History of Medicine awards Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones the prestigious Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award for his project Medicine in a Revolution: Homeopathy and the Regulation of the Medical Profession in Mexico, 1853-1942.

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones presented a paper titled “Science, Professional Training, and Public Health: The Sanitation of the Medical Profession in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1920-1934” at the joint meeting of the Conference for Latin American History and the American Historical Association, in Atlanta, Georgia on January 9, 2016.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes contributed two pieces about the November Paris attacks to the influential Lawyers, Guns and Money blog. The first “Solidarity and ‘Je suis Paris’” emphasized the importance of global and local solidarity in the wake of the violence. The second “Saint Denis Solidarity and Security” cautioned against expansive police and security measures.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes gave a paper entitled “Living with ‘Our Algerian Brothers’: The Historical Effects of Space and Proximity on Community Relations with North African Migrants in the Parisian Suburbs” at the interdisciplinary conference, “Migrants in the City” hosted by the University of Sheffield (UK) in October.

Assistant Professor of History Thomas Howe was invited to present a paper Wed., Nov. 4, at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (“Lynxes”) in the Villa Farnesina in Rome in the conference “Enhancing Reliance of Historic Sites to Earthquakes.” His paper suggested developing an unorthodox method of global management of designing and executing geotechnical stabilization of sites such as the Stabiae Roman villas by studying the highly successful aerospace industry and the key element of the “prime contractor.” The Lincei is the oldest scientific academy in Europe and remains one of the most prestigious. Galileo spoke there in 1617.

Assistant Professor of History Thomas Howe will present a paper at the international conference in Florence entitled: “Life Beyond Tourism”, 7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2015, International conference on contemporary problems of Architecture and Construction7 - The fruition of the heritage: cultural value-based travel, routes and landscape. New uses and enhancement of monuments.” Howe will speak on “Defining an Archaeological Park: the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Master Plan 2001 and Work Since 2007, and will trace the origins of archaeological parks from the Civil War battlefields, Yellowstone, and the Via Appia in Rome.”

Assistant Professor of History Jessica Hower’s article “Under One (Inherited) Imperial Crown: The Global Origins of Britain and its Empire, 1603-1625,” was published in the journal Britain and the World (Edinburgh University Press) volume 8, no. 2 (September, 2015): pp. 160-180. The article is a revised and expanded version of her 2014 conference paper, which won the Wm. Roger Louis Prize at the British Scholar Society annual conference in Newcastle, UK.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper titled “Harnessing Religion in the Service of Empire: French Laicite v. British Laissez-Faire?” at a colloquium on “Translating Secularism/Traduire la laicite,” hosted by the University of Southampton and the Insitut Francais Du Royaume Uni in London on September 18. She also chaired a panel on “Laicite and Religion.”

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones was awarded the Hans-Walz prize by The Hans Walz Foundation at the Robert Bosch Stiftung for his doctoral dissertation titled “Revolutionary Medicine: Homeopathy and the Regulation of the Medical Profession in Mexico, 1853-1942”. The institute awards the best monograph on the history of homeopathy every other year, receiving in this occasion submissions from Germany, Spain and Brazil. 

Assistant Professor of History Jess Hower attended three conferences this spring and summer.

(1) The Trans-Atlantic Dialogues on Cultural Heritage: Heritage, Tourism and Traditions Conference in July, which was sponsored by the Ironbridge International Institute (University of Birmingham, UK) and University of Illinois, where she presented a paper titled “The Afterlives of John Cabot: The History, Heritage, and Memory of England’s First Trans-Atlantic Encounters, 1496-1707.”

(2) The Cannibalism in the Early Modern Atlantic Conference at the University of Southampton in June, where she presented a paper titled “’… And greedily devoured them’: The Cannibalism Discourse and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1536- 1612.” The research she presented has since been selected for publication in an edited volume on Cannibalism in the “Early Modern Atlantic,” under contract with the University of Arkansas Press.

(3) The British Scholar Society’s annual Britain and the World Conference in Austin in April, where she chaired two panels and presented a paper titled “The First Scottish Empire: Scotland, Britain, and the Early Modern Imperial World.” 

Professor of History Thomas McClendon attended the biennial meeting of the Southern African Historical Society in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where he presented a paper titled “Restraining Apartheid’s Whip Hand: Reforming Judicial Corporal Punishment in the 1960s and 1970s.”

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones gave a talk, “Scientific Medical Training for the Working Class: Homeopathic Medical Schools and the Centralization of Medical Education in Mexico City, 1895-1940,” in Spanish at the Department of Educational Research, Center of Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV), National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) and at the Department of the History of Medicine, School of Medicine, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), both in Mexico City in June. 

Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones presented a paper titled “The Sanitary Dictatorship and the Criminalization of Medical Practice in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1920s and 30s” at the Rocky Mountain Conference for Latin American Studies in Tucson in April. 

Assistant Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented at the Society for French Historical Studies annual conference in April. Her paper, “Mediterranean Crossings: Over the Border or Along the Boulevard?,” was partly inspired by her involvement in the Mediterranean Mingling Paideia cluster.

Assistant Professor of History Melissa K Byrnes has published an op-ed titled “Racism, not religion, is at the root of European attacks” in the “Austin American Statesman.”  

Professor of History Thomas McClendon co-authored “The South African Student Exchange Program: Anti-Apartheid Activism in the Era of Constructive Engagement,” published in “The Journal of South African and American Studies, (Jan. 2015).”

Assistant Professor of History Melissa Byrnes served as discussant for a panel titled “Contested Visions of Metropole and Colony: From France to French West Africa in the 20th Century” at the Western Society for French History’s Annual Conference in San Antonio this November. She also chaired a panel, “Conquering Science and the Science of Conquest.”

Jessica Hower, assistant professor of history, won the 2014 Wm. Roger Louis Prize, which is awarded annually to the author of the best paper delivered at the annual international Britain and the World Conference. This year’s conference was held June 19-21 at Newcastle University in England and Hower presented a paper titled “Under One (Inherited) Imperial Crown: The Tudor Origins of Britain and its Empire, 1603-1625.” The prize is worth $1,000 and entitles the winners to publication of their articles in a future issue of Britain and the World: Historical Journal of The British Scholar Society, which is published by Edinburgh University Press. 

Three faculty members from Southwestern attended the 17th annual Mediterranean Studies Congress held May 28-31 at the University of Malaga in Marbella, Spain. Melissa Byrnes, assistant professor of history, presented a paper titled “Ramadan on the Rhone: Muslims and Christians in Secular France.” Sergio Costola, associate professor of theatre, presented a paper titled “London’s Venice and Shylock’s Rialto” and Eric Selbin, professor of political science and University Scholar, presented a paper titled “Mediterranean Mishpocha: The 2010-14 Uprising(s) of the Mediterranean Peoples.”